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April 22, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:03:38
Episode 503 Scott Adams: Iranian Sanctions, Free College, 2020, Climate Credibility
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
Andrew, good to see you.
I hope you have your containers full of beverages.
Trey, Gary, Polly, Justin, hey Jen, Caleb, and Gary and Arlene.
It's wonderful to see you on this great Monday morning.
And you know why? It's a great day.
It's because it's going to start with a simultaneous sip, and it's going to happen now.
If you've got your mug, your cup, your glass, if you have your container, your chelice, your tankard, your thermos, your stein, your flask, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for this simultaneous sip.
Ah.
So, fascinating little poll out today.
So, Nate Silver just tweeted this around, and I retweeted it, so you can see it on my Twitter feed.
Apparently, the early states who were going to vote in the primaries for the Democrats, so these are the states that go first in the primaries, the activists in those states, when they were polled, who they support, Turns out number one is Harris.
So Kamala Harris is the number one pick of Democrat activists who have already picked a candidate in the earliest states.
Now remember I've been telling you for, I don't know, eight months that she would likely be the ultimate candidate and that it seemed unlikely to me that they would pick an old white hetero guy So here's the ranking from top to bottom of just early state primary states, you know, the ones who go first, and just the Democrat activists.
They picked Harris first, Booker second, Warren third, Buttigieg, then Klobuchar, then Gillibrand, and then 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7th.
It's Bernie Sanders. So the people who were closest to the power, the activists, they pick Sanders seventh.
They pick Biden eighth.
They pick O'Rourke, never.
O'Rourke is so far down on the rankings, he doesn't even register.
He does register, but he's way down.
So, in the top six, you have women, people of color, gay guy, and combinations thereof.
And no white males in the top six.
And I think that's going to hold.
So I think that that will be predictive of the final outcome.
And if that turned out to be it, then I would have successfully picked the correct Democrat candidate out of a field of 18.
That wouldn't be too bad.
Now, I don't know if I'll be right, but if it happened, it would be a good prediction.
The other big news today is that the administration has increased the pressure on Iran by saying that they will now put sanctions on any country who buys oil from Iran.
Previously, there had been some exceptions so people could buy their oil from Iran if they just had to.
But now he's going to start sanctioning companies for buying any oil from Iran.
And Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, I think.
Somebody else is going to pick up the slack by pumping more oil.
Now, remind me what people were saying about the Iran nuclear deal.
Two years ago. Two years ago, didn't we assume that if the Iran nuclear deal got cancelled by Trump, that Iran would start doing all kinds of terrible things, including reviving their nuclear arms?
But it's been a while, and the President cancelled that deal a while ago, and I'm not aware of any repercussions.
Are you? Am I missing something?
It seems to me that cancelling the Iran deal has been proven by time to be exactly the right thing to do, because we don't see any kind of response from Iran that we would be worrying.
It seems like they're just getting closer and closer to capitulation.
Now, I'm sure they're not thinking of it in those terms, but capitulation could look like anything.
It could look like a revolution.
It could look like a peace deal.
It could look like anything.
But one of the things I tell you about all the time is that in terms of persuasion, people are far more influenced by the direction of things.
And what Trump does really, really well is he makes sure that the direction of things is going well.
So when he cancelled the Iran deal, that created a single point and not really a direction.
So it was different, but it didn't suggest yet a permanent direction.
It was just a decision.
Now that he's cancelled the deal...
But then he also, he puts sanctions on, and now he's going to the next level of tightening them.
So if you're Iran, what is the direction of things?
Well, Netanyahu got reelected, so that's not real good for Iran.
Israel just keeps getting stronger.
Israel's stock market in which I invest, you know, the basket of stocks that represents Israel, is doing great.
It's doing great right now.
So Israel just keeps getting stronger.
Iran just keeps getting weaker.
Their economy is actually shrinking.
And here's the important part.
There's no end in sight.
There's nothing that Iran could look at and say, okay, if we just wait it out, You know, if we wait this long, things will be okay again?
Because it really doesn't look that way.
Trump has created in them a very clear impression that every day in Iran is going to be worse than the day before.
And it's been...
How long has it been since he cancelled the Iran deal?
Has it been... I've lost all sense of time in the age of Trump.
Everything is compressed. Has it been 18 months?
I don't know. How long has it been?
I really can't remember. It's been a year?
So for a year, Iran has seen their fortunes do nothing but go worse.
So for them, finding some way out of this would seem to be pretty important and getting more important.
I tweeted around a video by John Stossel.
Talking about green energy and how it's impossible to make everything work with just wind power and solar.
Because we won't be able to improve the efficiency of those things fast enough.
And they have their own issues and storage and reliability, etc.
And then he went on to...
