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May 1, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams

01:23:33

Episode 513 Scott Adams: Barr, Biden, Bullsh*t, Nuclear Power, Jobs

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	Bum, bum, bum, bum.
	Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
	It's time to add in some new instruments so that my theme song has a little more character.
	Drums. Bum, bum, bum, bum.
	Hey, everybody. Come on in.
	Tyler and Alfonso and Beatty and Null Hypothesis.
	That's a funny name for your parents to give you, Null Hypothesis.
	Well, I'm glad you're all here because you know what time it is.
	It's time for coffee with Scott Adams.
	And it's time for the simultaneous sip.
	And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass.
	Some kind of tankard or stein or chalice.
	Perhaps a thermos. Fill it with your favorite liquid.
	I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure that I call the simultaneous sip.
	Mmm. All right, I have a question which has been bugging me all night, and I can't wait to ask you.
	So I'll be looking at the comments for your answers.
	So on Twitter, I presented a challenge, and it's a psychological challenge, and something you can do at home.
	And I'm wondering if any of you have done it yet.
	And the challenge is to find somebody who believes in The Charlottesville fine people hoax.
	Someone who believes that the president actually called the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville fine people.
	Find somebody who believes that's absolutely true and then show them the transcript.
	But here's the key part.
	Ask them to read the transcript, the specific sentence in which Trump said, I condemn totally the neo-Nazis and the white nationals.
	And my hypothesis is...
	That if you ask somebody to actually read it aloud to you, that they won't be able to do it.
	And when I say they won't be able to do it, I don't mean that they'll be weasels and they'll change the topic or they'll simply claim it's not true.
	Those would be sort of normal, normal-ish things you'd expect.
	My hypothesis is that they actually physically can't do it.
	Let me say that again.
	The hypothesis is that somebody who is very invested in that being true will not be physically able to read it out loud.
	And that there will be a cognitive phenomenon Which, as a hypnotist, I've seen many times, but most of you have either never seen it or never noticed it when you saw it.
	So, as a hypnotist, this is a very predictable thing, which, you know, in a lot of different contexts, I can manufacture this effect.
	But most of you have never seen it, and you'll never see a situation, probably, that's as perfect as this, so clean and simple, in which you can just say, all right, I'm gonna induce Intense cognitive dissonance.
	I'm going to make your worldview that you think is solid and definite, I'm going to make it dissolve right in front of you, and then I'm going to watch your reaction.
	You'll never get that opportunity in the normal world, but you have one.
	So if you saw my Twitter feed, you saw the transcript is there, you can just print it out or show it on your phone and say to somebody, I want to see, just see if you can read it out loud.
	I believe that they will look at it and they will immediately find an excuse that they're busy.
	They will tell you that I'm not going to play your little game.
	They will say, what kind of trick are you up to?
	They will say, well, this doesn't really matter because it's about something else.
	But the hypothesis is that they would be unable to actually voice the words on the page.
	Now, that doesn't mean it will work every time, but I would guess something like 80 to 90 percent of the time, somebody said, I tried this.
	All true. All right, so I'm looking in the comments for somebody who actually tried it, and somebody said they tried it, and it's true.
	It will freak you out.
	It will freak you out to see you actually read that, see the person read the sentence, and then watch their eyes.
	Watch their brain reboot.
	So what you should see, I'll do an impression.
	So this would be somebody, the first would be somebody who is not experiencing cognitive dissonance.
	They still disagree with you, but they don't have any cognitive dissonance.
	It's like, all right, I'll humor you, I'll read it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they read it.
	And then they would tell you why it's wrong or why they don't believe it or whatever, and That would not be cognitive dissonance.
	Cognitive dissonance would look like this.
	That's what it would look like.
	You would see somebody in a state of sort of mental confusion and panic where it would make them temporarily unable to speak.
	So look for temporarily unable to speak.
	That's your tell for cognitive dissonance.
	Once you've seen it in this controlled exercise, you're going to get closer to seeing the world the way I see it as a trained hypnotist.
	Once you're a trained hypnotist, you can see people's brains rebooting, where before you didn't notice it.
	You just thought they were pausing to think or something.
	But once you can recognize it, it changes everything about the way you see the world, because you'll see people getting triggered into it, dealing with it, and then coming out of it, and it will be a completely different filter on the world.
	All right. We want to talk about, I know you want to talk about, the bar, the bar situation.
	Now, so the story is, the fake news of the day, is that Mueller allegedly wrote a letter to Bob Barr saying that Mueller disagrees with how Barr summarized the report.
	Now, of course, the news is all fake.
	Because apparently there is no letter in which Mueller said that he disagrees with what Barr said.
	In other words, there's no suggestion that what Barr said was inaccurate.
	The real story, which they don't quite say on CNN, at least not in these words, is that the real issue is that the way Bob Barr summarized it left out with some texture so that it would be misleading to the public.
	It wasn't inaccurate, but the public and the way the press is handling it, mostly the press, the press is handling it in a way that didn't seem true to the underlying stuff.
	To which I say, what did you expect from a summary?
	Now, I'm a writer, so maybe this is just glaringly obvious to me, because I quite often create summaries of larger bodies of my own work.
	Now, if you create a summary of your own work, which I do on a routine basis as a writer, does the summary capture all the goodness that you would very, very much like everybody to see?
	Well, no! How could it?
	How could a summary be as accurate as the underlying body of information?
	That's what a summary is.
	There's no such thing as a summary that has all the details of the original thing.
	I mean, you can imagine some special case where that might be true.
	But with all of the complexity of the underlying stuff, was there any chance that a summary...
	Could capture it as well as the author of all the underlying stuff believes should have been captured.
	That wasn't a thing.
	So if somebody says to you, Mueller wrote a letter and he's complaining that there's oxygen in the world, would that be a headline news?
	Because you'd look at yourself and say, well, there's always sort of oxygen.
	I think oxygen is the basic quality of the world.
	I don't know that that's news, right?
	It wouldn't be news, because it's what everybody knows is the obvious reality you live in.
	So if somebody says, I don't believe that the summary captured all the nuance of the original work, have they said anything?
	Is that anything?
	Because we've already seen the underlying work.
	We don't have to wonder.
	We've seen it. Now, and of course, so I turned on, you know, I caught this story at the end of yesterday and I didn't really pay attention.
	This morning I woke up and I said, oh, I'm going to dig into this a little bit before my Periscope.
	And I'm going to find out what's the issue.
	So I go to CNN, and I start clicking on some links to find out what is the problem.
	What is specifically Mueller say is getting wrong, not in terms of what Barr said wrong, but in terms of how the way Barr said it has allowed the media to misrepresent it, I guess.
	So I guess the question is, what exactly is Mueller complaining about?
	So I thought, well, that will be obviously wrong.
	In the article, right? If I read an article about this story, it's going to tell me what, specifically, Mueller had a problem with.
	That Barr said wrong, or the media is getting wrong.
	I couldn't find it.
	Did anybody find it?
	Now, it might be there, but it seems so hidden in the way that they're covering the story, they're covering it like it's gossip.
	They're covering it like the details of what it is that they're differing on, if anything, don't really matter.
	They're covering it like it's a personality against a personality.
