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May 13, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:00:10
Episode 528 Scott Adams: Manufactured Word-News, China Trade, Russia, Iran
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Hey everybody!
Hello, Kevin, Robert.
Come on in here. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
We've got lots to talk about.
Been saving it off over the weekend.
I'm home, and I'm ready to go.
Are you ready to go?
If you are, grab your cup, your mug, your glass, your stein, your chalice, your thermos, your flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
And don't forget your tankards.
I like coffee.
And join me now for this simultaneous sip.
Ah.
Well, there's a lot of so-called news today.
Let's get right on it.
As you're watching the tensions flare with Iran and the United States...
Are you having the same feeling that I'm having, which is that I'm glad that Trump is president and not really anybody else?
And I'm not sure we could have said that two years ago.
Two and a half years ago, we would all sort of be guessing what Trump would do if he were president.
But now we have a better idea.
And we know that the last thing that Trump wants to do is start a war with Iran.
It's just the last thing.
But we also know that he's famously unpredictable.
So there's one thing that Iran can't be sure about.
Iran can't be sure that he doesn't want to start a war with Iran.
So do you remember the days when people would say that dumb old, unpredictable Trump, he'll be no good in the international stage because he doesn't know anything, he'll start a war, he'll be impulsive, all the things that they said about him.
But now what do we say about him?
The things we can say about him now is that he seems pretty consistent about not wanting to get into unhelpful wars.
And war with Iran would be pretty darn unhelpful.
So he's created a pattern where the country actually trusts that the last frickin' thing he wants It's to get into a war.
It doesn't matter if it's Iran. It doesn't matter who it is.
The last thing he wants is to get into a war.
Now, you know, John Bolton is part of the administration.
And people, of course, are saying, well, we're not so sure about John Bolton.
He might want to get into a war.
He loves war, they say about him.
I'm not saying that, but people say that.
I don't know that they're wrong.
I'm just saying that people say that.
But don't you feel comfortable That John Bolton cannot convince President Trump to get into a war unless Trump really wants the war on his own?
I don't think he does.
Do you see any chance that John Bolton times 10 other John Boltons could change this president's mind?
You don't, right? It doesn't even seem...
You don't even hold that as a fear.
I see zero chance That John Bolton can change Trump's mind to make him get into a war that he did not want to get into.
It's just, I can't hold those thoughts in my head that Trump's mind can be changed by John Bolton.
But I don't know that I would feel the same about any other president.
I feel as though any president we knew less well, you'd say, I don't know, maybe you could get talked into it.
At the same time, we also feel confident that if President Trump needs to take some kind of military action, should events transpire that makes that more obviously a good choice, you also are positive he could do it.
You know that President Trump could pull the trigger if events require that.
So it's sort of the perfect place to be.
At the moment, and every once in a while you have to step back and say, oh yeah, he's sort of exactly the right president for this time in space.
He might not be the right president 20 years from now, might have been the wrong president 20 years ago, but for this exact time, he's sort of perfect in this one area there.
All right. We're hearing rumors that Biden might be considering Harris as his running mate to get that balanced-looking ticket, put a woman on there, put a person of color on there.
And I say to myself, there's no way Biden can win this, is there?
Am I wrong? Because no matter what Biden does, it's kind of not going to sit well with his own team.
Because if he does pick a woman and or person of color for his running mate, isn't it going to look like that's the only reason he did it?
Because it would be. I mean, assuming that they meet the minimum qualifications, and most of the people running do, or all of them, as far as I know.
But it's not going to look right.
It's not going to look like progress, is it?
It's going to feel...
It's going to feel like Mondale and who was his running mate?
I can't remember. It's going to feel like, yeah, yeah, yeah, the white guy, the old white guy is going to be in charge if they win, but we'll throw you a bone.
We'll give you a little something just to make you feel good.
Yeah, Geraldine Ferraro was Mondale's running mate.
It feels like Geraldine Ferraro.
In other words, it feels like the past.
It feels like something you would have done 30 years ago, but that you shouldn't even be having the conversation in 2019.
The conversation you should be having in 2019 is either the the top top part of the ticket is a woman or person of color or LGBTQ all right that would be a 2019 conversation or or Biden is just the most qualified, most likely to win, and he picks whoever is the most qualified to be vice president.
And you don't care what that person is.
You just don't care.
It's just not part of the conversation.
That would feel like 2019.
