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May 11, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:05:04
Episode 526 Scott Adams: Biden, Buttigieg, Bill Maher, Your Favorite President
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum hey Barry come on in here Good to see you. I see you've already got your beverage.
Dan, the rest of you, come on in.
Still plenty of chairs.
Grab a seat. Make sure you have a fresh cup of whatever, because it's almost time for the simultaneous sip.
I'm Scott Adams, and welcome.
Alright, grab your cup, your mug, your flask, your stein, your tankard, your chalice.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Oh yeah, that's good.
I want to start with a book recommendation.
Are you ready? I have only read this much of this book, but already I can recommend it unambiguously.
It's called Invisible Influences by Jonah Berger.
The hidden forces that shape behavior.
So if you are a fan of my persuasion reading list, this would be one to add to your list.
It's in the, let's say, genre of influence by Cialdini.
In fact, Cialdini is one of the people who like it.
Or he has a blurb about it on the back.
It's really, really interesting.
But here's the thing I wanted to talk about.
So we've got this discussion about the social media and how they're influencing elections, etc.
What would happen if Facebook ran exactly as many ads for Republicans as they ran for Democrats?
Let's make a specific case.
Let's say it's a presidential election.
And Facebook ran exactly as many ads for one as the other.
And let's say also that the ads, just hypothetically, this is not possible, but say also that the ads were exactly as well done.
That's not possible.
But imagine a world where the Democrat ads are the same number and the same persuasive quality.
Could Facebook game the system To make one of them have an advantage if they didn't change either of those variables.
They're the same number.
Let's say that they're presented to the same right number of people.
So let's say three things are the same.
It's presented to the right people.
It's presented at the right time.
They're equally good.
And there are just as many of them.
Could they still game the system?
If all of those variables were equal?
And the answer is, yeah, they could.
Even if you imagine that they've both targeted the correct demographics.
And here's how they would do it.
I'll just give you one suggestion.
What you were primed with before you see an ad will have a huge influence on how you process it.
So, Facebook could, and I'm not saying that they will, but they could very easily decide that the Democrat ads will follow, let's say, a story about something positive.
They could say, and I'm not saying they will, but they could say that the Republican ads will follow something negative, or something that will be designed to prime them for a negative response to whatever the ad is.
So, The social media companies could show you their stats and they say, look, it could not be more fair than this.
These are our actual stats.
We ran just as many.
We ran them when we said we'd run them, went to the right people.
There's just no way to say that that's unfair.
But we do now have the technology and it's very well understood.
To prime people before they see an ad with other content.
And it would completely change the result.
Remember, I'm not talking about a 1% difference.
I'm talking about something more along the lines of a 30% difference.
So the book is called Invisible Influence.
By Jonah Berger.
Now, similar content to what I'm talking about, you'd see in Robert Cialdini's books, Influence and his follow-up book, Pre-Suasion, and it will teach you that stuff.
So here's the thing.
One of the things this book does really well is it annihilates your assumptions about free will.
And one of the experiments really...
Let me see if I can give you an example.
So one of the examples is they have somebody come in as part of an experiment and they say, here's a line and the line is this long.
Now compare it to three other lines and tell us which one is the same length as the original line.
So let's say this is a line of a certain length.
And then there will be three lines.
One is way too short One is way too big, and the other one is obviously the right size.
Now, if you bring in people one at a time and say, match the lines, they'll get it right almost every time.
They'll say, this one is obviously, it's only close to one of these lines.
But, if you have people come in and prime the room...
People who are working for the people doing the study, they pretend to be other people in the same study, and they go first.
And they say, oh no, it's this other line.
You can instantly, instantly change the opinion of the person sitting there so that they don't even see the lines the same length.
Think about that.
They're looking at it.
And just because a few other people said that the line that's this big, and I'm talking about big differences, not that big.
Let's say this is the line, and the one that the Confederate is saying is the same length is only this big.
I mean, really big difference.
And you can actually convince the other people in the room instantly that they're seeing this line as this big.
Their actual visual processing is completely altered.
In ten seconds.
Now, once you realize that, you understand that there's nothing like people making decisions on politics.
There's nothing happening in the world about people looking for the facts and reasoning through it and coming up to opinions.
It just doesn't happen.
There's other research that shows that people's Political leanings, in terms of conservative or liberal, are largely DNA. You're actually born with a propensity to vote one way or the other, and that's pretty well established.
So when you put down, when you combine the fact that you are born with a DNA that will make you either More liberal or more conservative.
And then on top of that, you add the types of things in this book where you can influence people just dramatically by context and the way things are presented.
You really don't have anything like...
There's nothing happening that's a republic or democracy.
There's nothing like that happening.
You're seeing lots of different forces that are Bouncing against each other and then something happens.
But it's mostly a persuasion battle at this point because the power that, let's say, Russia has to influence the elections this much, the power that even...
The power that anybody has to influence an election is small.
It's all of these small persuasion things.
It's your DNA. It's who you'd like to have coffee with.