	They're covering it like it's a team sport.
	They're covering it like it's a he said, she said situation or one bitch against another bitch.
	I couldn't even tell what the problem was.
	And they're deeply trying to manufacture something out of nothing.
	Now, of course, on the other side, so I flip over to Fox News just to see what the other world looks like.
	And in the other world, they're saying, there's nothing here.
	There's nothing here.
	Now, as far as I can tell, the closest I can get...
	To what the issue is, is about the legal technicalities of whether there was something that would qualify as obstruction of justice.
	There didn't seem to be any disagreement on the fact that Trump was not involved in any Russia collusion.
	That part seems to be both sides agree.
	But Mueller is still saying that, it sounds like, That maybe the way the press is saying that the president, at least the press on the right, is saying that the president is essentially cleared of obstruction of justice.
	And Mueller, I think, this is as close as I can get to what's really happening.
	This might be wrong, so fact check me on this.
	But I think Mueller was indicating that you could maybe make a case of obstruction, but that in this special case, because it's a sitting president, That Mueller wasn't sure if there were, you know, the rules against indictment, etc., whether that made enough of a difference.
	And then on top of that, although they're not supposed to take into account that the underlying charge, the collusion, wasn't true, because keep in mind, you can be found guilty of obstructing justice.
	Even in a situation where there was no justice to obstruct, meaning that there was no crime.
	So there was still a justice system that you could obstruct, but there was no justice being lost because there was no crime that anybody was trying to get away with.
	So I think the questions are something about whether you can indict a sitting president, and then the second one is whether the president just doing his normal job under the Constitution Could ever be interpreted, this is the Alan Dershowitz twist,
	not twist, but his explanation, that could a president ever be charged with a crime for doing the ordinary things that you do in your job, which is hiring and firing, directing people to do things or directing them not to do things.
	So... So those are the things that Mueller apparently...
	I might be getting ahead of myself here, so please bring me back if I've gone too far.
	But it looks like Mueller said, yeah, there are little factual things which if he were not the president, that's the key, if he were not the president doing the job of a president under the Constitution...
	And if there had been a crime, which there wasn't, which isn't the important part, and if you could indict a president, under those conditions you might think that this could have gone forward as a case.
	But given that he was the president, and we don't indict presidents, and he was just doing the normal things under a president's job, it's a little too complicated for me, Mueller, to make the call on this.
	So I'm just going to lay out the information for the public and for the Attorney General, mostly for the Attorney General, and then the Attorney General decides what the public sees, and then the Attorney General will handle it from there.
	Now, did what I just described say that the President was cleared of obstruction?
	No. No.
	You know, I can't go so far into, you know, blind punditry that I'm going to say that that equals cleared of obstruction.
	But, he did say there's no Russia collusion.
	And so, I'm not a lawyer.
	I'm not, well, I guess I'm not a judge.
	I'm not a lawyer. If you tell me, citizen of the United States, what we want is justice, That's the main thing.
	We're not a country who needs to obsess over the dot the I's and the details of stuff if it conflicts with justice.
	If you had a choice of following the law or achieving justice, and those are your only two choices.
	If you follow the law, you don't get justice.
	But if you ignore the law, you get justice, which is a far higher standard.
	Which would you do? You're an American.
	And you're talking about another American citizen, one of your teammates, somebody on your team, somebody you are tasked to protect.
	And the law says something bad is going to happen that isn't fair.
	But if you do something that's fair, it might not be exactly technically compatible with the law.
	Which way do you go?
	If you're an American.
	Justice. Every time.
	So, Mueller has made a case that on the details, if you were just to ignore everything you felt about what's right, if you were to ignore everything you felt about what's just, if you were to ignore everything about what's good for the good of the country, if you could ignore all of those things, on some technical level, there might be enough stuff that you could indict.
	Could you ever get a conviction?
	Probably no.
	I don't think so.
	Can you imagine finding 12 jurors that would convict the president for doing his job and allegedly obstructing the investigation into the biggest witch hunt in history about a crime that the president alone knew he did not commit?
	I mean, he's the only one who knew for sure that there was no crime.
	So there's no way this ever, in any real world, could have turned into like a court case with a conviction.
	You could not find, in any circumstance, 12 jurors who would agree, oh yeah, let's convict the president who has the best economy in the world and is keeping us out of force.
	Let's convict him for a technical violation when he was trying to avoid a witch hunt into something that wasn't a crime.
	No way.
	No freaking way.
	But having said that, was it enough with what Mueller found to get an indictment?
	And if you don't know, the old saying is, you know, you could get an indictment for a ham sandwich.
	So it's really easy to get an indictment.
	You just have to have a pretty strong suggestion that there's something worthy of talking about.
	That's my non-legal explanation.
	So if Mueller is complaining that the public and the politicians are over-interpreting his finding, that's probably true.
	I think that's true.
	Because if you're just talking about could he get indicted if he were not a president just doing his normal job, I'd say probably yes.
	Don't you think?
	If he were not the president...
	If he were guilty, which he wasn't, you know, that matters in terms of how people feel about it, not so much the law.
	And if he could be indicted in all those things that weren't true, you know, probably Mueller has a case.
	So on a very technical Boy Scout, according to the law, I don't want my work to be misinterpreted, I can say Mueller would have a point.
	It's a trivial point.
	It's an unimportant point.
	It's completely irrelevant to anything that will ever be the ultimate outcome of all of this stuff.
	But it's a point.
	Now, if you've...
	Let me give you another gel man...
	Look on this. So Gell Mann was a physicist who famously noticed that when there was a story about physics, a topic that he understood better than most of the people in the world, he could tell that the story was usually wrong.
	But if you looked at a story on some other topic in which he was not an expert, Gell Mann, that's his last name, two words I think, He couldn't tell, but he believed the other stories, even though 100% of the stories that he understood the topic better than the news understood it, he knew that they were wrong.
	So he was saying, okay, what are the chances that these other stories are all right when the only thing I understand is always wrong?
	So that observation should tell you what to believe.
	So in this case, If somebody writes a summary about something, this is very similar to when there are news stories about me.
	So I have read maybe, if I had to put an estimate, I would say I've read maybe a thousand news stories about myself over 30 years of being a cartoonist.
	Of those thousand-ish stories I've read about myself, they're all summaries.
	Because you can't write an article about a person that, you know, captures all of the complexity of their life.
	That's not a thing. It's always a summary.
	How often are the summaries wrong?
	Pretty much all the time.
	Pretty much all the time. Now, they're not wrong like necessarily a lie.
	They're not always wrong because a fact got wrong, although that's very common.
	It's very common to have basic facts wrong maybe two-thirds of the time.
	And But the fact is that when I see summaries of me, I know they're all inaccurate in the way that I would want that story to be told.
	So of course Mueller thinks that a summary doesn't capture everything.
	And of course he thinks the public and the press are taking it too far or taking it out of context.
	There was no other option.
	It was a summary.
	There is no other option.
	Of course it doesn't capture the flavor of the original.
	All right, enough about that.
	And as always, I always caution you to wait for Alan Dershowitz's opinion on this whole thing.
	If Alan Dershowitz says that everything I just told you is a bunch of BS, you should immediately change your opinion to whatever Alan Dershowitz says.