Within the piece that I tweeted to show that nuclear was the only solution.
So we continue to watch what looks like some kind of a weird proxy battle in which the media is trying to make nuclear look dangerous by, you know, running specials about Chernobyl, for example.
Now, apparently there's an anniversary involved there, so it's not completely random.
But it looks like the press...
I mean, just consider this for a moment.
Just hold this thought in your head.
The press has just taken a really hard body blow from the whole Trump collusion fiasco.
Now that it's shown that for the last two years their biggest issue was a hoax...
What would be the very worst thing that could happen to the credibility of the popular press, the mainstream media?
The very worst thing would be for their audience to realize that nuclear was always the only option.
Whether climate change was a problem, or even if it isn't.
You would still want to do nuclear as hard as you could, because it might be the only solution.
Now, I've also said that you should also do sun and wind as hard as you can.
You should try to improve all of those things as hard as you can, because we're not really running out of money for any of that.
There is enough money to develop those technologies quite rapidly, and so we are.
But imagine the mainstream media Having to tell the public, okay, we've been telling you forever that it's got to be solar and wind and that's the only solution to climate change.
But it turns out that that's not supported by science.
So it turns out we were anti-science the whole time.
And the pro-science group, I would say, Would be the people who say, well, I don't know whether climate change is the predicted problem that it looks like, but I do know if there's any risk at all, and even if there's no risk, the scientific way forward, the one that makes sense, the one the math works, the one the technology works, is nuclear.
So the most pro-science approach Unfortunately, it's go hard on nuclear at the same time you're going hard on wind and solar and everything else.
All right. There's an article I tweeted around that says there might be a reason that older citizens, let's say the boomers, are more skeptical about climate change, and it has something to do with the peak oil that most of us at a certain age we live through.
Now, if you're young, you don't know what that means.
Peak oil was the idea in the 70s, I guess, that we were going to literally run out of new sources of oil, and then we would sort of have a maximum that we could pump, and from that day on, there would always be less oil in the world because we were just using it up.
Now, as it turns out, that prediction was driving the green community.
So because they thought that we were going to run out of oil, they said you need solar and wind and green energy.
And then, as the article I tweeted, which is really worth a read, notes, That the situation, the base situation that was driving green energy, completely changed.
So it went from, we don't have enough oil, to, hey, we figured out how to do fracking, and now we have plenty of oil.
We have tons of oil.
So the people who were pushing The green energy sources.
When it looked like we were going to run out of oil, they said the only solution is solar and wind.
And then when the situation changed to it looks like we have tons and tons of oil, What did the green energy people do?
They said the same thing they said when we thought we were running out.
They said, oh, the only solution is you've got to go to green and green technologies because of CO2. So, suspiciously, the thing they wanted to do, their solution, was independent of the problem.
Or so it looks. I'm, of course, using a little hyperbole here.
Now, if it's true that CO2 is exactly the problem that scientists, by a large majority, say it is, then that's just the truth, and you have to deal with the truth, and all that really happened is we used to be wrong, but now we're right. That's possible.
It's possible that in the past we were just totally wrong, About peak oil being the problem that we thought it would be.
And it's also possible that now we're totally right.
That climate change is exactly the problem that so many scientists are saying.
It's possible. But if you lived through the peak oil phase and you noticed that the facts all completely changed to their reverse almost, and yet the solutions stayed the same, You have to ask yourself, uh, that smells wrong.
It sounds like the solution was going to stay the solution no matter what the facts were.
And to that point, if someday somebody invented, let's say, a fusion-powered way to suck CO2 out of the air, let's say tomorrow we invented a way to remove all CO2 from the air so quickly and so efficiently that it didn't matter how much we put back into the air, because we could just suck it out as fast as we put it in.
Suppose we invented that tomorrow.
Would the green energy people say, Glad we got that taken care of.
Now it doesn't make sense to use sun power, and now it doesn't make sense to use wind power and kill all those birds.
We'll just use coal and oil, because there's so much of it, and because we figured out how to suck the CO2 out of the air.
So problem solved, right?
Well, I doubt it.
If you could pull all of the CO2 that's too much out of the air, leaving enough CO2 so that we have plenty for plants, we haven't taken too much out.
If we could do that today, would it change people's recommendations about future energy?
I'll bet it wouldn't.
I'll bet it would have zero impact On what people think we should do.
They would still say don't do nuclear.
They might talk about pollution.
They might talk about something else.
They might talk about the bad working conditions of coal miners.
It seems like something else would pop up.
that we would start to think was just important as peak oil when it wasn't true and as CO2 when it was more of a problem before we figured out how to suck it out of there in this hypothetical world.
We don't know how to do that economically yet.
All right. So, here's the point.
The problem with being a certain age is on one hand you have more experience so you know exactly what it feels like To be bamboozled.