It's a lot of stuff that certainly has nothing to do with facts and critical thinking.
To it, let me give you A little rundown.
I often say that the humans don't have a way to know if their filter on the world is accurate or not unless they make predictions and then they track them.
If you're not predicting and then tracking how right you are in your predictions, you don't know if your worldview is crazy or if you're pretty accurate.
So one of the things that I've been doing One of the things that I've been doing with my public predictions is I make sure you know what they are and why I'm making them so that the thing I call the persuasion filter can be evaluated against your own predictions and anybody else's.
Now, it's always an ongoing experiment and And we'll see if it works.
Now, so far, the persuasion filter, as I call it, has been scarily accurate from predicting Trump's rise to predicting how well things are going to go.
But here's the funny part.
If you had been the people in the other movie, the people who saw Trump as a big old crazy orange clown monster dictator who was going to break everything...
How did your predictions go so far?
So my predictions, just to remind you, most of you know, is that the president has actual persuasive skills, strategy skills, economic skills that other people don't have.
That he understands economics and people at a deeper level and can work on a deeper level with persuasion.
So I predicted that the economy would be great because the economy is a persuasion machine.
It's a psychology machine.
If people think it'll do well, they invest, and then it does well.
So it's all about the psychology of it, given that you don't have resource constraints, which we don't in any serious way.
So I predicted he would get elected, President Trump would get elected.
I predicted the economy would do well with his persuasion.
Bang on. What if you were the other side?
You predicted exactly the opposite.
He wouldn't get elected. And once he did, you predicted that his craziness would destroy the market.
Exactly the opposite. Now, I predicted that he would do well with foreign leaders and that being friendly with them at the same time he's negotiating hard would become not only successful, but probably the model forever.
The next president, after this president, is almost going to have to do the same thing, because it's really going to be obvious if that president treats one of the dictator leaders as a dog, and then gets a bad result because of it.
It's just going to be obvious it was the wrong play.
If you look at the trade deals and other deals that the President has cancelled, has any of that bitness?
I don't think so.
Are we worse off because of the Paris Accord?
No, we've actually lowered our emissions more than other countries.
Did we build concentration camps for LGBTQ people?
No. The president just negotiated with Gilead to create lots of AIDS drugs for people who can't afford it, which will probably go a long way toward eradicating the spread of AIDS in this country.
So he'll probably be the most successful president on AIDS. Did the president become a crazy racist doing crazy racist stuff?
Well, no.
And indeed, he was the president who got prison reform.
He's the president who just gave an award to Tiger Woods for no particular reason except that he golfs really well.
If you thought that the president was a big old racist, And you're watching his policies, and you're saying, okay, why does he keep bragging about African American and Hispanic employment being so good?
What kind of racist continues over and over again to brag about how well he's doing for that segment?
Doesn't make sense, does it?
Does it make sense that he would choose an African American athlete to give this award to?
Well, they're friends.
Apparently they've known each other for a long time.
But you wouldn't do that if you were trying to send a secret message, would you?
You wouldn't do a lot of things that he's doing if you were sending those secret messages.
So I'd say my anticipation has been correct.
The people who said, we see at Charlottesville that he must love these neo-Nazis who are marching against the And saying anti-Semitic things.
Well, why is it that Israel loves him?
Why are they naming a settlement after him?
None of that makes sense.
Why is he recognizing the Golan Heights as Israel?
Why is he moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem?
None of it makes sense in the other movie.
Because in the other movie, he was anti-Jewish.
How does anything we observe...
It makes sense in that movie.
None of it does. But 100% of it makes sense in my movie.
My movie was he never said what people said he said in Charlottesville.
That was obviously what I call the fine people hoax, which has now been confirmed as a hoax by pretty much all of the major networks and media companies.
They just don't like to rub it in, but they have acknowledged that he said the opposite now.
So how about the claim that he's crazy?
It's been two years.
Wouldn't you know...
Yeah, I did go to the buffet at the wind the day before yesterday.
Sorry, just somebody asked that question in the comments.
I predicted that the Russia collusion thing would be a big nothing.
I was right. How'd the other movie go?
The other movie didn't work out.
I predicted that he would be no more of a dictator than any normal president.
Sure enough, when the Supreme Court has a problem, he stops.
When Congress has a problem, well, he's going to have to get some more Republicans elected if he wants to get something done.
What about, he's also had a lot of success in the dropping of pharmaceuticals.
So apparently the rate of increase of pharmaceuticals has paused.
I don't think he's done well on healthcare in general, but there's still stuff happening there.
So maybe we'll see something.
So the basic point is, I think something like 100% of what my movie, and most of you are in the same movie, our movies, I think our movies predicted close to 100% of what we've observed over the last three years, right? Am I wrong?
That our movies, the ones that say that President Trump has actual skill, he's a different character, but he's bringing actual skill, has it not predicted pretty much everything we see?
Well, the other movie has failed on every measure.
Now, of course, people in the other movie will say none of that is true.
They'll say that the Mueller report did show that he was colluding, which of course it didn't.