	So wait for him to weigh in and that'll tell us if this is something or nothing.
	But it feels like desperation.
	Ah, we've got to find something!
	We've been so embarrassed.
	We've got to find something!
	Cling! Let's talk about some other things.
	Let's talk about Venezuela. You know, it seems to me that the Monroe Doctrine is going to rule the day in that We can watch Venezuela as long as we need to, until we don't need to.
	But I'm pretty sure that the Monroe Doctrine, meaning that the United States is going to take care of business in its own hemisphere, whatever it takes, we're going to take care of business.
	I think the Russians know that.
	I think the Cubans know that.
	I think Venezuela knows that.
	But we're not going to do it Prematurely.
	We probably won't do it just for humanitarian reasons, because there's already a humanitarian crisis, obviously.
	And as Tucker Carlson pointed out on his show, I think it was last night, when has the United States ever militarily intervened in another country to fix things, and it all worked out well?
	And I'm not a historian, and I thought to myself, is there really no example of that?
	Now, I'm willing to believe that's true, because I can't think of an example.
	Can any of you think of an example?
	And it could be, you know, some South American country we messed with in the 50s.
	Somebody's saying South Korea?
	I don't know. Well, you know, you can't count conquered countries, Germany and Japan.
	Kosovo. Eh.
	Granada? Eh, special cases.
	Panama? Panama is probably, I don't know, what's the situation in Panama right now?
	What's the situation in Granada right now?
	Yeah, so I wouldn't include Japan and Germany because we went to war with them because it was a war.
	So I would not include countries where we went to war for war reasons and then we figured out what to do after the war was over.
	That's a different situation. But Granada, we actually invaded.
	That was like, what, an eight-hour war or something?
	So I would say Granada has to be treated as a special case because they did not have any military resistance.
	So I don't think you can compare a country with no military resistance.
	To Venezuela. So is there a country that had a military?
	People are saying Kosovo, and I'm seeing other people saying that's not a good example.
	Somebody's saying Liberia, South Korea.
	Some are saying, all right, Panama, some people are saying.
	Guam, somebody's asking.
	I don't know about that. Nicaragua in the early 1900s.
	I don't know about that. I'm not debunking these, by the way.
	Somebody said Israel.
	Israel's an interesting example.
	Chile. Alright.
	Argentina versus the Brits.
	I don't know if that's appropriate.
	Kuwait. Oh yeah, Kuwait.
	Kuwait was really not in...
	Kuwait was not a situation of...
	Yeah, maybe that's a good example.
	Although you could argue that that led to the Iraq War eventually.
	You know, indirectly. Alright, so, that's an open question.
	I'm not a historian enough to know if we've ever intervened and gotten a good result.
	But, then I heard, this is funny, this is what I heard.
	We don't want to intervene, we don't want to intervene, because if there's any intervening, it should be the countries bordering Venezuela.
	So it's going to be far better for the United States if the United States doesn't intervene, but those bordering countries, maybe they get a little more involved because it's literally, it's more their backyard than it is ours.
	They're literally right there.
	To which I say, where do you think they're getting their military advice and their military weapons and their aid?
	Aren't we just going to give that stuff to the neighboring countries to employ in Venezuela?
	Yeah, and then somebody else says our special forces are there.
	Is there any chance that we're not already there with military?
	Don't you think that there's a 100% chance that some form of our military, probably special ops, is already there?
	I'm pretty sure we're already there.
	Do you think that our special forces are not already preparing a kill shot for Madura?
	Do you think we're not on the ground figuring out where he is at all times?
	Do you think we're not tracking their digital communications so that we know who's doing what everywhere?
	Do you think that those special forces can't shine a laser on Maduro's office and have a missile go through his window anytime we want?
	I'm pretty sure we're kind of ready, but not with uniformed forces on the ground, I'm sure.
	Let's drink to that. And so this brings me back to my idea that I often bring up.
	It seems to me that one of the things the world needs is a government in a box.
	And by government in a box, I mean a country that has an organization within the country.
	And I'll just use an example.
	Let's say it's Switzerland. Let's say Switzerland decides to form a unit that might even be a commercial unit, doesn't even have to work for the government, that will go into a country as advisors and they will become the temporary government for, let's say, three years or one year or whatever it is.
	And all they do is they go in and they set up a new form of government.
	And they're not even part of the country.
	They're literally advisors brought in to form a government, and they are actually the president.
	So the president of the country would be just some Swiss guy.
	That comes with this organization.
	They would set up a government, get it working, and then they would transform that government back into a local government.
	So they would set up elections, they would make sure the elections are fair.
	They'd work with the government, but basically it would just be government in a box and it would come in.
	Now, you would not do this unless invited.
	So in other words, it could be the way to settle a dispute where there are two sides and they can just never agree.
	So you bring in the government in a box, and the first thing that the government in a box does is they set up a safe passage for the dictator.
	There's always a dictator, right?
	All these problems end up with there's a strong person, strong man, strong woman in charge, and that person, if they lose control of their country, probably going to be dead.
	We're in jail. So you can never get a dictator to leave if the alternative is they and their family are all killed.
	So you don't have a way to solve a problem Because there's no exit strategy for the dictator.
	So the government in a box would come in and say, look, we've already secured an island state for you in another place, or we'll set up a situation where you can have your own little area of the country, and we'll just, you know, make sure that nobody gets out and nobody gets in.
	But we'll somehow create a safe path for the dictator to get to a better end state than dead.
	And just let them live out their life, even with money.
	They could live a good life just in isolation.
	They don't have to be isolated.
	They could have visitors and stuff, but they just can't have a political influence anymore.
	Somebody says, use Bitcoin.
	Yes, I think there's some kind of cryptocurrency layer to this where if the economy is broken, if they just need some way to have some money that they can buy and sell things, there might be a crypto element to that.
	I don't know enough to know that that makes sense yet.
	Anyway, so we need a government in a box.
	It probably needs to be something like Switzerland because nobody would expect a Swiss team to come in and for any kind of long period of time be the ruling party of another country.
	Nobody would put up with that.
	So you probably, at the minimum, you probably have to have the military in favor of it.
	Because the military could get rid of the government in a box at the same time that they would have to be the ones that invited them in.
	So it probably has to be supported by the military at a minimum.
	Anyway, that's one idea. Let's talk about some other things.
	Let's talk about Joe Biden. Okay, the funniest thing about Joe Biden, and there are a lot of funny things about Joe Biden, I don't even know where to start.
	So he was asked, the human gaffe machine, I call him, He was asked by, was it Robin Roberts?
	Asked him if he had a slogan for his campaign.
	And here's the funny part.
	He didn't have a slogan.
	I guess he hadn't thought of it.
	He hadn't thought of a slogan?
	Come on! That's sort of running for president 101.
	You've got to have a slogan. And so he tries to come up with a slogan on the fly.
	And he goes, Make America...
	Moral again. And when Joe Biden is trying to act extra sincere, his eyes get really closed.
	And he leans in.
	I'm so sincere.
	Making America moral again.
	See the sincerity? Look at these eyes.
	Look at his mouth. This is very sincere.
	I'm so sincere.
	I'm more sincere than you could ever imagine.
	Look at my sincerity.
