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April 4, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
40:49
Episode 480 Scott Adams: Biden, Bad Media, Lies, Glaciers, Nuclear Power
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Hey everybody!
Come on in. I'm a little bit late.
Woke up to a little bit of a house emergency this morning.
It wasn't fun at all, but it's all taken care of.
I know why you're here.
Gather around. Grab a seat, any seat.
There are no assigned seats.
Take a seat, ideally a seat in your own house or possibly your car.
And let us begin with something I call the simultaneous sip.
It begins when you put a liquid, your favorite liquid, in a glass, a mug, a cup, a stein, a chalice, possibly a thermos, a tankard.
And then you raise it to your mouth with me and you enjoy the simultaneous sip.
That's one of the best ones of the week.
So, as I said, I got a late start this morning, so I'm a little bit unorganized.
So I don't know how this is going to go.
We'll see. Here are the following interesting stories happening.
I noted Tucker Carlson issued an apology.
An apology. Nobody asked him to.
But he apologized essentially for his treatment of Joe Biden over the nuzzle gate stuff.
And I want to say a few things about that.
Number one, in a weird way, Joe Biden has been cleared, or let's say vetted, of one of the worst possible things that could happen.
Because with all these women talking about these non-sexual things, you know, an Eskimo kiss and sniffing somebody's hair or whatever, nobody came forward and said anything sexual happened.
Nobody. You would think with all that publicity, there would be at least one nut who would come forward and say, oh, he also touched me in the wrong place.
So, in a weird way, it's sort of the dog that didn't bark.
With all this attention...
On this guy of a certain age who's been in Washington and around forever, there's nobody who has a worse complaint than he hugged too much.
If you think about it, it's kind of not so bad.
I don't know how many 76-year-old powerful Washington men could have that much attention and nobody would come out of a closet and say, yeah, you know, something worse than that happened.
Nobody. It's pretty good.
I mean, obviously we're grading on a curve, because we should assume that nobody is doing that sort of thing.
But the reality is, people are, and at least he isn't.
So let's give him that.
Now, he issued his apology, and it was, I don't know, it was an adorable apology.
And wrong at the same time.
I'm not sure it was an apology.
It was more of a clarification.
I guess it was sort of an apology.
We're talking about Biden himself in his little video.
And what he said was that he's now understanding that times have changed.
And the filter at which we look at this physical behavior is different in 2019.
And now he's understanding that and he will modify his behavior.
To which I say...
When was it okay to do awkward things to people and violate their personal space?
Somehow the entire media gave him a pass on the most ridiculous assumption.
The most ridiculous assumption is that it used to be okay.
I'm pretty old.
I've been around. I don't remember any time it was okay to violate somebody's Personal space and touch them in ways that made them uncomfortable.
Now, what's different is that people are going to go public about it.
What's different is it becomes a headline.
What's different is what people say about it.
So that's all different. But there was never a time in the 70s when Joe Biden could go up to you, grab you from behind, sniff your hair, and unless you knew him really well, you'd feel totally okay with that, right?
So somehow I haven't heard one person say, Joe, are you saying this used to be okay?
Because I don't remember that.
I don't remember the time when everybody was okay with any kind of non-sexual physical contact.
But anyway, I will add my voice to Tucker's, which is...
Interestingly, it's almost as if the right has given Biden more of a pass on this than the left.
You know, the right had their memes, and we had our fun, and it was definitely entertaining.
But in the end, it's probably not disqualifying.
It might have a big impact on the vote, so in a sense, he might not be the strongest candidate because of this.
But I'd have to agree it's not disqualifying, and Probably is a little ridiculous, and so it's hard to keep it in perspective, but I guess I would say that I never felt comfortable forwarding the memes, but I think I did forward them, because they were just too funny.
It's not my fault.
It's not my fault, it's funny.
All right, enough about that.
So the President tweeted this morning, I think, That the Republican Party is the party of the American dream.
It sounds like he's testing out a new penguin and the dingleberries.
That made me laugh.
I'm looking at a comment.
I know who you're talking about. You're talking about Nadler?
Somebody called Nadler the penguin.
Penguin and the dingleberries.
That's pretty funny.
Anyway, the President's testing out this phrase, it sounds like.
The Republican Party is the party of the American dream.