They'll show that he is a dictator.
They'll say he is crazy.
They'll say the economy isn't doing that well.
So they're actually looking at the same set of facts and just interpreting them backwards.
But we're seeing some small changes.
Apparently Bill Maher on his show was interviewing one of the many, many Democrats running for president.
Doesn't matter which one. I can't remember his name.
So somebody was running for president.
And Bill Maher was actually pushing back at this candidate saying that the economy was bad.
So even Bill Maher Couldn't let his anti-Trump guest get away with something that was so insanely, you know, contrary to observation.
It's obvious that the economy is doing well.
And even Bill Maher couldn't let this guy be so far off in space that he could say that on his show.
So that's, you know, these are just the small, small changes.
Let's talk about a few other things that are fun.
So Rudy Giuliani...
At one point he said he was going to go to Ukraine and investigate something about Biden and Biden's son and some Ukrainian deal.
Blah, blah, blah. But then he cancelled it.
And he said he doesn't want to go there because there were too many, I don't know, anti-Trumpers or something.
And I thought, that was a really good move.
Giuliani gets an A-plus for this whole thing.
Because the thing that Giuliani wanted, obviously, is for the media to cover the connection between Biden and Ukraine.
He's just trying to make Biden-Ukraine questions.
I don't understand the Biden-Ukraine story.
Something about his son, Hunter, who's now passed, and some deal that maybe Biden was trying to influence that helped his son because of a prosecutor who got fired.
The details don't really matter.
And frankly, you know, I don't think that my guess is that Biden is in no more trouble for that than Trump is for anything about Russia.
It's just a bunch of connections that sound suspicious, is my guess, without knowing the details.
But Giuliani cleverly cancels the trip.
So he gets two hits.
He gets one hit for planning the trip, one hit in the news, and then he gets another press hit for canceling the trip.
But all he really wanted was for everybody to talk about this ambiguous, you know, connection of something that might have been there or something that might not have been there.
And we're talking about it. So A-plus for Giuliani for good PR. You know, good campaign trick, I guess.
Here's something interesting.
This is the most fun thing that's happening right now, election-wise.
So AOC slammed Biden for what she believes is him not being aggressive enough in whatever he's going to come up with in the details for climate change.
Now, I think Biden's people pushed back and said, wait, wait, wait, you haven't seen what we're going to do yet, so don't assume that it's a middle ground before you actually see it, which is fair.
But in the early comments, where we don't know exactly what Biden's going to come up with, but the sense of it is that he's going to try to sell something that's both sensible and middle ground, While still doing enough that the people on the far left don't have much room to criticize.
So he's trying to thread a needle that maybe doesn't exist.
So he's trying to find a channel on this that maybe logically doesn't exist, which is doing something that's reasonable and also will seem like enough.
I don't know that that exists.
We'll find out. Here's the interesting thing.
He mentions nuclear.
You ready for that? Joe Biden, when he talks about climate change, he mentions it just sort of, you know, just throws it in.
It's just sort of a throwaway.
You know, we'll do lots of things, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and Paris Accord, and, you know, solar, and we've got windmills, and nuclear.
Just sort of, just throws it in there.
Now, he doesn't say generation four.
He doesn't make distinctions. He doesn't say how much would be nuclear.
He doesn't make the point that nuclear is pretty much a requirement if you're going to be aggressive about it.
He doesn't say that at all.
But here's the thing you've got to watch out for.
If he's serious about nuclear, he does have the best plan.
So watch out.
Because I've been saying for a while that President Trump is leaving this gigantic opening that he could close very, very easily.
And it probably is that he's either...
President Trump has either not been advised to the point of understanding the nuclear solution, or he's waiting, or maybe he has some personal opinions about it.
I don't know. But it's obviously missing.
It's like just strikingly missing from the president's rhetoric is climate change.
Now the kill shot here, which the president has available to him, and I just have no idea why he hasn't used it yet, could be he's just waiting.
It could be more effective if he waits.
I think the kill shot is to say, you know, there's a big disagreement about whether climate change is as big a problem as people think.
But it doesn't make any difference to what we do.
Because what we do is we should improve all of our energy sources as aggressively as possible, because it would be the greatest idea in the world if climate change is a big problem, and it would also be the greatest thing in the world if it's not.
Because for all of the reasons of industrial development, Keeping pollution down, of getting good prices on nuclear, of having stable, reliable sources.
You can't really put all your eggs in one basket.
So you don't want to put them all in the green basket, or at least the traditional solar and wind green.
You're going to have to spread it around.
So if President Trump said, look, the rest of the country can argue all they want about what's true or not true about climate change, it makes no difference to what we actually do.
Because the only way you could really deal with climate change is to be aggressive in all of these technologies.
Nuclear being probably the one that will make the most difference.
But hey, maybe it turns out that solar has some development, some innovation that makes it far more practical than we think.
Maybe there's some battery thing that we don't see coming that would change the storage question.
So the president could so easily sell a story where if the United States doesn't go full strength at every one of these technological opportunities, We're just being dumb.