So, if you live through peak oil, you know what it's like to read the news every day, and it's just completely wrong.
It's exactly opposite of what was happening.
Because, in fact, we found out lots of ways to get more energy through carbon-type energy.
But the problem is...
It is also fairly normal for science to be wrong in the past, but get it right in the present.
How many examples are there in which we used to be wrong, but now we're right?
Lots of them, right? So you can't say that because we were wrong last time, We'll be wrong again.
There's just no connecting logic to that.
And that's the Tony Heller problem.
So Tony Heller, famous climate skeptic, I've talked about him a number of times, he has the most persuasive argument, which is different from being true.
You know, persuasive is not the same as being accurate.
That's a separate question. I can't judge the accurate part, but I can say it's persuasive.
And one of the persuasive things he does is he points out just nonstop, he points this out, how many times in the past we've made climate doom predictions that were in the headlines and they were all wrong.
Now that's very persuasive.
Because if you say, look, the same people who are supposed to be our authorities have been wrong for a hundred years and they're always predicting doom with the climate and they've never been right yet.
That's very persuasive.
But, but, it's not logical.
Because the other thing that's true is that science is wrong until it's not.
So there is a point In the normal march of science where we were wrong right up until the point where we start getting right.
And you never know when that is.
You don't know, is today the day that we started getting it right from this day on?
Or is today, you know, 20 in a row that we got it wrong?
It's hard to know.
So the persuasion problem is pretty big.
All right. I wanted to do an experiment.
I don't know how this is going to work.
I'm going to change my microphone, and then I'm going to take some callers.
So I'm going to put on my new microphone, and then I'm going to ask a caller to debate me on, or to anybody who disagrees with me on anything I've said on this periscope or any other.
So I'm looking for somebody who has a different opinion on something.
And here's the test.
I want to see if someone who believes they disagree with my opinion can state my opinion accurately.
So it's not going to be necessarily a debate on the subject.
I want to see if there exists a person who believes they disagree with me and can also state what I believe accurately.
I contend that that's rare.
That people who believe they disagree with me don't actually disagree.
They can't hear what I'm saying.
That they're translating what I'm saying into something else in their mind, and they're disagreeing with the something else.
So I'll do a little test.
Let me change my microphone. Alright, microphone changed.
So, I'm going to take some calls, and I'll keep the call very short if you've called for some other reason.
So, I'm only looking for people who have a specific disagreement with me, and I want to see if they can state their disagreements.
Alright, facts are safe.
I believe it is your day.
Alright, so we have a caller.
Facts are safe. Are you there?
Hi. Good morning.
What do you disagree with me on?
What is the topic? So I disagree with you on the transgender athlete debate.
I know you do.
I know. We have interacted on Twitter many times.
Alright, now, so don't tell me what you disagree with.
Tell me the specific thing that you believe is true that I believe is not true.
So tell me the specific thing that you say is true, just state what you say is true, that you believe I don't believe.
Go. So I know that you believe that competitions are in generally unfair to begin with.
Correct. And you agree with that too, don't you?
Not to the extreme that you believe that to be true.
Not to the extreme.
So you don't believe that Shaquille O'Neal plays basketball and that I also play basketball?
That's pretty extreme, right?
Because I can't really...
How can I play against Shaquille O'Neal or, let's say, some other player who's still playing?
Is that fair? No.
But you're not in that percentile of competitors.
That's my point. That's my point.
All right. So – well, hold on.
But let's get back to the point.
I don't want to argue – I don't want to debate the point.
I want to see if we agree – just agree on what we're – if you can characterize my belief.
So I'm saying that there's an extreme difference in sports which is normal.
That if I go into a sport that I've never played, and there's somebody who's an elite athlete, it's like I'm a chihuahua compared to a lion.
There's an extraordinary difference.
You would agree that's true, right?
That's an extraordinary difference.
All right. And so you would agree that it is common...
To have extraordinary differences in capabilities in sports.
For example, somebody who has a physical handicap can't play sports in high school, wouldn't you say?
I mean, typically, if they have a bad enough handicap.
I might disagree with you, but...
All right, so don't you agree with me that there is naturally an extreme difference in capability for every sport?
Because people are extremely different.
There is less of a difference between Shaquille O'Neal and LeBron James than you and Shaquille O'Neal.
Yes, but it doesn't matter.
But it doesn't matter, to my point.
You might actually be competitive in the WNBA. All right.
So let's get back to what you think that I believe is different than what you think.
See, when you say it's a matter of degree...
That doesn't give us anything to work with.
So give me a specific fact that you think we disagree on.
Well, I think that I believe that athletes who want to compete should simply compete in the genderless classification, where all men compete right now.