	And then, of course, he didn't realize...
	Yeah, that the acronym for Make America More Again is MAMA. Oh, perfect.
	Perfect. And Milk America Again.
	That's funny. Anyway, so that's the first funny thing.
	Second funny thing. Did you see the clip of him awkwardly hugging Hillary Clinton?
	It looks like... I don't know if I can show it.
	Alright, let me see if I can show it to you here.
	Can you see it? So he's hugging her, and she's giving him the tap on the shoulder.
	Tap, tap. Okay, let me go.
	Tap, tap. Tap.
	Let me go. And then she just puts her hands down and just hangs there, like the ultimate sign of let me go.
	Then she goes back to tap, tap, tap.
	Let me go. Let me go.
	You can let me go now.
	Hey, look at it. I'm just hanging here.
	Let me go. Let me go.
	Let me go.
	Now, that clip was actually looping, so it looked more exaggerated than it was in real life.
	But this was just an introduction to my actual funniest point.
	The funny point is, have you seen the latest video of him campaigning?
	And he's going up on stage and everybody...
	When you go up on stage, that's usually when there's some handshakes and some kisses and some hugs.
	And he doesn't know how to handle himself because he knows that everybody's watching how he touches people.
	So watch. It is frickin' hilarious.
	If you're looking for it, it's funny.
	If you're not looking for it, you might not notice.
	But he doesn't know how to interact with people.
	Because he had 76 years of interacting a certain very physical way, and now that he knows he can't do that, you can tell that he's completely out of his element, because he's trying to navigate a Me Too world where you can't touch anybody.
	And so he looks awkward to me because he hasn't figured it out.
	Now, there was also this viral video that went around that put together all the little bits of his speech in which he seemed to be slurring or searching for a word.
	If you see them all together, it looks like he has a mental problem or he's just very old or it really does sell a picture of him having some problems.
	I would say that's misleading because you could probably do that same clip with all of my periscopes.
	If you took any of my periscopes and took all the little times I'm searching for a word or I slur a word or I say a word wrong, it would look just like that.
	Maybe it's because I'm old. But anyway, I wouldn't make too much of it because I think you could do that with anybody.
	But here's the other funny part, and this is the best part of all.
	So, when we heard that Trump was calling him Sleepy Joe, Sleepy Joe Biden, you know, there was some disagreement about whether that was a good or a bad nickname.
	Because people said, well, creepy would be better.
	But I think the president wisely stayed away from creepy.
	And I think it was wise because the president has his own, you know, grab him by the whatever stuff going on.
	And so if he used the creepy...
	Creepy label, it would probably be thrown back at him.
	So I think it was good that he avoided that.
	Sleepy is one that the president can win every time.
	Let me just give you this scenario, and if this doesn't make you laugh, you're dead inside.
	Alright, so now Sleepy Joe has to deal with the fact that he has to deal with this label.
	So he has to act as whatever is the opposite of Sleepy.
	When he was on stage, do you think he was thinking that, that he had to look like he was presenting a lot of energy?
	Oh yeah, he was thinking it.
	He was thinking it hard.
	Because if he had done anything that looked low energy, it would have been all the news.
	That would have been the news.
	It wouldn't have mattered what he said that night.
	If his energy was low, in any way that you could even interpret it as low, even if it had not been...
	That would have been the only story.
	So Trump, by now, is absolutely in his head.
	He's so far into Biden's head because now everything that Sleepy Joe does has to counter the idea that he has low energy.
	What does that make you do to overcompensate?
	Well, the first thing it does to make him overcompensate is he probably has to ramp up his energy a little higher than normal for these events.
	And it almost certainly would make him misspeak.
	Because if you're adding a little bit too much energy compared to the energy that you normally add, and I think he actually has good energy, but it's a great political argument against him, it seems to me that maybe that could have been a little bit of what made him misspeak, that maybe he was trying a little too hard.
	Or how about this?
	Do you think that Biden got a good night's sleep The night before he gave his speech.
	When he was going to sleep the night before, and Joe lays down, and he's like, tomorrow I'm going to announce for president.
	I'm going to save the world.
	He's calling me Sleepy Joe.
	Can't sleep. Can't sleep.
	Don't sleep. I'm not going to get eight hours tonight.
	I'm going to get five hours tonight.
	Because I'm not Sleepy Joe.
	I'm not Sleepy Joe.
	He's not going to make me Sleepy Joe.
	I'm going to... Five hours a night.
	That's all I need. And I'm not going to let anybody see me take a nap.
	Ever. I'm never going to go home early.
	I'm not going to cancel an event because I'm tired.
	I'm not Sleepy Joe.
	So I think President Trump has used what I would call a sports trash talk model that is very active, meaning that it's going to make his opponent respond to it.
	It's an active insult.
	I think, imagine if you will, President Trump has a long day and he wants to take a nap.
	How does he do it? He probably says something like this.
	Can you clear my schedule after eight o'clock tonight?
	I want to spend some alone time or some family time.
	And the president goes off to his private quarters and goes to sleep early.
	I don't know if he ever goes to sleep early.
	I suspect he doesn't. But he could.
	And nobody would have any question about it because his brand is high energy.
	So if the president goes into his private quarters, you just think, well, he might be asleep, he might be having some family time.
	You wouldn't think anything of it.
	So the president can sleep as much as he wants because his brand allows it.
	Now imagine that you're Sleepy Joe.
	And you've got all these advisors and people.
	You don't know them all.
	You don't necessarily quite trust them yet.
	You don't know who's leaking to the media.
	You don't know if you have a mole.
	You don't know what stories are going to get out.
	And you're tired.
	You can't say you're tired.
	You can't tell your closest advisor you're tired, because that's going to come out someday.
	You can't say, cancel my events this afternoon.
	I just need to catch up.
	Can't say that. You can't not take on an event even though it would exhaust you.
	Because you don't want to look like you couldn't take on an event because it would exhaust you.
	And you can't even go to sleep early.
	Suppose it's 11 o'clock at night and the advisors are still talking with Biden.
	And what he wants to say is, I need some sleep.
	I don't know if he can. I don't know if he can say that.
	I think he stays up to midnight so that they leave on their own, so that he doesn't have to tell people he's tired.
	So I think the president is so deeply in Sleepy Joe's head that I'm going to make a prediction.
	Are you ready for this?
	If this is as actively powerful framing as I think it is, He could exhaust Biden before Election Day, if Biden makes it that far.
	I'm thinking he probably won't.
	But if he does make it that far, in two years he will have run himself ragged at age 78 or 6 or whatever the hell he is.
	And the odds of him not stumbling or getting sick or showing some effect of all that work is pretty low.
	So it's possible that Trump has presented a ticking time bomb of a kill shot.
	And I don't know if we've seen this one before.
	This is one that has a timer on it.
	Because on day one, when you heard Sleepy Joe, didn't you have the same impression I did, which is, I don't know, he doesn't feel that sleepy to me.
	My impression is sort of the opposite.
	He feels like he's a pretty high-energy guy.
	And I've said before, I give him very high marks.
	For fitness. Have you seen Joe Biden?
	Like he's really, at least in terms of his weight and his, you know, just his persona.
	And he's obviously had a lot of work done on his face and stuff like that.