Just dumb.
Because this is an easy sale.
You know, if you believe climate change, do this.
If you don't believe climate change, do it just the same.
There's no difference. So, there's this gigantic, gaping, four-lane highway opening for the president to take the dominant issue on the left and annihilate it, probably in the space of two tweets.
Now you tell me why the president is not doing that.
I don't know. The only thing I can imagine, because it's just so glaringly obvious, the only thing I can imagine is he's not been briefed up to speed about the fact that the nuclear meltdowns and problems of the past were old technology.
And that the nuclear technology used in, let's say, France, for example, who gets most of their power from nuclear, is Generation 3, which I believe have never had a meltdown.
And Generation 4 is coming, which would make meltdowns almost physically...
I think physically impossible.
So you almost couldn't imagine anything going wrong because of the very design of them.
And they work well together.
So you might need some...
You might need Generation 3...
Where you just want to get going quickly and have a really big site.
You might need Generation 4 where they don't have as much infrastructure.
There's a different situation.
So it's probably going to be a blend.
So you don't even have to decide if you like Generation 3 or 4.
You don't need to decide.
Go hard on both.
It's the only rational path forward.
Anyway, so Biden has taken a clear, I would say, I think?
But the high ground was there.
It was just waiting for somebody to come in and say, yeah, I love all this green power, but you also have to have nuclear.
There's no question about it.
And here's why. If Biden makes that case and Trump doesn't, you're going to have to ask yourself if Trump's your guy, right?
Because that's a pretty obvious play to make.
And if he doesn't make it, you're going to have to ask yourself why.
I don't know why.
Let's talk about the president's new nickname for Buttigieg, Pete Buttigieg.
As you may know, Mayor Pete, as they call him, has a striking resemblance to Mad Magazine's mascot, Alfred E. Newman.
And I love the way the president introduced this nickname.
Instead of just tweeting about it, he said in an interview, listen to the way he states the sentence.
He says, Alfred E. Newman cannot become President of the United States.
He's very underrated for exact sentence structure.
He gets a lot of criticism because he doesn't speak in complete sentences quite often, but he speaks so effectively in his non-sentences that people know exactly what he means when he's talking to them.
It's very effective because it's simple and gets right to the heart of things.
But the way he put it as a statement of what can't happen Just makes this ordinary nickname.
It just takes it to another kind of level of fun.
It would have been weak for him to say, hey, have you noticed that Buttigieg looks like Alfred E. Newman?
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Hey, do you notice? He looks like Alfred E. Newman.
Ha ha ha! There were a million ways to make that not funny.
Think about it. There were just all kinds of ways to introduce this idea that just would lay there.
It would just lay there like not funny.
But because he puts it in this exact phrase, Alfred E. Newman cannot become President of the United States, it makes you think, it makes you wonder about the question.
It's like, well, could Alfred E. Newman, or somebody who looks like him, Become President of the United States.
Why couldn't they? They could.
So because his sentence makes you grapple with the question of whether someone who looks like Alfred E. Newman could become the President of the United States, he takes it out of the mere comparison and makes you think about it in the future and how you'd feel about it.
It's sort of twisted around in your head until it just sinks in and becomes a permanent part of your thinking.
So I hate to use the term earworm.
You know, you've heard that term in the earworm.
Something once you hear it, it just keeps repeating in your head.
But Alfred E. Newman cannot become president.
Now, to his credit, Buttigieg had a really good response in which he said he had to Google it because it must be a generational thing, meaning that he's too young to know about these old references, which was a clever reply, but it did make him look a little young.
So I think Trump still got the better part of that exchange.
Because he gave you an image you'll never get out of your head.
But I think the counter was competent, but not as good as the original ones.
Now, there's a company that's getting ready to print some 3D homes in Latin America.
So they're not very elaborate homes.
They're basically little rectangles that they 3D print.
And by 3D print, I mean there's a big mechanical arm that they move in place and it sprays concrete until it's 3D printed.
A little house, a very simple one.
They don't have many...
So it would be a simple house for poor people the way it is.
Now, Latin America is a perfect place to test this.
I personally think...
That the prototypes are deeply unimpressive and probably not something you'd want to live in, or anybody would want to live in.
But they might be better than nothing.
If your alternative was to sleep outside, Probably better than what you had.
If your alternative was, you know, a lean-to made out of, you know, discarded boards and cardboard, well, it's probably better.
So maybe they can work out the wrinkles there.
Yeah, it's better than a box.
So, So, one of the things that I've been talking about forever is that it won't be possible for us to tax our way to giving everybody all the services that they want.
Oh, let me do something I was going to write.
I was going to write something, but I want to run it by you.
And this is a...
I was going to write a blog post on how to frame things properly.
I'll give you some examples.
Most of our major topics that are unsolvable have a framing problem, meaning that we're thinking about them wrong, and therefore we can't get an answer because we're framing them wrong in the first place.
If you take for example the border with Mexico, if you frame it as a border with Mexico, it's hard to get it done because Americans like Mexicans.