And I thought to myself, not bad.
It's not bad. I don't know if it's campaign slogan quality, but it does bring back, you know, it evokes sort of the Make America Great Again thing.
I can see why it has appeal.
I have a tepid approval of it.
It's not a barn burner, but it's pretty solid.
All right. You know, I always love to talk about the dog that didn't bark.
Here's another one. So this was suggested, I just saw this on Twitter, by Twitter user John Clarkson.
So John, if you're watching this, you made me laugh this morning.
So the climate change argument often focuses on glaciers and the Antarctic.
And the argument is that we're seeing the changes in the glaciers and the Antarctic more pronounced than we would see anywhere else.
That's sort of the first place.
And John says, and you're going to laugh when you hear this, because you didn't already think of it.
So, yeah, John Clarkson.
So John says, why is it that That the climate change risk just happens to be in the hardest place for we citizens to go look at it.
I mean, think about it.
What are the odds that the place on Earth that we're having most of the alleged climate change effects Just happens to be the place we can't go look.
Now, I'm not claiming that therefore climate change is a fraud.
It's probably a perfectly rational Coincidence that it just happens to be the place that makes the big change is a place that's an extreme part of the globe and it's hard to get to.
So there's probably nothing, you know, I'm not assuming that there's any connective tissue.
But when the first time I heard the question, it's like, huh, after 40 years of failed climate change predictions, and I think everybody would agree that in the past, you know, decades past, the predictions have been inaccurate.
It's like they finally found a way that we can't go check.
We can't go look.
Again, that's not predictive of anything.
It's just a funny coincidence.
But here's another one.
So I'm going to add my own dog that didn't bark.
So here's a way.
I'm going to propose to you a way to know that climate change is fake.
Now, it's a testable hypothesis.
So I'm going to give you something that could be objectively measured.
It wouldn't be easy, but I think you could do it.
And if you measured it, I think you would find that my following statement is actually more insightful than maybe your first reaction to it.
Here it is.
True or false, Republicans and Democrats always disagree No matter the facts or the argument.
So I first have to get you to agree to that statement.
Is it true that no matter the topic, Republicans and Democrats are going to disagree?
And it wouldn't matter if you were looking at the same fact.
You know, if an alien came to Earth and stood in front of you, if the first person who got to the alien was Republican, the Democrats would say he doesn't exist.
If the first person who got to the alien was a Democrat, all Republicans would say he doesn't exist, even if they stood there and looked at him, because they can't agree.
So start with that assumption that, in general, of course there are individuals.
Individuals can go back and forth.
But as a group, the Republicans are going to be on one side, Democrats are going to be on another.
Except for climate change.
Apparently, climate change is the one situation where all the Republican scientists, or according to the 97% of scientists rule, that the vast majority of Republican scientists agree with the vast majority of Democrat scientists.
Do you believe that if you actually sorted the scientists by Republican and Democrats, That you would find that both sides are close to that high 90s agreement about climate science.
If that's true, and this is the thing I'm saying could be checked, you could do a survey where you could identify all the climate scientists, sort them by Democrats and Republicans, somehow get them, this is the hard part, getting an honest answer.
Because they would have to know, the scientists would have to be confident that nobody could ever track it back to them.
They would have to know that the poll is super anonymous, somehow.
I don't know if you could accomplish that.
Because they'd have to feel it's anonymous, not just be anonymous.
But if you could do that, do you think that the Republican scientists would have the same opinion?
If that's true, and they do, You better be really worried about climate science.
You better be super worried.
If it's true that the Republican scientists agree with the Democrats that it's a dire problem, you better be pretty frickin scared.
Seriously. No joke.
If the Republican scientists have the same ratio of belief that the world is coming to an end, that means that even politics isn't a strong enough force For them to not see the obvious in front of them.
Now, there are certain situations that are rare where Republicans and Democrats do agree.
So, for example, if there's a terror attack on the country, Republicans, Democrats, same opinion, right?
It's an attack on the country, we all come together.
But that's the rare situation.
In a situation where there's no immediate, you know, danger of something exploding today, We're almost always on different sides.
So, here's my next point.
This dovetails into point number two.
Climate science is no longer a science question.
Climate science is no longer a science question.
It has evolved into a persuasion question.