Oh, so you would like to create a new classification.
Well, I don't have an opinion on that.
There's no new classification.
The NBA is a genderless league.
Oh, meaning that they could play if they're good enough?
Any gender can play in the NBA. Okay, so so far we're fine.
So tell me something that you disagree with what I think.
Something that you think is true that I don't think is true.
You believe that it is okay for an XY chromosomal person to compete in an XX chromosomal competition.
Hold on. You're using sloppy language.
When you said you believe it's okay, don't say why I believe it's okay.
Say that I either think it's fair or economical.
Tell me what I think it is.
You think that's an acceptable competition.
It is acceptable to have people of wildly different capabilities in the same sport, yes.
That's the normal way sports are organized.
But they're not wildly different.
I would not say that they are as wildly different as their biology would make them.
Professional athletes are not multiple standards of deviations away from each other's capabilities.
Sure they are. If you looked at my high school basketball team, I'm 5'8", and my coach actually tried to recruit me to play on the team because the team had so little capability.
The guy that was jumping center was 5'6".
So that was my high school basketball team.
Now, if Michael Jordan's family had moved into my town, and the actual Michael Jordan had been on my team, There is no way that anybody in my entire school district could have ever scored a point.
The difference in his capability would be so extraordinary compared to the person who jumped to center.
Center on my high school team was 5 foot 6.
Now you're telling me that that 5 foot 6 center, the best guy on our team, was roughly in the same category as Michael Jordan.
That's your statement? So Michael Jordan is such an outlier, and he can only go to one high school.
All right, but I think you just agreed with me that it's rare to have that much of a difference, right?
You'd agree with that? It's rare to have the situation I just described.
Michael Jordan on my high school team would be unusual, but he was on somebody's team.
But it will not – okay.
But it will not become unusual when XY chromosomal people begin setting all the high school records across all of the states in all of the country.
All right. So you're worried about the slippery slope.
Right. Okay.
Are you aware that the slippery slope has been sliding since the 70s?
When the first transgender athlete played women's tennis, Renee Richards.
Are you familiar with that story?
So we've debated this.
I'm aware.
I'm aware. And you would agree that there was no slippery slope.
Even though she did well and proved your point that she would play better than the average woman.
It didn't cause more transgender people to become professional tennis players.
Would you agree that's true? So would you agree that the only case that we've seen it, the problem you are suggesting is a problem, simply didn't happen?
Well, I think we're seeing it now in high school athletics, right?
I don't know if we're going to see it in professional yet.
Have we yet seen even one high school team with more than one transgender player on the team?
Yes. Has that ever happened?
Yes. There was a case in Connecticut with two transgender racers who took first and second.
Okay. And was the world the worst place for that because of that?
I would ask the female athletes on those teams how they felt about such competition.
Hold on.
You and I agree that those two transgender athletes, who I will call women...
I will call them women.
Hold on. Let me just finish the point.
We both agree that if those two transgenders make the team and do well...
That all of the women who did not win would be less happy.
Is that true? We agree on that, don't we?
I would agree, yes.
Now, would you also agree that no matter who won, all of the people who didn't win would be less happy than if they won?
Would you agree with that?
Not to the same degree.
No. Not to the same degree.
And does it matter if they're a little less happy because somebody else is happier?
Because the two transgender athletes who won were quite happy, I'm sure.
And their families were happy and they had a good day.
Does it matter that somebody else on the team was a little less happy because somebody else was happy?
Can we manage a society to, well, I'm less happy that somebody else did well?
There's somebody else here, so let me just close out my point by saying, ultimately it comes down to some sense of it's not fair, wouldn't you say?
I think those women, I think they feel they were cheated, so that it was not fair.
Right, but I agree with that.
I agree with that those women would feel they were cheated.
I just don't think that that matters to anything.
Why should I care that two women think they were cheated When the alternative is that transgenders would be discriminated against.
That's the trade-off, right?
So I'm intentionally saying that I would rather give the transgenders a little extra freedom in this world, a little comfort and safety.
And if there are a few people who don't get to be on the team or don't get to win, does it really matter?
Does it really matter?
Will it affect their life?
Will it affect their incomes?
It won't have any real effect.
But thank you for playing.
Thank you, Scott. This one's a tough one.
All right. Bye for now.
All right. Why do we have rules in sports?
Well, for those who say we have rules in sports, I'm saying that they should all follow the rules.
And if the rule is society has decided that a transgender person Is a woman in terms of what teams they would compete on, then those are the rules.
So everybody is agreeing with following the rules.
There's nobody on the side of breaking rules.
Those of you who are saying it's not fair, I agree with you aggressively.
I aggressively agree with your players.
In fact, I'll go further.
It's way unfair in the sense that the transgender athlete will have an advantage.