	But, you know, I don't like to criticize people for that.
	Those are personal choices.
	But I would say he's the opposite of sleepy looking.
	But it's got a timer on it.
	And the longer he tries to prove he's not sleepy...
	The more he's going to wear himself into the ground, the more he's going to expose himself to mistakes that he might not have made.
	So I think it could be brilliant, but we won't know.
	We're going to have to wait and see if that little thing, that little seed takes root.
	All right. I sent around an article.
	Since all of you know...
	Oh, I should mention again.
	So yesterday I wrote a blog post.
	I have not written a blog post in...
	A long time because I've been doing the periscopes and working on books and stuff.
	But I thought it was time to take everything about the fine people hoax and put it into a written form because written form just travels better.
	It can be more viral to more people because people will read things they won't watch on video.
	And I realized that there was such a consistency To how people responded when they're revealed to have been hoaxed and that they believe the president really said that the neo-Nazis were fine people.
	If they believe that, and then you show them the transcript that it's not true, they almost always go down what I call the hoax funnel.
	They start with this big claim.
	The president said neo-Nazis are fine people, and you show them the transcript, they go, okay, it says exactly the opposite.
	But he said, and they always revert to, What were these other people, these fine people, why were they marching with Nazis?
	Huh? Huh? Can't be a fine person if you're marching with a Nazi.
	And so in my blog post I talk about how that's actually a hallucination.
	There's no claim and there's no reporting.
	That all the people there were marching.
	In fact, it was sort of a chaos.
	There were some marchers and then there were all kinds of other people doing all kinds of other things in street clothes.
	Who knows what those people were thinking or why they were there?
	Nobody did a survey.
	Nobody talked to them all.
	Nobody knows. So worst case scenario, the president made an assumption, but he also detailed this assumption.
	He said, I believe there were people there about the statue.
	So he said that clearly, in the same context as he was talking about the fine people on both sides.
	So it's obvious that he meant both sides of the statue controversy.
	Anyway, my observation is that people start with a big hoax, and you can debunk each of the lesser hoaxes that they retreat to down the funnel, until you get to the end of the funnel, and it usually turns into questions.
	If you can turn somebody from a statement of fact, the president said, neo-Nazis are fine people.
	That's a statement. It's not true.
	You debunk it, they go down to another statement.
	Well, those funny people were marching with Nazis, but that's not true.
	There's no evidence, no suggestion, no reporting, and all the reporting says that people were not marching with Nazis.
	There were just lots of people there.
	So that's not true.
	Once you've debunked that, you end up, every time, and you could do this at home, the person who's having their worldview annihilated will eventually end up with questions.
	The question form means they've already given up on the statement.
	So they've already accepted that the president did not say neo-Nazis are fine people.
	The transcript says that clearly.
	He did not say that. And they end up with, so why would these people who are fine people attend an event obviously organized by neo-Nazis and racists?
	And as I write in my blog post, in order to ask that question, you would have to know nothing about reality or human beings.
	So the question is just frickin' dumb.
	Because if you take 100 human beings, and 100 Americans I like to use as my example, you take any 100 Americans, and even if they go to the same place for the same event, Are they going to have just two different opinions?
	If you take 100 people and put them someplace that has two sides, you know, pro-statue, anti-statue, are they only going to have two opinions?
	Just two opinions?
	Pro-statue, anti-statue?
	No. If you've been alive in this world for more than 10 frickin' minutes and you've interacted with humans, you know that the number of opinions at Charlottesville was probably closer to 1,000.
	I'm exaggerating.
	But there were probably every flavor of opinion there.
	There were people who were complete racists, but don't you know there were some people who were not racist who would never date somebody of a specific other ethnicity?
	Well, sort of racist.
	But are those the same?
	Well, you could argue they're the same or different.
	But my point is, there was probably every opinion that you could possibly imagine If there are enough people, you're going to have every freaking opinion.
	And I would say that's one thing that you could bet on and win every time.
	Now, was this the one time that hundreds of people showed up in the same physical geography?
	Is this the one time in the history of the world that they only brought two opinions with them?
	Pro-racism?
	Anti-racism?
	No, not. There's no chance of that.
	So the idea that people came for the same reason, or the same understanding, or even that they looked at the same flyer and had the same interpretation of what was going on, some people looked at it and said, oh, it's organized by racists.
	I guess I'm a racist, so I'll go.
	I'm sure people said that.
	Don't you think that other people, guaranteed, because there are a lot of people we're talking about, and of all the hundreds of thousands of people who saw the flyer on social media, don't you think there were any who said, oh, it's a thing about Unite the Right, it's about statues, it looks like some Nazis will be there, but why do I care?
	There are going to be a lot of people there.
	You know there are going to be people on both sides.
	You know there's going to be people with every opinion.
	But this flyer is telling me that definitely some of them are Nazis.
	I don't think it's a Nazi event.
	I just think the racists are showing up because why wouldn't they?
	This is right in their sweet spot, the statue of controversy.
	So, could you show any flyer to 100 people and have them all come down on the same opinion, given that the flyer was not, it didn't say, hey, we're racist.
	It just listed speakers and had images and some statues.
	Do you think you could get 100 people to look at that flyer and have the same opinion?
	No. Not in any world that you've ever lived in.
	Can you get 100 people to have the same opinion about anything?
	So the president's assumption that could have been right or wrong, and it doesn't matter, because he stated his assumption.
	His assumption was that there were people there just about the statue.
	And then he talked about, you know, his belief based on the assumption.
	The worst case scenario is Is that the president assumed there were multiple opinions, and it's the first time in human history that's ever not been true.
	That's the worst thing that you could say about this, is that the president made the most common assumption you could make that there were a lot of different opinions there, and it was the one time in human history it wasn't true.
	And there's no reporting of whether it was true.
	We can't know what everybody was thinking.
	So, anyway, I put together these thoughts debunking every part of the hoax funnel so that you can use the same structure to drive people down the funnel.
	The fun is watching people go down the funnel so consistently because the direction they take always ends up with, and then I think Chris Cuomo will end up with the final weakest question, which was, oh, why did the people who showed up not leave immediately?
	If there were any fine people who showed up, once they saw what was happening, why didn't they leave immediately?
	Now, that's a question, not a statement.
	And it's a question based on ignorance.
	And it's a question based on lack of imagination.
	The fact that Chris Cuomo doesn't know any possible reasons why that could be true doesn't tell you anything.
	It tells you that Chris Cuomo is ignorant.
	And I don't mean that as an insult.
	I mean ignorant in the sense that we're all ignorant about something.
	You know, that everybody has something they don't know.
	I mean, that's just normal texture in the world.
	So I'm not calling Chris Cuomo dumb.
	I'm saying that his question is a legitimate question, meaning he doesn't know the answer.
	So the fact that he doesn't know the answer to a question doesn't tell you anything about what happened.
	It just tells you Chris Cuomo didn't know the answer to the question.
	Can we imagine...
	Any way to explain Chris Cuomo's question?
	Why would fine people show up and not immediately leave?
	How about this answer?
	Chris Cuomo, how do you know they didn't immediately leave?
	How do you know they didn't show up, see what was happening, and turn and leave?
	That's not in evidence.