And that's true in two completely different ways.
One way is if it's true that climate science is exactly the risk that the majority of experts are saying, if that's true and they can't convince half of the country that it's true, it's a catastrophic problem.
So if it's true and they can't convince the country, that's one situation, a catastrophic problem.
If it's true And we can't convince the country to use Generation 4 safe nuclear technology, which has been brought to the point where just we need some more engineering and iteration, but we know it'll work.
And we know it will be safe from meltdowns, and we know it actually eats nuclear waste from older plants.
So it's like good in every possible way, and we mostly know how to do it.
The only way to save the world, according to Bill Gates, who's looked into it and lots of other smart people, is to convince the half of the country that believes in climate science that the only way to address it is with the safe new technology for nuclear.
But they cannot be convinced.
So there are two completely different persuasion, monstrous persuasion challenges.
If it's true, you want to convince the people who don't think it is true.
And if it's true, you've got to convince the people who do think it's true that there's one solution, and it's nuclear, and it's not grandma's nuclear that was unsafe.
It's the modern stuff.
Let's call it Millennium Nuclear.
I don't know. I'm trying to come up with a new name that makes it sound friendlier.
And so, I think I told you this before, that I have personally, through personal conversation, I have concluded that people on the left, the prominent pundits, the people who shape opinion on the left, are literally unaware that Generation 4 nuclear technology is the solution to all of their problems.
They actually have never even heard it.
It's like words that have never come into their ears.
Now, whose fault is that?
Well, it's obviously the silos of the news.
You only see your news.
People on the right generally know this.
They may not know as much about Generation 4, but they do think nuclear is a good idea, even if they're not up to date.
People on the left have never even heard of this Generation 4 stuff.
It doesn't exist.
I believe that persuasion is the solution and that whether or not climate change is the catastrophic risk that some, actually many, say The safe nuclear technology is still the answer.
So it's the answer whether it's bad.
It's the answer even if it's not bad because you still need lots of power.
It's simply the best way to get there.
It's the best thing for the economy, best thing for poor people, best thing for technology, best thing for the economy, best thing in every possible way.
So people like me who are trained to persuade people Suddenly have a responsibility that we didn't ask for.
You see this, right?
If there are only certain people who can be persuasive, in other words, they know how to do it, and the fate of the planet depends on those few people who know how to persuade to actually do it, I feel this...
I was feeling this yesterday.
I was feeling this enormous I'm not going to call it a weight because it didn't feel that way.
Enormous social responsibility.
And you see that Mark Schneider in particular, he's my nuclear expert, works in the industry.
He's mostly informed me, so I have enough information now that I can start persuading other people.
I've been making lots of noise about it.
Mark's been making lots of noise about it.
Bill Gates has been making lots of noise about it.
And I'm trying to think who else.
But if you watched The Five yesterday, you saw Greg Goffeld mention nuclear.
I wish he had used Generation 4, the buzzword, To alert people that the new technology is not the same as the old technology.
We saw that Representative Matt Gaetz just had an announcement.
He's calling his proposals the green real deal.
And he includes a, I won't say a focus necessarily, but he calls out nuclear as part of the solution.
Now, I think Matt needs to get to the next level of calling it Generation 4 and making sure that the first time you say it, you say the good stuff.
So here's my first, let's say, I don't want to call it a gift, but I don't have another word.
I'm going to give you a persuasion technique that I'd like you to take with you.
So I'm going to train you all, everybody who's watching this, and I'm going to weaponize you.
So you've probably had the...
I'm sure you've had the experience of getting into a conversation with a friend or whatever, and you bring up nuclear, and immediately they have problems with it, and maybe they're just not convinced.
So I'm going to tell you how to persuade for the cleaner, newer, safer nuclear.
And here's the trick.
The first sentence needs to include the safety element and the fact that it eats the waste from the old machines.
Because the two things that people worry about are, is it going to have a meltdown?
And the answer is no. The new technology doesn't.
And what about the nuclear waste it creates?
And it turns out it eats nuclear waste.
So the way I do it is whenever I introduce it in a tweet or a sentence, I say...
We should be looking at the new generation for nuclear that is safe from meltdown and eats nuclear waste for its own fuel.
So do you see that?
That's just one sentence.