But what doesn't feel like 2019 is let's run an old white guy and we'll make the base happy by throwing in a vice president just to just to give them a little treat.
It just doesn't feel like 2019, does it?
It just doesn't sit right.
I don't know. I don't think it'll work with his bases either.
So he's got a real problem, because whichever way he goes with a vice presidential conversation, it's going to look half wrong to half the people.
There's no clean win there.
All right. Let's talk about conservatives being kicked off of social media platforms.
Have we not seen several conservatives who were temporarily suspended get back on Twitter?
We've seen that, right?
So we saw Carpe Donctum.
He had a brief suspension.
It was reversed, and he's back.
We saw that with...
James Woods, his tweet was an Emerson quote, hang them all.
But all he had to do was delete that quote, or I imagine, I imagine Twitter would have been fine if he did the quote again, but added the context.
If all he did was delete the original quote and retweeted it with, I was trying, you know, I meant to quote Emerson, I don't mean literally hang anybody.
He could have made the same statement, but in a clearer way, would have totally been back on Twitter if he wanted.
Now, it turns out that James Woods has chosen to make a principled stand for free speech, meaning that he will not go back on Twitter unless he can say the tweet exactly the way he said it.
I would say he's dying on the smallest little hill.
So, you know, James Woods can do whatever he wants to do.
It's his decision to make, so I'm not going to second-guess it.
But it's a very small hill.
It's not really free speech.
It's about clarity.
It's about saying what you mean in a clear way.
That's sort of all Twitter is asking of him, isn't it?
If you think about it, is Twitter asking anything beyond, could this be a little more clear, so we know you're not asking for violence?
That doesn't feel like the biggest problem in the world.
It feels like the tiniest little problem.
But James Woods, for whatever reason, and I'm not going to second guess him, would like to make this a stand that he wants to take.
I don't have a problem with that.
It's just, it's the tiniest, tiniest little problem.
I personally wouldn't take a stand on such a tiny thing.
And I think there were a few other conservatives who had their bands or suspensions reversed.
So the thing to look for here is the slippery slope.
I always tell you there's no such thing as a slippery slope because there will be counter forces that emerge to stop things from sliding forever.
Unless we want them to slide forever, then of course, that's what we want to happen.
So, if you saw that none of those suspensions had been reversed, That would be DEFCON 25, worst thing in the world.
You should be worried about that.
But if you see things you think didn't seem right, and you see some number of them get reversed, you're starting to see something that looks like balance returning to the system.
It's sort of a system that will get out of balance probably on a regular basis, but the public will weigh in.
Balance will be found.
There will always be a few people you think should not have been banned.
But that will just always be the case.
We live in a world where people don't have the same opinions.
So I would say continue to watch this.
You should continue to be very concerned about it.
But at the moment, it's showing signs that the slippery slope is not some direct march to getting rid of all conservatives.
That doesn't seem to be the case, based on the evidence.
All right. I almost...
Don't want to talk about this next topic, but I'm forced into it.
I really don't want to talk about this.
I can't tell you how much I don't want to talk about the thing I'm going to talk about next, but I have sort of an obligation to do it.
It's actually just painful.
I swear to God, it hurts me, and I don't mean that as an exaggeration.
I feel physical discomfort on this next topic.
I have to defend AOC. It gets worse.
Wait a minute. It gets worse.
I'm also going to defend Rashid Tlaibi.
I don't know how to pronounce your name.
Both of them are getting the fine people treatment this week.
Do you know what the fine people is?
That's where people took President Trump's quote about the fine people in Charlottesville.
They drop out the second part of his statement where he said, I'm not talking about the The Nazis and the white supremacists.
So they cut that part out, and people think that he's saying the opposite of what he was saying.
Now, when I point that out to people who believe that the president called races fine people, what do they do?
Let me give you some context.
You see the puking already.
People will be signing off like crazy here in a minute.
When I point out to people that they just didn't read the transcript totally, and when they do, it's obvious that what they believed about the president It was 100% wrong and it's completely clear because it says so right in the words.
What do people say?
Do they ever say, ever, even once, do they ever say, oh my God, I guess I read that wrong the whole time.
I've been duped. I changed my mind to the opposite of what I thought for three years.
Nobody does that. Or two years, whatever it is.
Nobody does that. I'm watching exactly the same thing happen with AOC, with her, the world is gonna end in 12 years because of climate change.