So I would never argue that it's not an advantage.
And I would never argue that it's good for the other women who are playing.
For some of them, it's clearly bad.
It makes them less happy.
I just don't care.
Because sports are about making most people unhappy.
Because most people lose.
If you go to a tournament, and there are 20 teams in the tournament, only one team wins.
Every time. There's only one winner.
Everybody else loses.
Sports are mostly about losing.
So if you add a little bit of extra losing into a sport, which is mostly losing, it's mostly about losing.
It's mostly about people who didn't make the team.
It's rare that anybody makes a team.
Is it fair that the good-looking tall person who was born with good genes gets to be a superstar and we treat them with extra respect and they get the extra dating capabilities?
No. You know what is unfair?
Unfair is somebody being born with some just ordinary advantage.
That's unfair. Is it unfair that I'm smarter than most people?
Most of you are smarter than most people, too, or you wouldn't be watching this podcast.
Is that fair? Is it fair that somebody's tall and I'm not?
That's not fair. We don't live in a fair world.
Fair is a ridiculous standard.
The only thing we can do is make sure the rules are the same.
And if the rules allow a transgender athlete to compete as a woman...
And I think they should.
And that's the rule. It's not unfair if everybody follows the same rule.
Alright, that's enough of that. I think that's enough for now.
Jordan Peterson is on the other side of this debate.
Is that true? Jordan Peterson is on the other side of transgender athletes.
That would be a fun debate.
He wouldn't do well in that at all.
Who decided on these transgender rules?
Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter who decided on the rules.
It only matters that the rules are the same.
All right. What brand is your headphone?
I don't know. Joe Rogan is against it.
You know, it's perfectly acceptable to be against transgender in sports as a fan.
So as a fan, if you say, I think that would be less entertaining because I would already know how it's going to work out or something like that, that's a fair opinion because that's just an opinion of what kind of sport you like.
That would be no different than saying, I like watching basketball, I don't like watching baseball.
So there's nothing wrong with that.
But it's a separate issue if you start treating people unfairly because of gender.
All right. I'm just reading your comments here for a minute.
It's a really slow news day.
Yeah, there's a little news somebody's prompting me here about.
So apparently both Obama and Clinton used the phrase Easter worshippers, talking about the Sri Lanka terror attack.
They called it Easter worshippers instead of Christians.
And people are saying, what?
When did we come up with that term?
Why don't you just call them Christians?
It's a good question.
It's a fair question.
I don't know the answer.
Somebody saying, nobody agrees that men are women because they say they are.
I do. I say transgender is a woman.
So you can't say nobody.
Because I say that.
The transgenders say that.
Probably, I don't know, a third or half of the country says that.
Let me tell you my view and what informs me on this whole transgender issue.
I don't think there's any such thing as normal when it comes to sexuality.
I think there's this huge range that includes some gay and some bisexual and some totally heterosexual and just all kinds of weird things all over the place.
So when it comes to sexuality, I think everybody's an outlier.
That's just my personal opinion, that everybody's a little bit different from everybody else, and a lot different from a lot of different people.
So you just have to come up with some rules, and it doesn't matter what they are.
For the most part, it doesn't matter what those rules are.
As long as society agrees that those are the rules, those are the rules.
Sports are not important.
In fact, I think sports are probably as negative as they are positive, but that's for another day.
All right. Gender is not sexuality.
That is correct.
But let's say...
Let me speak clear.
Yeah, I don't want to mix gender and sexuality.
I'm saying that sexuality is a big range, but also gender is a big range, and that the sexuality and the gender range overlap and et cetera.
So it is more complicated, you're right.
But I favor transgender rights because...
I don't think there's a good enough reason to single them out when everybody is so different on those scales.
All right. Sports keeps daughters off of drugs.
Maybe. I'm not so sure that sports do half the things that people say.
Somebody says transgenders have more suicide.
I don't know if that's true, but it wouldn't surprise me.
I mean, if you were trying to fit into a world that was resisting you, that would be tough.
All right. Men in the women's locker room.
No. Yeah, the locker room thing is a challenge.
I'm not going to say that's easy, but you know, everything was a challenge until it wasn't.
Giving women the vote seemed like a challenge probably at the time, but it worked out.
Ending slavery seemed like a big challenge, had lots of problems, but you sort of had to do it.
So the fact that it's a big challenge and that it's a problem and the fact that lots of people don't like it are all true statements that should not be decision-making variables.
Why is it good to mutilate the body, somebody says.
Well, that's just a biased statement.
What you call mutilating the body is other people would call Adjusting or improving or fixing the body.
That's just the point of view.
is called a butylene and not a very nice one.
Somebody says, I disagree with your abortion views and we should leave the decision up to women.