What you don't want to do is say, hey, why aren't we doing nuclear?
Because as soon as you say nuclear, somebody who's anti-nuclear or only knows about the old less safe technology goes rip and the walls go up.
You want to get the message in with the full, safe, and eats the waste message.
So that should be your first introduction to Generation 4.
You should also call it Generation 4.
Do not say, hey, there's new nuclear technology.
Because people are very influenced by words.
If you say, hey, I've got a new nuclear solution, people hear nuclear, and they go, um, no.
I've got 40 years of feeling bad about nuclear.
No. So don't use nuclear as your first word.
I say, generation four, first.
So I don't say nuclear technology of the generation 4 type.
You start with generation 4 because you want that to be the brand.
Remember, the brand is not nuclear.
The brand is generation 4 nuclear.
Because then people say, oh, that's not nuclear.
That's generation 4 nuclear.
Somebody said Bill Gates first, so it is also very good persuasion to say it's the thing that Bill Gates says is literally the only economical, practical, fast enough way to even have a chance, even a chance of addressing climate risk, assuming climate risk is what people say.
So there is my persuasion.
I'm going to weaponize all of you, and I know members of the media and a lot of politicians watch this, and a lot of their staff.
So the way to talk about it is, first sentence, generation four nuclear, not just nuclear, generation four nuclear, and without any punctuation, say, safe from meltdown, and eats nuclear waste for fuel.
That sentence in that structure is way more persuasive than any other approach.
Then people are going to say, yes, but it's too expensive and there are regulations and rules and stuff like that.
The way to address that is to say, we're in the age of Trump and getting rid of regulations is what he's good at.
Secondly, some of these sites could be co-located with other sites, so you already have a site that's sort of a nuclear site, so that could work.
But they also, because they don't have the meltdown risk, you can locate them in a lot more places than you could locate the ones that do have a meltdown risk.
Because any kind of a, you know, even if it got hit with a bomb, it would be contained in sort of a few miles, and that would be it.
Somebody says, I used to say molten salt.
Yeah, I think it's a mistake to say thorium or molten salt or what is it?
Some kind of lead pebbles or whatever it is.
There are a whole bunch of technologies that are within Generation 4.
But I think Generation 4 is a stronger brand.
Not only because it encapsulates, you know, the several technologies.
Oh, lead is it? Molten lead, yeah.
But Generation 4 also sounds newer, and Generation 4 speaks of progress.
As soon as you hear Generation 4, you know that, and then somebody says, the ones we have now are Generation 1 or 2, I forget.
But as soon as you say that, then people understand it from software.
It's like, oh, okay. This is not Windows version 1.
This is something else.
Okay. I have now weaponized all of you, and when you talk about it, watch how that phrasing changes how people respond to it.
I challenge you to find anybody who says this is a bad idea, the Generation 4 nuclear, once you've explained it well.
I haven't met one.
Just try to process that.
Try to process that I've never met anybody I don't think online or offline, who once you describe it, and once you can tell they understand what you said, that they have a problem with it.
I mean, they might have some vague questions and stuff, but I've never heard anybody push back.
It's the damnedest thing.
So, we must push back, and we must find a way to break the new silo on the left.
Because it wouldn't matter how persuasive people are on the right.
They were already leaning toward nuclear anyway.
You need to persuade the other side.
If somebody on the Democrat side, who's, let's say, in the top four, says, let's go crazy with generation four nuclear, you don't want to be the Republican who didn't say it first.
Let me put this in political terms so I can weaponize it further.
All right, wait for this.
So you know that there are...
Most of the people watching this are probably Trump-leaning people, but there are probably a solid 20% who are not.
I'm going to make a claim that I think is true.
I think this is true, but, you know, you'd have to test it.
Here's the claim. Whichever candidate, when we get down to the final two, Trump versus whoever is the Democrat, whichever of those two says the words Generation 4 nuclear first will be the president, will win.
If Trump lets...
If the Democratic challengers say it first, he's not going to want to say it second.
And then he's going to lose the election.
If he says it first, he takes climate change off the table.
Their strongest play.
All they have is health care and climate change, right?
It comes down to that. Climate change and health care are the two things that are going to activate Democrats.
I don't think that the Republicans are going to do anything but fail on healthcare.