	We have no idea how long people stayed.
	I've also suggested that if I were to find people and I showed up there, and once I was there, I realized that there was going to be a fight between Antifa, who I hate, with a passion, because they're literally masked, armed people who would like to hurt me personally.
	If I saw that they were about to get in a fight with neo-Nazis, who I hate with a passion, As much as I hate Antifa, I'm making a moral equivalence.
	Yes, I am. I'm making a moral equivalence.
	They're both completely bad.
	If you're saying, if anybody's saying one of them is a little worse than the other, well, I don't think you're, you know, you should not show your face in society.
	If you're gonna, if you're gonna find, if you're gonna make like a fine differentiation between the masked and armed Antifa thugs who want to overthrow the government and beat me to death, if you say, well, they're not so bad.
	I mean, that's not so bad.
	You know, they're at least they're against racism.
	I mean, they got that going for them.
	So they're not completely bad.
	They want to beat you to death with clubs.
	But, you know, they have these good parts, too.
	If you're saying that, don't talk in public.
	Seriously. You're just embarrassing yourself if you're defending one of those sides as being a little more moral than the other.
	Anyway, if I showed up there as a fine person and I saw that these two groups that I hate the most were going to fight each other with sticks and beat each other, you couldn't get me to leave.
	Are you kidding me?
	Are you kidding me?
	You think I would leave that show?
	Now, if I felt physically in danger, I would, of course.
	But apparently the police were protecting the people who weren't fighting and letting the people fight who wanted to fight.
	And there weren't guns.
	They were just beating each other with sticks.
	So you could kind of watch the show.
	Would I have left that?
	No freaking way.
	I don't hate anybody more than I hate Antifa and neo-Nazis.
	To me, they're tens and tens.
	The most hated, most worthy of condemnation of any group.
	If you can show me a picture of them beating each other with clubs, I'm all in on that.
	I want to see that. All right.
	So, anyway, if you read the blog post and if you would be nice enough to tweet that around, it's pinned to the top of my Twitter feed so you can find it easily.
	All right. Now, Mike Sanovich had an interesting tweet in which he was talking about How the stress in the world is worse than ever, at the same time that the world is better than ever.
	The stress that people are feeling about the world is the worst.
	At the same time, the world has never been better.
	I mean, not even close. We are at levels humanity has never, never seen.
	This is the best the world has ever been, by a pretty good measure, right?
	And he pointed out that, he was nice enough to point out that I had predicted that we were entering, now I called it the golden age, when all of the real problems were solved or on the way to being solved.
	The real problems being, you know, poverty, war, crime, you know, the real problems.
	And that they would be replaced by psychological problems.
	In other words, the way we were thinking about our world was getting worse At the same time, the world itself was getting way better.
	And so we're seeing that start to develop.
	So Mike was nice enough to call that out as a prediction that looks like it's heading toward fruition.
	Now, apparently Trump is considering designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group.
	Now, the pushback to that is that the Muslim Brotherhood is not just one organization that's doing some bad stuff.
	There are people in the Muslim Brotherhood who are terrorists.
	That seems to be just a fact nobody's questioning, except maybe the Muslim Brotherhood doesn't call themselves terrorists.
	But, as I understand it, it's sort of an umbrella term, and there are lots of people who say they are Muslim Brotherhood, and especially in some countries, where it just doesn't mean that.
	So there are people in other countries who are just innocent Muslim Brotherhood people who abhor violence, they're against violence, they're against terrorism, but they still like being whatever, you know, that label, they like to be part of the Muslim Brotherhood for whatever the other benefits the organization presents.
	And so the idea was that it would be bad to designate the organization As a terrorist group, because it would have a bad effect on these people who really are on our side, you know, in the sense that they're peaceful and they don't want terrorism.
	So they're marginally on our side, same interests.
	To which I say...
	That's their problem. You can't tell me that if a nice person...
	I mean, the Democrats have just finished telling us that if somebody who thinks they're a nice person marches with neo-Nazis, well, they're sort of neo-Nazis.
	And I agree with that, which is why that wasn't relevant in Charlottesville, because nobody is making the case that they were actually marching with the neo-Nazis, the people who were fine people.
	But I think it must be said that if you identify yourself as a member of a group with known terrorists, I don't think it matters that you personally are not in favor of terrorism.
	Does it? Because you can just change your membership.
	You can just say, oh, shoot, now that you've designated them a terrorist group, I denounce my membership.
	I'll join another group.
	I don't think we should see that as our problem.
	I think that we should very much encourage the good people who are nonviolent to maybe disavow the group that is.
	That's not asking a lot.
	So without knowing the details of this, it would be dangerous to have a strong opinion on this because I don't think any of us know all the nuance of the situation.
	But if the only problem Is that there are a bunch of people that we really genuinely like and they're basically on our side, but they call themselves Muslim Brotherhood for non-violent reasons.
	I think that's just something they need to work out.
	I don't think for a second that should influence what we do.
	Somebody else's decision to join A despicable group should not be determining our foreign national interests at all.
	Now, I know I'm oversimplifying, but just on that one point, I have a pretty strong opinion.
	But there may still be good reasons not to do it.
	I'm sure that'll get worked out in the conversations.
	All right. Oh.
	So, I have a challenge question.
	And I'm going to ask this question as if I know the answer, but I really don't.
	Because there might actually be an answer to this question that I can't imagine.
	So I'm going to open it up to the public and see if you can come up with an answer.
	President Trump has been blamed for, or credited with, depending on how you want to say it, with 10,000 lies.
	10,000 lies.
	Now, I'm assuming that since he started office.
	Now, I'm assuming that lie in this context is anything that doesn't pass the fact checking.
	And I'm assuming that 10,000 means repeating the same thing that they don't think is true more than once.
	So I think that it's not 10,000 individual lies, I assume.
	I assume, right? Check me on that.
	I think it's 10,000 things he said that they say aren't true, but that would include a lot of repeats of the same thing that they say is not true.
	Now, on the other side, there are two giant lies that the press has been telling.
	One is the fine people lie that they continue to tell, and one is the Russia collusion lie, which they continue to sell indirectly, as they are today.
	If you do a search on fine people, you get a million hits.
	Almost every one of those hits is a lie about the president, because they would tell the story the wrong way, almost all of them.
	And if you do a search on Russian collusion, you get 1.4 million hits on Google.
	I'm guessing at least a million of them are blaming the president for being a Russian spy.
	Or a Russian puppet or something.
	So if you took those two lies, the fine people lie, and you add it together with the Russian collusion lie, and that's just two things.
	Imagine all the lies told about this president.
	That's just two of them. And you have two million lies.
	Two million. But here's what I'd like to suggest.
	I want you to see if I'm wrong on this, so fact check me on this.
	It seems to me that the 10,000 lies that the president has told are almost entirely what I would call sales lies.
	In other words, they're in the service of selling something.
	And for the most part, what he's selling is make America great again.
	So if the thing he's lying about gets you to a better economy, do you feel bad about that?
	If the thing he's lying about reduces ISIS recruiting, Is that bad?
	So let me give you the specific examples.
	If the president says the economy is doing better, or that his administration has done more things than he's really done, or that the cutting of the regulation is more important to the economy than he says, or that his contribution to the stock price going up is far more than actually the evidence suggests, what is the outcome of all of those lies about the economy?