We like them. Yeah, we understand that you need a border.
But it would be more productive to say, because it's more accurate, that it's a border wall between the United States and the cartels.
Because the cartels literally control the territory on the border, which is how they make so much money, by allowing and charging people to cross illegally.
So they're making a lot of money, so they control that part of the border.
So the first thing I'd say is, let's stop calling it a wall with Mexico.
Maybe the president can't say that because he's got to be a little more diplomatic with the actual government of Mexico.
But you and I can say it's a border wall with the cartel.
Because it's a border wall with the cartel.
That's literally what it is.
It's not territory that is controlled by Mexico.
But here's another framing.
Here's a framing I don't believe you've seen yet.
For immigration, so not talking about the walls per se, but just the framing of the contest.
We're talking about is it humanitarian, is it about drugs, is it about crime, etc.
Here's the better framing.
Who gets to decide who comes in?
Who gets to decide?
That's a high ground.
Who gets to decide?
Because, here's the framing.
If we have good border security whether or not walls are part of that is a separate conversation but if we have strong border security then the citizens of the United States get to decide what happens with our country.
If we have weak border security the kind we have then people who do not live in this country Get to decide what the United States is.
So you could just completely stop saying crime, completely stop saying humanitarian crisis, stop saying jobs and economics.
You can mention all those things.
Either their background, their context, they're important.
But when you're arguing it, just say, look, the question is who decides?
Just decide that. Because we're never going to have a system that everybody agrees with.
If you're trying to run a civilization and it's not possible to have a policy that even you can get even more than 50% of people to agree with, the best you can do is to develop a system that gives the right people the decision.
Even if the right people don't make the decision that maybe you would like, You need to get the right people making the decision, because that's the most stable situation.
And so the question on immigration is who gets to decide what the United States is and turns into?
Do Americans get to decide?
Because the only way we get to decide is with a strong border, and we don't have that.
Right now, Guatemala is deciding what the United States is.
It's actually their decision.
People in Guatemala are deciding who we are.
Is that okay? If you're okay with that, then you should be able to comfortably say that.
Say yes, I think the fate of the United States should be decided by people who don't live in the United States.
If that's your view, step up and say it.
All right. When we're talking about health care, It's impossible for the public to get involved because we don't quite understand the ins and outs of it.
So popular opinion can't really drive our politicians in one way or the other.
If you don't have that, then the lobbyists have the control.
So right now the lobbyists control the government because the people can't play.
We're completely taken out of the game because of complexity we don't understand.
So here's a better way to frame health care.
There are just two choices, but these two choices permeate everything.
All the parts of healthcare and healthcare insurance, which I'll consider two different things.
Here's the framing.
Things are either pro-competitive or not.
That's it. Just make that framing.
Any change or any current situation is either transparent and pro-competition or it's anti-competition.
And that's all you need to know.
And you can evaluate every single thing on those two things because the thing we know is that prices are too high and competition is the only thing that can make it come down.
Nobody's ever invented another way to take prices down.
If the government puts price controls on, everybody knows that's bad for the world.
That's a well understood phenomenon.
Nobody has an idea better than competition.
And I would believe...
The socialist-leaning people would agree with this.
So, right now, the most unproductive framing of healthcare is that the people on the right are saying it's socialism, it's socialism.
Totally unproductive.
It's a good way to make people hate whatever those ideas are, but it so doesn't describe what's happening that it's a complete waste of time.
It's a complete diversion to any good outcome.
Likewise, if the people on the left say it's a bunch of greedy rich people who don't want to help people who have less, that's not really productive either because that doesn't quite explain what's going on here.
So I would put it this way and say we should do everything that fits into the category of being pro-competition.
So the president recently, or the administration recently, I guess they instituted some law, I don't know the legal procedure they did it, but pharmaceutical companies will be required now to save their prices in commercials, even TV commercials.
Now this is clearly pro-competition because that gets the customer involved in seeing what prices are and that might have some indirect.
So I would say that we should stop talking about socialism versus whatever the Republicans might come up with.
That's the wrong frame.
The frame is look at each individual decision, of which there could be hundreds of them, and just ask one question.
Competitive or anti-competitive?
That's all. Single-payer insurance, is that competitive or anti-competitive?
What is it? Is that competitive or anti-competitive?
Well, that might not be as obvious as you think.
Because if there's single payer for healthcare, does that stop individual companies from trying to be the preferred vendor?
I don't think it does, does it?
I would think that even Bernie Sanders' plan still involves the market doing lots of competitive things to compete with each other to be the preferred vendor.
So I don't know if even Bernie Sanders' plan is anti-competitive in terms of what it would do to the individual companies.
I'd say that's an open question.
But anyway, if you think of it in that term and nothing else, just does this make more competition or less, you probably always get to the right hand.
Get close to it.
Let's take something else.
Gun control. The...
Well, let's not do gunshot.
Let's do abortion.
The framing of abortion so far has been, is this a life or is it not a life?
Completely unproductive framing.
Because it's really trying to get to the answer without dealing with the details.