Well, the question on abortion, yeah, I'm not sure I want to get into that.
But the real question is, who makes the decision?
Because somebody has to make the decision.
So it kind of comes down to, does the government make the decision or do you let the individual and the doctor make the decision?
So it's very interesting.
It's interesting in a sense that conservatives oppose abortion because that would put conservatives on the side of more government.
So maybe this is the one exception where the liberals want less government.
They don't want the government to get in between their doctors and the pregnant woman's decisions.
Both sides lie about abortion.
That is correct.
Both sides lie about abortions.
Man's voice is important.
In what way? Somebody said the men's voice on abortion is important.
To which I say, is it?
You would get the same result, wouldn't you?
If no man was ever allowed to vote on the topic of abortion, and I guess nobody gets to vote on it, but if no man ever got to weigh in on the topic of abortion, and let's not count the money stuff, Just the decision of whether it's legal or illegal or under what conditions.
If no man ever had an opinion on that or offered an opinion, would we be in a different place?
I think we'd be in exactly the same place, wouldn't we?
Because women disagree the same as men disagree.
I think we'd be in the same place.
No government, no conservative would say they want more government.
Well, that's what it is. You want more rules over people's private decisions.
That's what abortion is.
It's putting a government control over a woman and a doctor's decisions.
So I think conservatives are...
Let me break it down this way.
Conservatives have by far the better moral argument on abortion.
This is where I'm going to get in trouble because I'm going to be taken out of context.
So if you take just that part out of context, then I get in trouble.
So this is the part you're going to leave out when people take this out of context.
So if you look at the positives of both sides, the conservatives by far have the more moral position, which is that If there's any doubt about where life begins, and there's certainly differences of opinion,
but the conservative position that if you can't tell if this entity is alive or not alive, if you're even talking about it, the most moral thing to do is to treat it like it's alive.
So morality-wise, the conservatives, by far, Have the strong argument.
Which is not to say I agree.
So you're not going to get my opinion in what I'm going to be saying here.
I'm just laying out observation.
But the pro-abortion people by far have the argument that's most compatible with freedom and getting the government out of your decisions.
So those are the problems.
You've got the moral argument, far better on the conservative side.
The freedom argument, far better on the liberal side.
And morality and freedom are both absolutes.
So it's hard to find any kind of a way to match up there when you're talking absolutes.
So Freedom versus license.
I don't know if I put it that way.
Yeah, so the question is, who gets to decide?
So the liberal point of view, which I never hear the liberals explain it as well as I'm going to explain it.
The question is, who gets to decide if there's a life and death decision?
Because there are situations where there's a severe risk to the mother in order to produce a healthy baby.
So who gets to decide?
Does the government decide that the mother must take that risk?
Does the doctor decide that the mother must accept that mortal risk to herself to save the baby?
Or does the baby decide?
Somebody has to decide, right?
Is it the law?
Is it strangers? Is it strangers who get to decide whether you take a risk with your life?
Why do strangers get to decide that?
So... The freedom argument is squarely on the side of the pro-abortion people.
That's what freedom looks like.
The freedom for the mother to protect her own health in her own opinion, nobody else's opinion, about her own baby.
And to balance how much risk she's willing to take for the benefit of her own baby.
Somebody has to make the decision.
So the liberal point of view isn't so much about pro-abortion We're not abortion.
It's really they should concentrate on who gets to make the decision and they should throw it right back in the conservatives face if they were smart, if they were good at this, which they're not.
They would throw it back in the face of the conservatives and say, look, be consistent with your own stand.
You have two things you're trying to be consistent with and you've got to pick one.
One thing that conservatives want to be consistent with is that life, innocent life, There's a big difference.
If you're guilty, maybe some death penalty might apply.
But if you're innocent, like a fetus, the conservative view is there's no wiggle room.
If you're innocent and you're maybe a life or you are a life or even we're talking about it's a life, it will be protected.
So that's like an absolute.
But the other absolute, maybe a little less absolute, is that the government should not interfere with In people's lives any more than is absolutely necessary.
And I would argue that this is unnecessary.
It's an option. So the government doesn't have to have a law about abortion.
It could let the mother and the doctor decide.
It's not mandatory.
It's just not mandatory.
It's just a strong preference.
All right. Somebody says a mother who is not willing to save her baby's life...
is not a mother or deserves to be a mother.
Well, I respect opinions on both sides of this debate, but you're actually not on the right topic.
The question is, who gets to make the choice?
The question is not, will everybody make the right choice?
So when you're talking about freedom, you are not limiting freedom to make the right choice.
It's not freedom if the only freedom you have is to do the right thing according to other people.
That's not freedom. Freedom would be, you get to decide.
Period. It's your freedom.
You get to decide. So if you want to take freedom, in this limited sense, away from mothers, just know that that's what you're doing.