When AOC said, in whatever interview, that if we don't do something about climate change, the world will end or be destroyed in 12 years.
I read that, and then I heard it when I listened to it, and I said to myself, Oh, she doesn't mean literally the world is ending in 12 years.
It's obvious in context that this is just hyperbole, and that what she really means, to me it seemed, obvious in context, that what she meant was if we don't get really, really serious in the next 12 years, it'll be too late.
12 was sort of a random, even number.
It could have been 10, could have been 15.
I don't think that part was important.
She was just saying that if you don't do something super, super aggressive in the next decade-ish, it's going to be the end of the world.
End of the world, meaning bad things happening with climate change, doesn't really mean the end of the world.
Okay? So when she says the world is going to end, she doesn't mean literally we all die.
Just bad, bad things are going to happen.
When she says 12 years, she doesn't mean 12 years.
It should be obvious to anybody who heard that that she was using hyperbole.
Now, when I point that out, what do people say to me?
They say exactly what they said on the other side when they heard the fine people statement wasn't true.
Did they ever say, oh, well now that you explained it to me, I get it.
He didn't mean fine people were racist.
He meant the other people. No, they never say that.
They say... I heard it with my own ears.
It was literally what she said.
Scott, stop trying to gaslight me.
She said clearly and unambiguously in these words that in 12 years the world will come to an end because of climate change.
How can you say she didn't say it?
She said it directly in exactly those words.
It's just the fine people thing in reverse.
It's just the other side having the same mental breakdown as the liberals do when they hear the fine people thing.
So here's what AOC said about it.
So that was my original interpretation.
I think those of you who've been watching me on Periscope know that I never took the bait on that 12-year thing.
I'm not the one who ever thought that was ever serious.
I didn't think she meant it seriously.
I thought she assumed people would, you know, understand the context, but not.
So here's her tweet on it.
So AOC says, this is the technique of the GOP to take dry humor plus sarcasm literally and then, quote, fact-check it.
And that's exactly what people were doing.
They were taking her statement, which was not a serious literal statement, and they're fact-checking it as if it could have been meant literally.
It's embarrassing. It's really kind of embarrassing, because that's exactly what's happening, and she's so right.
Now let me stop, for those of you who don't know this.
I'm no fan of AOC's policies, and I think she's a racist.
I don't like her at all.
But it's also true that she's good at persuasion, so I'm willing to say that she has some qualities which are high-end, Well, I can disagree with other parts because I'm an adult.
I can do that. So then she gives her examples.
She goes like the, quote, world ending in 12 years thing.
Then she says, you'd have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it's literal.
Kind of agree.
That's exactly what I thought.
When I saw people taking it literally, I thought to myself, some version of, are they joking?
Are they pretending they're taking it literally?
You couldn't really be taking this literally.
And then I observe that people are at least acting like they're taking it literally.
And people are piling on to me on...
Social media, like, exactly the same way the left piled on to me about the fine people thing.
And they have the same attitude, and they say it the same way.
It's like, it's Groundhog Day.
All we did is change the topic, but the way people are responding is identical.
I heard her say it.
Oh, let me get the quote for you.
Are you confused about the quote?
Let me show you the exact words.
Scott, how could you say something so clear?
These exact words?
How could you possibly say she doesn't mean it?
Well, here's how I can say that.
I know how words work.
If you know how words work...
And in my case, I'm a professional writer, so it's sort of my professional career responsibility to know how words work.
And in particular, I'm sort of a world expert at knowing what a joke is.
That's 30 years to spend my job.
I know what a joke is.
I know when somebody's serious.
I know when they're exaggerating because I know how words work.
Apparently, and I've told you this before, at least a third of the country doesn't have a sense of humor.
And I mean that in a literal sense.
The same way some number of people can't carry a tune, I would be one of them.
The same way some people are blind.
People have all kinds of different capabilities, and about a third of the public literally can't recognize a joke, unless it's really obvious.
And so she calls it dry humor and sarcasm.
I don't think those are exactly the right words.
She should have said hyperbole.
But she doesn't want to say hyperbole because she doesn't want to lose the urgency that she put into the original statement because people sort of believed it.
And then what happens next when people realize that, oh, it is kind of obvious that she didn't mean this literally?
What do people do?
Do they say, oh, oh God, I took that literally.