	Well, the outcome is that the economy improves.
	That is the point of those lies.
	The point of saying everything is great is to make people think, our economy is great, so I guess I should invest.
	And when they invest, it makes the economy great.
	When he says, I mean, we're hiring like crazy and the employment's up and everything's good.
	These are good lies.
	These are salesperson lies.
	Because the salesperson might lie to you, but you still could end up buying the thing that you wanted.
	So there are lots of lies.
	That are hyperbole, they're exaggeration, they're overstating, but they're for a very clear, positive purpose.
	Now, of course it helps them get elected, it helps them be president, etc.
	And I'm not minimizing the fact that there's self-interest involved.
	But the lies are very, very positive.
	They're so positive that you could argue that the president's lies about the economy are the best thing that have ever happened to the country.
	Think about that. The president's lies about how good the economy is are literally making the economy better.
	That's not an exaggeration.
	That is a fact I would die on.
	You could put a bullet to my head and say, Scott, say with confidence that the president's lies about the economy are actually good for the economy.
	And I would say, I'll say it right now.
	The president's lies Are good for the economy.
	Okay. I would put a bullet in my mouth and tell you that there's no frickin' question that his lies help the economy.
	Let's take another topic.
	ISIS. So the president said, you know, ISIS is defeated, blah, blah.
	Was that an over-claim?
	Absolutely. It was definitely more than what was true.
	It was hyperbole. It was maybe doesn't pass the fact-checking.
	But if you're ISIS and you're watching the news or you're thinking of becoming ISIS, do you want to join the group that is being decimated?
	More than decimated.
	Decimated technically means 10% worse.
	So ISIS is more like 95% worse now and heading in the wrong direction.
	When the president lies about how well ISIS is doing, That's bad for ISIS, because they can't recruit if the news is saying ISIS is losing everywhere.
	It's a lie, but it's the best frickin' lie anybody ever told.
	I want more of those lies.
	Let's give us more of those.
	Those are good lies.
	Those are smart lies.
	Those are leader lies.
	Now, compare those lies, and again, I'm not saying those are the only things that there are lies about, but compare them to just the two lies coming from the press, the fine person lie and the Russian collusion.
	What have those two things done to the To the moral fabric of this country.
	So speaking to Joe Biden's campaign theme about the moral center of the country, what did the fine person lie due to the moral fabric of this country?
	It frickin' ripped its gizzards out.
	It's the worst political lie except for Russia collusion.
	Those two things are the worst political lies Maybe of all time.
	And because you look at the racial divide in this country, so much of it springs from the fine people lie.
	Now, some of you are going to say, no, you could throw that one away.
	And the president has done so many other things that sound racist that that's just one of them.
	So, Scott, you're overstating the importance of that one.
	And I would state that that one lie is the one where they're sure that the president was a racist, and all the other ones are ones that even the people who think he's a racist can sort of see that it might be something taken out of context.
	So that the shithole countries think, even if you're sure the president's a racist, For other reasons.
	You hear that shithole thing, and I think even if you don't say it out loud, you're thinking to yourself, okay, he kind of was talking about the countries.
	I sort of get that.
	It's not a clean one.
	But because the Charlottesville one I'm so sure is true, and that one he really showed that he's in favor of neo-Nazis, that makes me think the shithole comment is true.
	Take another one. The Mexicans are animals.
	Fake news. Well, of course, the president was actually talking about MS-13.
	If you're someone who thinks the president is racist, and you hear that story, you say, okay, call them animals, but it's pretty clear he was talking about MS-13.
	All right, that's a gray area.
	It feels racist to me, though, not because of the situation, because that's obviously he was talking about MS-13, but because of Charlottesville.
	Since I know Charlottesville really happened, all these other things seem truer than the facts would make them seem.
	So the point is that Charlottesville is the alpha lie for all of the other lies.
	And the reason I'm taking it out is because it's the third leg of the TDS stool.
	So the TDS stool, the thing that supports people's insanity about the president, are three legs.
	Russia collusion, Fine people hoax and racism, etc.
	And the thought that he's literally crazy.
	He's got a mental problem. As time goes by and the results in this country continue to be stellar...
	The he's crazy, mentally incompetent one is starting to fade on its own.
	Have you noticed you don't hear that as much?
	Have you noticed that the headlines are not full of the president is crazy and impulsive and all that?
	That just went away.
	That's one of the legs of the stool.
	Russia collusion went away.
	The fine people hoax is this last little brittle leg that is also going away because it's not true.
	And I think my blog post should kick that leg out because it will give you a link.
	And by the way, you should save it.
	You should save my blog post link.
	And you should turn it into a bit.ly and you should put it on a note file so you always know where it is.
	And then forever on social media, when somebody brings up that lie, send them a link to my blog post and it will take them all the way down the hoax funnel down to the question and get rid of that leg.
	So I would say, if you were going to compare the destructive power of lies, the Russia collusion and the fine people lie were destructive lies.
	And they got two million hits.
	That is the biggest lying.
	I don't know if we've ever seen bigger lies.
	Maybe World War II or something, there were bigger lies.
	But it feels like the most powerful super lie The President has told 10,000 salesperson lies.
	And the result is a better economy.
	Less recruiting for ISIS. And what happened when they said, is there a rise in white supremacy?
	And the president downplayed it.
	And they fact-checked him and said, oh, but there are like two dozen people killed this way.
	But there are two dozen plus three people killed this way.
	In a context where more people die in swimming pools and on bicycles than are killed by white supremacists.
	I mean, literally. It's not even close.
	There are far more people who drown in the backyard swimming pool than are ever killed by terrorists in this country.
	So, the President downplayed it, partly because he's the one being blamed for the rise in white supremacy.
	If somebody is blaming you for something, are you going to say there's a lot of it?
	If somebody said, hey, Scott, you're to blame for pollution, do you think there's a lot of pollution?
	I might be tempted to say there's not too much of it.
	Because I don't want to take the blame.
	Because I know I'm going to get the blame.
	So of course I'm going to minimize it.
	Anyway, so the President's lies, if you want to call them that, are seemingly all toward a greater good.
	The lies against the President are not for a greater good.
	The fine person hoax It had no good intentions.
	It was just to change who was in power.
	Same with the Russia collusion stuff.
	All right. Did I cover all of my topics?
	Is there anything I didn't talk about yet?
	So I watched a clip of Don Lemon talking to, I forget who, but it was some Trump supporter who was just annihilating him until the point where Don Lemon had to just shout over him until the guy couldn't talk.
	And that was funny.
	Oh, nuclear.
	Let's talk nuclear. So, I hope you enjoyed my interview with Michael Schellenberger yesterday, a world expert advisor on the subject of nuclear energy.
	And you saw a little bit of a disagreement I'm not sure.
	That might be too strong of a word.
	But there was a different view, let's say, on older nuclear technology versus Generation 4.
	But I wanted to put that in context now.
	So there are two points of view.
	Roughly. So Schellenberger is saying that Generation 3 nuclear, which is the type France has and not the type the United States has, I don't think.
	We might have a few. I think we have mostly Generation 1, which were the relatively more dangerous designs.