People just saying, it's a life.
End of story. Let's not talk about anything else.
It's a life. Therefore, you keep it alive under all circumstances.
And the other people saying, it's not a life.
And if it's not a life, well, you've got lots of options.
That's the wrong framing.
You can never get to an answer.
Here's a better framing.
Who gets to decide?
Because whoever decides is going to make mistakes.
Whoever gets to decide about an abortion for a particular person in a particular situation, whoever it is, is going to make mistakes.
They might make mistakes in the direction of harming the mother.
They might make mistakes in the direction of harming a life of an unborn.
There is a 100% chance Of mistakes.
So if you have a situation where you can't eliminate mistakes, somebody's just gonna die, no matter which way it goes, and it's gonna be a lot of people.
Someone's gonna die.
The important thing is, who gets to decide?
What is the most credible decision-making process?
And here's the question.
Should it be the mother and the physician Who will make mistakes and will sometimes, guaranteed, make decisions that you would not have made.
If you want a process where no mistakes are made, you don't have that option.
You're going to have to make a choice and somebody's going to die because of that choice, guaranteed.
It's either going to be lots of unborn Or it's going to be mothers who are damaged in other ways because they can't happen to an abortion.
You know, if it's the life of the mother who's at risk.
So somebody's going to die.
So don't tell me what's the good policy.
Tell me who gets to decide.
Now this is the reason that I recuse myself from the abortion debate.
Because when I recuse myself as a man who doesn't really have anything to offer on the topic, It gives the women who are in the Who do want to have an opinion, it gives them a greater say.
So I take myself out voluntarily.
You don't have to. I wouldn't even ask you to.
So if there are men here who would like a strong say, if you'd like to vote on it, go ahead.
Nobody's telling you you couldn't or shouldn't.
My personal decision is to recuse myself.
It gives women slightly more of a control on that decision where I think it should be.
Even if women decide that it's all illegal or if women decide that it's not illegal, I think that the place to make the decision is with women primarily, but I wouldn't stop you if you're male from weighing in because it's a free country and you have every right to do that.
Somebody says it's a cop-out.
Is it a cop-out for a judge to recuse from a case where they have bias?
No. There are cases where the best process The best process is what you want to get.
It's not about me.
None of this is about me.
It's about the best process.
All right. So I was going to write a blog post on some of these framing choices, and I didn't know if that would be interesting to you, but I'll put that out there in just case.
All right. So somebody's saying, men matter.
Speak up. I will not talk you out of that.
That's a perfectly reasonable position to say that men matter and they should speak up.
Perfectly reasonable. I choose to recuse.
If anybody else does, that's their business.
Gun control.
The problem with gun control is that people have different risk profiles and they know it.
So there are people, let's say a celebrity or let's say a farmer who's in a remote place, there are certainly situations in which having a gun probably improves your odds of life.
And there are other situations that you can imagine where probably introducing more guns into that situation, an inner city for example, might make things worse.
So when people are allowed to vote for their own self-interest, so you really have just a difference of self-interest.
You've got people who know that a gun is probably going to make them safer.
They know how to use it.
They know their particular security situation.
You can't really resolve that because some people are going to want to pursue what's safe for them.
Other people are going to want to pursue what's safe for them, and they're different.
There is not one right, there is not one answer about guns that gives every group of people the same level of safety.
Every decision will change the balance of who's safe and who's not, in their own minds, if not in reality.
So until we understand that, we can't get anywhere.
Here's the other thing I would say.
Gun control has been proven to be effective unambiguously.
And I know people hate it when I say that, but there's one example that just proves it, in my opinion, proves it beyond a doubt.
And that's the fact that fully automatic firearms are banned.
And time after time after time when we see these mass shootings, they're semi-automatics.
Why would all of the mass shooters use semi-automatic rifles When the better weapon, by far, wouldn't it be close?
In terms of killing power, not even close.
A fully automatic rifle would have far more killing power.
Why don't they use that? And the answer is, they're hard to get.
You can get one.
But it's expensive. There's more paperwork.
You have more visibility.
More people are going to be flagged to look at you.
So the fact that fully automatic rifles are so far just not used, even by the most motivated mass killers, They use what's the easiest to get that can also kill a lot of people, and that's the ARs, the U15. So I'm not suggesting we should ban them necessarily.
That's not where I'm heading with this.
What I'm saying is we should stop saying that gun control is a bad idea or doesn't work when there's such an obvious example where it does work and has worked and probably saved tons of lives.
If you look at just the Las Vegas shooter, The Las Vegas shooter knew enough about guns that if there were such thing as a fully automatic he could easily get without flagging himself, I'm sure he would have had one.
He knew enough about guns to have the good kind of gun if he could get one.
So that's the first thing.
Somebody says, oh my god, you're so wrong.
Well, I'm taking it from the military people who know enough about automatic rifles to inform me that it's a gigantic difference.
For example, the fully automatics don't jam if you're using them like a machine gun.
Fully auto would waste lots of bullets.