You're taking an individual's decision and you're giving it to the central government or the state.
If that's what you want, just call it what it is.
Taking freedom away from a woman for a reason that you think is good, but it is taking freedom away.
So the reason they can't agree is that they're on the wrong topic.
One is arguing freedom, and the other is arguing life, and they're not even the same conversation.
All right. I'm not free to murder someone.
That's right. Yeah, the government has taken away your freedom to be a murderer.
But society has also decided that we all agree with that.
So you can't compare, this is the problem with analogies, you can't compare the fact that the government makes murder in general illegal to abortion.
Because everybody agrees that murder should be illegal.
But everybody doesn't agree that if you have to balance the risk of the mother versus the health of the baby, not everybody agrees that it should always go in the same direction.
That's very debatable.
Somebody would like to debate me on statue removal.
There's not much to debate there.
I would not put up an offensive decoration in my house.
And I think that it is bad behavior to put up an offensive declaration in the public square when something like a third or a half or I don't know what the percentage is of the public would be deeply offended by it.
So we shouldn't run a society in which for no strong reason we're deeply offending people.
It just is unnecessary.
What about when it's just for convenience?
That's how freedom works.
See, you cannot argue that people will use their freedoms inappropriately.
It is not a legitimate argument against freedom that some people will misuse their freedom.
Because that argument would prevent every freedom.
It can be true, Leaving it up to the mother, the doctor, as the only decision maker.
It could be completely true, and I would argue it is true, that you guarantee there will be people misusing the system to literally murder babies.
I think you can just guarantee that somewhere and in some number, whether it's a small number or a bigger number, we don't know, but you can guarantee that That there will be some mother-doctor decisions that you wouldn't have made and that you consider deeply wrong.
That's freedom. If you want freedom, you put up with a little of that.
That's the trade-off.
And I'm not saying you should put up with that.
If you think life is sacred, that's a strong moral argument.
All right. Do you have a happy subject today?
Yeah, why is there no happy subjects?
How about that?
All right, how about this? Let me give you a little optimism to round out all the unhappy stuff.
We are absolutely in the best time of history.
It wasn't long ago, and maybe it was two years ago or a year and a half ago, I started saying that we were entering a golden age.
Very few people Quite agreed with that because they would look at all the problems in the world and say, my God, this or that is going wrong, this or that is going wrong.
To which I said, no, the business model of the media makes you think things are going wrong when they're not.
Even if everything they say about climate change is true in terms of the economic dislocation, even if it's all true, It's still a tiny problem in the context of our economic well-being.
We'll be extraordinarily better in 100 years, no matter what.
No matter what climate change does, we're going to be 5 to 10 times better off just because of the normal pace of advancement.
We'll figure out how to handle climate change if it's a problem.
We'll compensate.
We'll be able to move people.
We'll build robots to build dikes.
We'll do something. It's 100 years.
We've got time to figure this out.
We've got the best economy, the best healthcare in the world.
We've got fewer wars.
I don't know, just about everything is going well right now.
Have you ever gone completely without media influence to test improvement of how you feel?
I have not. It would be hard for me to do it now because I do this every day.
But I do know somebody who, with doctor's orders, did a news diet, meaning it was somebody whose doctor told them to stop watching the news.
And it was the most fascinating thing, because this was a co-worker a million years ago, and I would sometimes ask her about world events, I mean, headline events, and she would look at me and say, what?
I haven't heard about that.
And I'm talking about big headline stuff like somebody got elected president, that sort of level.
You say, hey, what do you think about the new president?
And she'd be like, new president?
Wasn't paying attention.
What's his name? It was the most fascinating thing to see a modern person in the modern world who had cut news out of her life.
And when I asked her how she felt about it and how it was, she said it was great.
Because it turns out there was nothing she ever did differently because of the news.
All of that bad news she was consuming didn't cause her to vote differently, didn't cause her to become an activist, didn't cause her to do anything but worry.
The only thing the news did for her is just it made her worry.
So she got rid of it and it made her happier.
Somebody just said that Mike Srinovich released the interview portion of me that was a small part of that became, or some part of that became part of his movie, Hoaxed.
So I haven't seen that tweet, but if it's there, I'll tweet it around.
Oh, do I have a slaughter meter report today?
Yes, the slaughter meter is still at 140%.
If nothing changes, and of course things will change, so this is a ridiculous statement, but the slaughter meter imagines in an artificial world, if nothing changed between now and 2020, what would be the election result?
If nothing changes, I hyperbolically put it above 100% where it can't logically be to make the point that that 100% is really safe.
He could have things go wrong and still have a 100% chance of winning at this point.
Now, much will change and I will revise the slaughter meter up till the day of the election.