	France has Generation 3, and I'll be looking for some fact checking on this because I'm out of my depth here.
	Has Generation 3, very successful, and as far as I know, zero nuclear accidents.
	Somebody, or at least of any consequence.
	So fact check me on that.
	I don't believe there's ever been a Generation 3 nuclear accident.
	Can somebody fact check me on that?
	I forget what Fukushima was.
	But certainly Chernobyl was a different thing.
	Three Mile Island, none of those were Generation three.
	So, Michael Schellenberger is saying, quite reasonably, why would you mess around with these new generation four stuff that would take a lot of work and testing and there's a lot of risk involved on the unknown.
	Versus Generation 3, where we have such a long history and no problems, and we've refined it to the point where we've taken out all of the opportunity for problems.
	Why wouldn't you go with that and worry less about Generation 3 because we already have a solution?
	And my take on that was, you know, I certainly get that if you're going to start today, you have to start with Generation 3 because Generation 4 is not quite there.
	So that part we agree on.
	But what I disagree on is that the potential for Generation 4 isn't better than Gen 3.
	And the reason I say that is, some of you saw an interview I did with the person I call the smartest person in the world, Naval Ravikant.
	He was the founder of AngelList and generally considered one of the smartest people in the world and certainly specifically smart in the world of startups and entrepreneurial stuff.
	That's really his greatest area of at least what the public thinks of his expertise.
	His brain is pretty big, but we would recognize him as maybe one of the smartest people in the world Now, when he talks about nuclear, he says...
	Talking about it as startups, the way you would talk about it as startups is that nuclear, you can't iterate designs because if something goes wrong and there's this long approval process and blah, blah, blah, it's hard to quickly test things the way every other technology is developed.
	So other things can be tested quickly and then you can get to a better point because even if things go wrong, it doesn't matter if your smartphone doesn't work, it's not like a nuclear...
	Meltdown. Got something in my eye here.
	Now, the government has funded, and there's at least one test site in the world where they're going to rapidly test Generation 4 designs.
	And there are a dozen or so startups in the Generation 4 world.
	And Bill Gates is a major investor in one of those.
	So I say, why don't you do both as hard as you can?
	Why not build the Generation 3 power plants that we know how to do right now and still keep iterating the heck out of Generation 4?
	Because someday, someday, they might be better.
	And it's hard for me to imagine that all of the geniuses, and they would have to be geniuses, literally geniuses, working on all these nuclear startups, it's hard for me to imagine that they don't know what Michael Schellenberger knows.
	That Generation 3 has been refined to the point where it's the safe, smart way to go.
	How could all of those startups not know that?
	Now, I'm probably overstating it, so I don't want to misrepresent Michael's point of view, but I think his point of view has more to do with where you put your emphasis.
	I don't think he's saying that there's no way we would ever get to a better design through Generation 4.
	I think he just thinks that's the bad play, statistically and timing-wise, which I wouldn't disagree with, because I don't have the expertise to disagree with that.
	But I want to make a case For doing both hard.
	Because we don't have a money problem.
	In other words, there is funding for these startups, Bill Gates, etc.
	So it wouldn't make sense not to push them as hard as we can within a safe zone.
	At the same time, we're doing Generation 3 if we need to build stuff right away, and we do.
	And then Michael also had a little, I'd say, a more negative...
	Opinion about green technology's potential and made a compelling case that the people who are claiming the economics are good are, let's say they're leaving things out.
	Let's say that they're being as kind as possible, that the people who say the all-green solution is ready now and we can just roll this stuff out and we're all good to go, that those people are not quite considering all of the variables, let's say. That's the kindest thing I can say.
	And I think he's probably right on that.
	Like Generation 4, I will take the Naval point of view, which is, I don't think you can really know where green technology, mostly solar and wind, I don't think you can know what their upper limit is.
	I think if it's like every other thing in the world, people will discover new improvements and ways to optimize that we didn't know.
	Let's take just the simplest example.
	One of the things people say about solar is that it takes up too much physical space.
	Don't you think somebody is going to invent a way to make it more vertical and then physical space is not important?
	What happens when robots Can build solar facilities.
	And you just say, okay, robots, go out there and we'll check back in a month and we want a whole new solar facility built in the desert.
	Well, what does that do to the cost structure?
	When you can just point the robots in a direction and the next thing you know, there's a solar facility.
	And maybe it doesn't even take much room.
	Maybe it's vertical. I think I tweeted around an article in which there's one plan For turning air conditionings and skyscrapers.
	Yeah, somebody's talking about this already.
	The solar skyscraper.
	Somebody has a plan.
	I don't think it's quite as practical as they're thinking, but they think maybe they can get there.
	In which an office building would have lots of air conditioning facilities, and those air conditioners create heat.
	So if you're cooling something, you're necessarily making something else hotter because you're just moving the heat.
	You're not taking heat away.
	You're just changing where it is.
	So something's getting hotter in order for an air conditioning to do what it is.
	And the idea is that heat could maybe be used to create fuel And of the CO2 in the air.
	In other words, you convert these air conditioners to do two things.
	One is to cool the building, but the other is to use the heat that they generate in the process as part of the solution for dragging CO2 out of the air and converting it chemically into a fuel that could be used where you can't use green energy.
	So that's usually a ship or an aircraft.
	They don't run It's not likely that they'll run on electric energy anytime soon.
	So you create fuel into the CO2. So then you put solar panels all over your building.
	So if you imagine a building that's got solar panels all the way up, and the air conditioning for each building is optimized to pull a little CO2 out of the air.
	And to convert it to fuel that replaces the need for carbon in airplanes and boats.
	Now, can they ever build that?
	If I said to you, in 40 years, will we be able to do what I just described?
	Build a skyscraper that is energy neutral and actually drags CO2 out of the air Doesn't require any electricity beyond what is generating on its own.
	Oh, you're watching the bar?
	Dammit, I need to go watch that too.
	Anyway, so the point is, nobody can really tell you where solar and green energy are going to be in 40 years.
	Anybody who says they can, I don't trust them.
	Let me just toss this out.
	Right now, the biggest problem with solar is that you can't store it, right?
	We can't figure out how to get batteries.
	But imagine, if you will, that we solve instead the transmission problem.
	Suppose instead of making batteries, we figure out how to send electricity over long distances without losing the energy.
	And right now, I think you could do that with maybe superconductivity or something.
	But a breakthrough in that would allow you to network together all of the skyscrapers with their solar all over the world.
	So even if the sun were not shining where you are, you could be networked by superconductive cables to another part of the world where the sun is shining just great.
	So if you had the entire world networked with superconductivity, do you need batteries?
	That's the question. Would you need batteries if it was dark where you are, but you're networked to the other side of the world where there's plenty of sun and there's plenty of solar, and it's just sending you the electricity from the other side of the world?
	Now, you would have to have superconductivity and underwater cables and all that, and those are things we haven't solved.
	But if you can tell me, and I'm not suggesting that that exact scenario will happen.
	I'm just trying to stimulate your imagination so you can say to yourself, okay, we really don't know what it looks like in 40 years.
	There's just no way to predict that.
	So I say go hard at everything, and I'm going to go watch Bill Barr, and I will talk to you later.

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