Well, not if you're just shooting randomly into a crowd.
And the bump stock ban, I think, was probably useful because the bump stock didn't have much of entertainment or hunting value.
The bump stock didn't really have the normal kind of value that you get from normal gun activities.
It just was sort of a trivial thing.
But it might have been tempting for people to use that same technique.
So it takes away a temptation, a very small difference in what actually happens in the real world.
Now, I want to strongly support the notion that having a well-armed population does control the government.
The dumbest thing I hear people say about guns is that the military of the United States has the good weapons.
They've got the nukes and the drones and the tanks.
So what good would it be for citizens to even have ARs?
What good does it have to have small arms in the public when the government obviously has more weapons?
Well, here's the thing. The government can't turn against the people without everybody who's in the military losing their families.
So they're not going to do it.
Just think about it.
Imagine that any part of the military turned against citizens of the United States.
What's the first thing that the citizens of the United States would do?
They would find out who were these people in this military unit that just killed some citizens.
They would find out who they were.
They would track down their family.
And they would kill them.
It would probably happen within the week.
So the ability for a military unit within this country to turn on its own citizens, oh, they could definitely do it.
But their families would be killed in a week.
If they all want to lose all of their families and never be able to live in this country, it would create a country that nobody could live in.
What would be the point of turning against the citizens with your big weapons if you couldn't go outdoors without getting sniped to death?
The government wouldn't be able to walk outside.
So even if there were a dictator, as long as the rest of the government was supporting it, There would be enough guns to pick off all of their family members.
Everybody would be sitting in the neighborhood and they'd say, you know, I don't know how to get to the Secretary of Defense, but I know his cousin, so I think I'm going to take my handgun down and visit his cousin.
Maybe that'll convince the Secretary of Defense to look at this a little differently.
So, when people think that it's going to be the government's military against the people's little small arms, it's not going to be that.
It's not going to be that. The first thing people would do is hide all their weapons.
If the military turned against the public, step one, everybody hide their weapons.
That's step one. Step two, figure out who are all the family members of the people who seem to be in on this plot to work against the citizens.
That's step two. And you know we're going to find out.
There will be hackers who find out.
There will be You know, you imagine that the bad guys would wear masks, but there would be ways we'd find out.
We would easily find out all the loved ones of anybody who turned against the citizens, and they would be wiped out in a week.
So I don't think we can have...
A revolution in this country.
Likewise, the military wouldn't be able to guard all of the things that the citizens could work against.
I mean, the citizens could really mess up this country if it became a civil war.
Alright, so enough about that.
So the gun thing just can't be solved because the differences in our risk profiles.
That's exactly what Britain said.
You know, culture makes a big difference.
American culture is so strong on this gun issue that I just don't see the government confiscating guns.
I just don't see it.
All right. Good point, but didn't happen in Kent State with the National Guard.
Yeah, you know, Kent State was just a one-off.
I don't think people saw that as anything but a tragedy.
That didn't really look like a revolution against the people.
That would be a whole different deal.
Yes, it's a mental illness issue.
So I heard a statistic on Tucker Carl's show that...
The amount of people who have mental illness in teenagers is up by 50% in, I don't know, the last 10 years or 8 years or something.
And the number of teen suicides is up by 50%.
And I thought, oh my god.
It seemed like that was true.
I mean, anecdotally, it looks like the country is going crazy, but sure enough.
Has the role of medication been studied?
Yeah, if you're looking at what it is that's causing people to be so sad and suicidal, it's probably a bunch of things.
I don't think it's one thing. If I had to...
If I had to guess what are the major factors behind all the increase in depression and stuff, it's probably a combination of the following things.
Social media for sure.
And the next thing would be the amount of stimulation.
So people are way overstimulated and our brains are just getting fried and we can't deal with ordinary problems because all the problems of the world Are being blasted at us all the time.
If you did not have technology, as when I was a kid, your entire world was you sitting there and people that you could physically get in contact sometime during the day.
So my world was so tiny that my biggest problem was it was boring.
It was very boring.
But I wasn't stressed because there was nothing to stress me.
I didn't have enough stimulation.
I was so under-stimulated that I was always looking for more stimulation.
I guess people are always looking for more stimulation, but it was hard to find back then.
So certainly it's something about the stimulation, something about looking at screens, something about social media making you feel bad, giving you bad body images.
But just think about this.
Before smartphones, you knew, let's say, 50 people pretty well.
So let's say your circle of people you knew pretty well was about 50 people.
Within that 50 people, you were probably the best or one of the best at a lot of different things.
So among all the people you know, you might have been the best basketball player.
You might have had the best grades in history.
You might have been the one who could run the farthest.
You might have been the one with the best personality.
You might have been the sexiest one.
If your world was small and there were only 50 people you cared about, you could be really good at a few things within that group of 50 people.
But now you're looking at all the people in the world.
Suddenly, you went from being pretty good at a bunch of things within this group of 50 people you know to you suck compared to Stephen Curry.
You're no good at basketball.
Compared to all the models on Instagram, you're not attractive.