All history, evidence, and current activities suggest that the Republicans will have absolutely nothing on healthcare.
So they're just going to be weak there, and they're going to have to deal with that.
But on climate change, if Trump says Generation 4 nuclear before his opponents do, so he can own it, Impossible for him to lose the election unless some new thing happened between now and then.
So I think it's that strong.
I think it's that big a deal.
If Trump brought Bill Gates into the White House and they had a photo op and then Trump and Gates do a press conference and Trump says, I'm no expert in nuclear, But listen to Bill Gates.
And then Bill Gates does his thing and says, you know, I think nuclear is the way to go.
I'm not doing this for political purposes.
I appreciate that the president gives me, you know, this platform.
And this is something that you should not be a Republican or a Democrat about.
It's the fate of the planet.
And even if you don't believe climate change is a risk, it's still the right thing to do.
It's still the economical thing to do.
It's still the smart thing to do.
If Trump did that, and by the way, I always think it's obnoxious when people who are not in his job give him suggestions about what to say or how he should give a speech or who he should talk to.
I always find it obnoxious.
The reason I do that is because You and I are not president.
He became president not because he has bad instincts.
So his instincts, you're going to have to just say, anybody who becomes president, whether it's Trump or anybody else, they're smart about this stuff.
So it's almost embarrassing As a citizen, to imagine that you can give them advice on the details of how to do their job, because they just know more than you do about what they're doing.
They have good instincts. But I'm just saying, so I'll make this a prediction, not a advice.
Because I just don't feel like advice is...
It just doesn't feel right to me to give advice to someone who's so much more successful than you are, right?
How does that make sense? So I'll just say it's a prediction.
If Trump says Generation 4 nuclear, he can't lose the election unless there's some new news that we don't know about.
All right, so there's a news site that someone alerted me to called All Sides.
A-L-L, all sides, all one word,.com.
And it's interesting because it seems to consolidate links to articles and it labels them how far right, Republican, and how far left, you know, Democrat, the articles are.
And so you go to their homepage and you see all the articles and then you see they're labeled, are these from the left to the right?
And I thought to myself, yeah, it's only new to me.
That's right. I'm not saying it's a new site.
I just happened to notice it.
And I thought, my God, this could be good.
And I had this interesting reaction to it, which was I'd look at an article and I'd read what the title of the article is and I'd say, hey, that could be interesting.
And then I'd see how they labeled it and it would be labeled either far right or far left.
And I immediately said, oh, I don't have to read that.
So it's actually a news site that labels all of its own content as unnecessary to read.
Now, they don't do that intentionally, but as soon as I see an article is labeled far right or far left, I say, there's no point in reading it, because it's just propaganda.
Now, if I go to CNN or Fox News, since it's not labeled, other than being in their universe, I'm still tempted to read it.
I'll read any article on CNN. I'll read any article on Fox.
But as soon as they put that label on it, on the allsides.com, where they tell me this one's far right or this one's far left, I looked at them and I go, I don't need to click that.
They already told me I don't need to read it.
They have done the work for me.
There's nothing in here except misleading information.
Why would I read that article? So, I love the idea of it, but I would suggest that people are really addicted To reading the news sources that feel good, and that people consume news as entertainment.
So what has changed is that news used to be information, and it's definitely not information anymore.
News is pure entertainment.
That's why we're talking about Joe Biden's nuzzlegate and not nuclear power in the news, right?
Let me look at the news, look at what they could be talking about, and there's just no correlation between useful information and what's in the news.
It's just entertainment at this point.
People are not going to give up their entertainment because some other site has useful news.
Just humans don't do that.
All right. Just looking at my notes here.
Oh, there was a study. I don't know how reliable it is.
All studies are unreliable, it seems.
But I like to talk about the studies that agree with something I already thought.
So maybe they didn't even need to do a study on this.
But it was a study that said that people think that other people are fooled by bad media.
Didn't you already know that?
So the study said that people think that they personally are not bamboozled by the media that they consume.
But they're pretty sure those other people are.
A lot of other people were getting fooled.
So, I thought, they could have just asked me.
They didn't really need to do that survey, did they?
Everybody thinks it's other people who are being fooled by the news.
And then... The weirdest and most fun thing in the news is that Trump keeps saying that his father was born in Germany.