It could be down to zero by election day.
So it's not a prediction.
It's sort of a meter to show where you are at a snapshot in time.
It's not telling you how it's going to end.
It's telling you how it would end if nothing changed, but of course things will change.
Yeah, problems will happen and most of them will be fake.
So the president tweeted today, how can a president be impeached for crimes committed by the other party?
How can a Republican president be impeached for crimes committed by Democrats?
And correct me if I'm wrong about this, but there's something that's just...
Freaky about the fact that we still talk as though it was Trump who did or did not do something illegal or immoral.
When all of the evidence shows clearly and unambiguously that the Clinton campaign did all of those things.
They seriously broke the law.
It seems obvious that they tried to overthrow the government.
Overthrow the government.
In what world does it make sense that I can say in casual terms, oh yeah, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, they did try to stage a coup and overthrow the government of the United States, which of course would be a big problem for the world in general.
How weird is it that I can say those statements, which as far as I can tell are completely true, and yet...
The world goes on as though none of it exists.
Now, there are two explanations for this.
And neither of them are anything but freaky.
There are two I can think of.
There might be other explanations.
Maybe there's one I'm not thinking of.
But one explanation is that I'm experiencing cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias.
And that many of you are too.
Because I think most of you on this Are having the same experience, right?
You're looking at what seems obviously a coup attempt.
I don't know how you could interpret it any other way.
And yet it's treated like it sort of doesn't exist.
What it feels like is Godzilla appeared on the mainland and Godzilla is tearing through American cities.
And you'll see like a weather report, and the weatherman will say, well, it's a cloudy day, it looks like a chance of rain, and doesn't mention that behind him in the video, an actual Godzilla is destroying a city.
And I'm watching, and I'm thinking, well, you're going to mention Godzilla, right?
Because Godzilla's like right behind you.
That's actually Godzilla.
I can see it right there.
I'm not guessing. I'm watching Godzilla right in front of you.
You're going to mention, you're going to turn around, right?
You mentioned? Godzilla?
And then the weatherman says, and that's the wrap.
That's all the weather for today.
And then the weather reports over, and I think, what the hell did I just watch?
I think I watched Godzilla destroying the city.
But the weatherman talked about clouds.
What's happening? What's happening?
So that's the feeling I'm getting when I'm watching people talk about the president's alleged bad behavior.
In the context of the Democrats literally trying to overthrow the country.
Now, am I just suffering from cognitive dissonance?
Is there actually no real crime by the Democrats?
Am I imagining it?
Am I taking a bunch of coincidences and putting them together in a way that the facts do not quite dictate?
Maybe I'm I'm imagining more connection in the facts than there really are?
Is that what's happening?
Or am I actually watching the mainstream media ignore a coup attempt that almost worked and took two years and all of our attention?
Which of those two things is real?
I honestly can't tell.
And the fact is, you can't tell either.
It would look exactly the same.
If there's one thing I could teach you with this persuasion stuff, is that what I just described should be the way you should always look at the world, which is that I have two worlds that are operating perfectly within the facts, and they're opposites.
So all of the facts that I know about the world would support the hypothesis completely that I'm having an imaginary...
View of the world.
It's completely consistent with what I know about life and the world and reality that I'm just imagining this.
Completely consistent.
The fact that I can give you ten reasons for why I think it in no way makes it real.
Because we've watched tens of millions of people show you ten reasons why the president was obviously colluding with Russia.
But that wasn't real.
That wasn't real.
Although the other side says it was.
So you have to be open to the fact that there are two interpretations of reality and I just hold them both as potentially true and see which one predicts.
So here's what I would suggest.
Which of these world predicts?
If it's true that Hillary Clinton and Democrats, etc.
were part of a plot to overthrow the government, the prediction would be That Bill Barr, who is no Democrat, would be digging into it and that he would eventually come up with evidence that would prove that case.
So the prediction, if there was a coup, is that Bill Barr would find out more about it and there would be more meat on the bones and that we would have something like a conviction or at least knowledge of what happened.
Under that theory, the problem is me.
No, under that theory, I've correctly identified reality.
But the other reality is that Barr never makes any progress against what we imagine was a coup attempt.
That there are no indictments, there's just no new information, and we just are left wondering.
If that happens, which I don't predict, then Then it would just be me imagining the situation along with most of you.
Most of you would literally be imagining what's happening right now.
Both are possible given the current set of facts.
All right, just looking at your comments.
First time on Periscope, is there a way to turn off the stupid hearts?
I believe if you have a mobile device and you turn it sideways to landscape mode, it'll give you sort of a theater mode that turns off the comments and the hearts.
And you'd have to hit it with your finger again to turn them back on or turn it sideways again.
I believe that's true.
Your device might vary.
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