You got me. I completely thought she meant that literally, but now that she's explained it was not literal, and now, Scott, that you've explained that you took it that way the whole time, and when you see it in context, yes, yes, it's on me.
Why did I ever take that literally?
What was I thinking?
Did anybody do that?
No. Nobody did that.
They all mocked me for not understanding that she must be serious.
And then they start asking questions.
Well, if she didn't mean it, why did other people repeat it?
Because I guess Beto and other people started using that 12-year thing.
Well, I don't know why other people repeated it.
It's probably a combination.
Some probably believed it.
Some were probably using it as a hyperbole.
Some maybe didn't care.
They just thought it was a convenient thing to say.
And then she said the GOP is basically, this is AOC's tweet, the GOP is basically Dwight from the office, so who knows?
Okay, that was pretty good.
Because we all know Dwight from The Office, and it's a pretty good tweet.
So again, I think AOC is a racist.
I don't support her policies.
But when she said the world is going to end in 12 years, you should have interpreted that as we'd better get really, really serious in the next decade or so, super serious, or else we're in big trouble.
If you interpreted it any other way, that's sort of on you.
But in our political world, we'll make news out of it and turn this nothing into news.
All right. This gets worse.
If you hated that, you're going to really hate this.
I expect to see my numbers just like drop to zero on this next one.
So there's reporting that...
What's her name? Representative...
Where did I put that?
Okay. Representative Talibi.
I don't know how to pronounce it.
So it was reported that she said that she feels a calming feeling when she thinks about the Holocaust.
She has a calming feeling when she thinks about the Holocaust.
Now, given that she's pro-Islam, I don't know if that's the right way to describe her, but she's been accused of being anti-Israel.
That's the accusation.
I won't read her mind, but that's the accusation against her.
Now, do you think that she said that she has a calming feeling about the Holocaust because it makes her feel good?
Do you think that's what she intended to say?
Doesn't the smart part of your brain tell you, maybe this is out of context?
Nobody would say that in public.
Aren't you just automatically, don't you see something wrong with this, even before I tell you what's wrong with it?
Don't you know this can't possibly be true?
And of course it's not true.
Because exactly like the fine people quote, where the clarification is left out when he said, I'm not talking about the racist.
When this is reported, they report the clarification, but they bury it.
So the headline will be that she said this terrible thing, which if you hear it a little bit out of context, you just can't figure out how in the world this could mean anything except something terrible.
Your imagination can't get you there.
You hear it and you say, okay, even if I'm being charitable, I can think of no way to interpret this other than the worst possible thing, that she somehow felt good about the Holocaust.
Well, here's the rest of what she said without any prompting, right?
So this is her statement with no prompting.
The other thing she said was...
She talked about the Holocaust being tragedy, horrific persecution of Jews across the world, etc.
So she says in direct language that the Holocaust was a tragedy and horrific persecution.
So she's not as soft-battling it.
This is her own statement with no clarification.
Nobody asked for a clarification.
She was just continuing to talk.
So is there any doubt that About what she thinks about the Holocaust.
I think that's very clear. It's a tragedy, right?
And then she gives us some context, and it's clear that what she meant was that, here's my interpretation, that the Holocaust was this horrible tragedy.
Everybody agrees.
She agrees. You agree.
We're all on the same page. Nobody's questioning that.
But when she remembers it, She understands a time when the Palestinians, and in her telling of the story, this is not my telling of the story, but in her telling of history, the Palestinians and the Jews essentially work together To find some way that the Jews could be safe with their own land.
And she said, well, this was bad for the Palestinians, but she feels some calmness that some good came out of it, which is that the Jews were safe after the Holocaust.
Now, that's how I interpret it.
To me, that's what she said.
But it's very easy for the news to turn this into...
She has a good feeling about the Holocaust.
She didn't say that.
She said the opposite of that.
She called it a tragedy, etc.
She just said that it was a time when the Palestinians and the Jews...
We had a productive relationship, and that gives her a calming feeling about the potential for future working together.
Because there was a time when we worked together.
We meaning those two groups.
So that turns into news.
This is what I call the word news, where somebody just says something in an inartful way, and then somebody says, well, that sounded to me a little like you were saying something terrible.
So let's pretend we think that's what you said, and act as though you really meant it, when obviously you didn't mean that.
Obviously, she didn't mean that.