Right? And I haven't seen it reported, but wasn't his grandfather born over the...
Let's say Trump grandfather.
Grandfather, Germany, or was it Austria?
Trump's grandfather was kicked out of Germany, according to CNN. So he came to the United States at the age of 16.
So that was Frederick Trump.
So, in all the reporting you've seen, where Trump keeps saying that his father was born in Germany, And then they report that it's fake news and what's wrong with him?
Is he insane? Is he crazy?
Is he lying? Then nobody says the obvious explanation.
Isn't the obvious explanation that he meant his grandfather?
What the hell else would be the explanation?
Well, I'm right, right?
Did he say that? Did he say grandfather?
Did he correct it?
Yeah. To me, the most obvious explanation...
So people went to the pathological liar explanation, and they went to, you know, 25th Amendment, like he must be insane because he doesn't know his own father is a citizen of the United States or was a citizen.
So everybody went to the worst possible explanation when there was the easiest possible explanation, which is, oh, he meant his grandfather.
I mean, I don't think there's much chance...
That if you were to talk to the president in person and say, oh, you know, you said your father, you meant your grandfather, that Trump would have said, do you think Trump would have said, no, no, I meant my father.
My father was born in Germany.
Do you think privately he would say that?
No. I mean, I'm not a mind reader and I haven't asked him, but I think that's a very small chance.
I think more likely he'd say, I said father, oh, I meant grandfather.
No wonder they're confused. The most ordinary explanation Is that he meant his grandfather.
I mean, it felt obvious to me at the time, and yet it was this big national story, and I kept looking at the story saying, and now you're going to say he probably meant his grandfather.
And then the story would end, and I'd say, what the hell?
You don't even mention that it was obviously his grandfather he meant, and that he just misspoke?
Now, we can't read his mind, but that's the obvious explanation.
Is there anything else going on?
Yes. I will tell you that the WEN token, the crypto token that comes with my Interface by WEN Hub app, my startup's app called Interface by WEN Hub, has associated with it, you can use regular cash and credit cards, of course, but you can also pay with these tokens that are created for the app.
You can buy them in exchanges such as Hotbit and LA token.
And we're adding some more exchanges.
The stock symbol is W-H-E-N. When.
And the value has, I think, tripled.
Tripled in value in the last week.
Now, I want to be very careful.
These crypto tokens are never investments.
So whatever they're worth and however much they go up in one day, they could be zero tomorrow.
So I'm not giving you any financial advice.
I'm telling you that if you wanted to own these, they have gone up from one penny to three cents in a week.
And we're getting activity from Asia.
And we're getting more signups all the time.
And if the underlying product does well, that almost guarantees that the tokens will have value because you can use the tokens for the product.
So, assume that this is not an investment quality idea, but those people who own tokens, those tokens could go up in value either because other people buy them and the demand goes up.
Or because the product that they're associated with does well and that creates a demand for them.
Two ways. So I just put that out there.
You could go to wenhub.com to buy them from us or you could get them even cheaper from an exchange.
But if you buy them from an exchange, you're going to have to know how to use wallets.
You're going to have to know how to get Ether because you can only buy them with Ether at the moment.
As soon as we get on an exchange that handles US dollars as well, they'll be completely liquid.
All right. Somebody says, why should I buy it?
If you ask the question, why should I buy the WEN tokens, you should not buy it.
If there's even a little doubt or you don't quite understand that field, then that's not for you.
So I can say that with complete confidence.
But if you're in the crypto field or you wanted to tiptoe in and you didn't want to put a lot of money in it but you just wanted to take a flyer on it, you'd have that option.
So you could just buy it at wenhub.com and see what happens.
Alright, what is the maximum number of tokens?
We just did a burn, and so I don't have the new number.
But the essence of your question is, you're trying to figure out what's the universe of tokens?
It's a set number, and we just substantially reduced it because we did what's called a burn, where you essentially destroy a number of tokens that were originally created.
And you do that to reduce the supply.
For the benefit of everybody who owns them.
Because as the supply goes down, in theory, the value of each token could go up.
But again, don't get involved in any kind of token buying, whether it's the WEN or any other token, unless you know that this is the riskiest thing you could ever put your money in.
Just know that. All right.
That's all I got to say for now.
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