Compared to all these smart people making billions of dollars in Silicon Valley, you're not doing well and you're not smart.
So basically you just went from somebody who could feel good about yourself, because within the world that you could see and touch, hear and interact with, the 50 people you ever see, you were doing okay on a bunch of stuff.
But if you start comparing yourself to the world, we all suck.
We all suck compared to the whole world.
So that makes a difference. I think also there's probably a difference in how we're tracking it.
Maybe we're noticing more of it.
Maybe we're diagnosing more than we were before.
There's probably something in our food that makes a difference.
So, probably.
Somebody said I blew your mind with that truth.
Which truth is that about how we compare ourselves?
I don't know exactly how I blew your mind with one thought, but thank you for saying that.
So your sports argument applies to capitalism?
I don't know the connection with that question.
Who is the best cartoonist in your opinion?
Well, that's personal.
That's just personal.
There's no such thing as a best cartoonist.
It's just whoever you like.
Jordan Peterson has put it best on how to attain purpose.
Here's my take on attaining purpose.
I believe that you, I may have said this before, I believe that you'll have a sensation of having purpose in your life when you're doing things that are compatible with your evolved biological self.
So, when you are, let's say, making money or you're doing well, you're succeeding, other people are noticing that you're succeeding, that's very much something we evolved into.
To feel good about. We evolved to try to stand out, take some risks, at least some of us to be aggressive and try to accomplish things, and to feel good when people say, hey, I like what you did.
That's a good success. So when you're doing stuff that are compatible with our biological natures, for some people that's getting married and having babies, raising kids, other people don't get a thrill from that.
It just makes them unhappy.
But for the most part, find something that is clearly compatible with how human biological people evolved.
And if you do that, you're probably going to start feeling pretty good about what you're doing in the world.
For example, I always give this example that if you take care of yourself first and then get that under control, get your fitness, your diet, your health, make sure you're learning something every day, you've got some kind of income with some kind of higher potential...
If you get that done, then maybe you can expand who you're helping.
Helping your family, your friends, helping your town, helping the world as you become more capable.
So I think those things are all deeply gratifying.
So I think anytime you're learning and growing, taking care of yourself first and then expanding who you can help from the center out, yourself being the center, as long as you feel that happening, even when it's happening slowly, you're feeling progress toward the thing that you were Literally born to do.
Somebody has a comment here, says, the wife keeps sabotaging my enjoyment of Scott Adams scopes.
Well, if your wife is listening, whoever just said this, Please let your husband listen to this periscope unmolested.
He'll really thank you for it later.
All right. Somebody says that is exactly what Dr.
Peterson says. Actually, I didn't know exactly what he said, but I assumed it was compatible with his thinking.
I didn't know that that's what he says about meaning.
Frankly, I have not I've delved into Jordan Peterson's books and deeper philosophical stuff.
I've seen lots of clips of him, and he's magnificent in his YouTube stuff.
Alright. Somebody says, you organize your gym routine around my periscopes.
Let me tell you what.
I do the same thing, and I do what I call fiber-sizing.
Five being FIV. I fiversize.
Meaning that I often, not every day, but I often time my workout so that the Fox News show The Five is on.
Because I find that there's something about the multiple people joking and having fun about things I care about.
It's distracting in all the right ways.
So it puts me in a good head for working out.
But it also gives me structure.
So this is one of the best...
A number of people have said they do their workout at around this time to pair it with my Periscope.
It's a really good thing to do, having nothing to do with me, but rather to have a A routine around something that you like to listen to or you're willing to listen to and it keeps your mind off your exercise.
it's a really good system.
All right, I'm just looking at it.
Oh, so, yeah.
So Ben Shapiro made some news by walking off a BBC interview.
I guess the BBC interview was asking some questions that didn't sound like they were even...
It wasn't even trying to be unbiased.
And so Ben reacted to that and walked off.
The interesting thing happened was what happened after.
Because, I don't know if you noticed, but Shapiro basically completely took it on himself.
He accepted, he accepts, I think he's framing it as he got beaten in this interview, or he essentially lost in the exchange.
So he's saying that very clearly.
He's taking it with humility.
Looks like he's taking it as something to learn.
Everyone says he got destroyed, even Ben.
So I listened to just the part where there was the angry exchange and then he walked off and I didn't really...
All I saw was his reaction seemed out of sync with the questions.
It seemed like his reaction was bigger than the situation called for.
And I feel like that's what he's acknowledging in his own words.
And what was interesting was how often do you see people do that?
It catches you off guard It catches you off guard when anybody is honest about their mistakes.
So I have to admit, I kind of like him better.
I don't know if I would have handled it the same way.
In other words, I don't know if I could have been.
I like to think I could have.
I think I like to have been as honest as he was about how he didn't come off well in that.
I just appreciated his honesty of saying, okay, I lost that round.
It's not the end of the world.
So, anyway, I would say he made a mistake.
He totally copped to his mistake.
Let's move on. I appreciate him more for doing that.
Alright. I guess that's all I have to say.
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