All right. So, I'll put this in the context of if you watched how people squirmed and struggled and went into cognitive dissonance when the fine people hoax was revealed to them, you can see much of the same thing in reverse when people find out that AOC never meant that the world is going to be destroyed in 12 years.
The obvious interpretation is that we have to get really serious within 12 years, according to her, Or there will be massive consequences.
Which you could argue is true or not, but at least that's the correct interpretation.
All right. Here's news that makes me laugh.
Schumer, Chuck Schumer said, he was telling Pompeo, who's going to meet with Putin, I guess, he said, quote, during your meeting with Vladimir Putin, it is critical that you warn him that any action to interfere in our elections...
We'll be met with an immediate and robust response.
To which I say, are we to believe, according to Chuck Schumer, that the government of the United States has not yet told Putin to stay out of our elections or else something bad will happen?
Are we to believe that that message has not yet ever been delivered?
What?! Now, I don't know that it has been delivered.
I wasn't in the room.
I haven't listened to any private conversations between Russians and the United States.
But nothing would surprise me more than to find out that against all common sense, against all logic, against everything you know to be smart, that somehow that never came up.
Nobody mentioned that?
There's nobody in the United States who ever said to Russia, hey, if you do this again, this is going to be really bad for you?
Nobody said that to them?
Maybe. Maybe.
I mean, anything's possible.
But it seems to me that that's pretty much what we would have told them.
And even if we didn't tell them that?
Second question, do we really need to tell them that?
Is it not obvious?
Has Putin not paid attention to the United States for two years, and he hasn't noticed that this would be sort of a sticky point with us?
Schumer says this to make us think that the administration never had that idea.
It's like, oh! Thank you, Chuck.
Wow, we were just going to go over there and drink vodka, but now that you mention it, maybe we should talk about some political stuff while we're there.
What? Oh yeah, the election stuff.
Let's talk about that. Anyway, I found that funny.
I'm watching Trump apparently quoted...
Tom Fitton, and the quote was that the director of the FBI is protecting the same gang that tried to overthrow the president through an illegal coup.
So, I kind of like the fact that the president and his supporters are referring to the whole Russia hoax thing as a coup.
Because it feels fair.
I'm the one who's been having a great history of saying that words matter and you have to understand when it's hyperbole and when it's not.
But this sure looked like a coup.
We just don't know who was thinking of it that way and who was thinking of it as, I just better do my job and check on this because there's some question about Russian connection.
I think some members of the FBI were just doing their job Didn't think there was anything there, but they figured, well, we better check.
So I think some of it was that.
But clearly there was something else going on.
So there were some people who had different intentions.
We know that for sure.
Look at all the news that we've had lately that turned on the meaning of words.
Now, I've told you before that one of the ways you can know you're entering the golden age, an age where a lot of our big problems are solved or on the way to being solved, Is that we run out of problems.
But the news still has to fill the news with stuff.
And if you don't have problems, what are they going to do?
Well, they're going to manufacture problems.
So listen to the things that have been news.
And it's all about words.
Was the Russia collusion thing a coup?
Or not?
Was it spying or was it an investigation?
Was it a hoax?
Is climate change a hoax, a Chinese hoax?
Or is it science?
Was there collusion or was there conspiracy?
Was there obstruction or was there just somebody doing his job?
I mean, almost all of our news...
It's about somebody interpreting words.
Did the president say fine people?
Did AOC say that blah, blah?
So pretty much the news is people acting as if they don't understand how words work.
That's it. That's something like 80% of all the news is that somebody has to pretend they don't know how ordinary words work And so they misinterpret it.
It's like, oh, I get it.
You only read the first part of the sentence.
Let's make some news out of this.
Well, if you read the second part of the sentence, you would know that the first part was misleading.
Well, let's just ignore the second part.
Somebody says, look at all Taleb comments.
Why would that matter? It wouldn't matter to this.
So apparently... As the Democrats continue to self-destruct, Nancy Pelosi invited an anti-Israel imam to deliver the prayers in the U.S. House.
Just think about this.
Nancy Pelosi, I assume accidentally, I think she just didn't know who she had invited, Invites an imam to give the prayer, and he's got a pretty solid record of being anti-Israel.
I saw some of the quotes, and it's pretty hard to imagine they were taken into context.
And I thought, it's like they stopped trying or something.
I mean, are they trying to lose this election?
I'm starting to see people speculate that the reason they're running Biden is that they know they won't win.
So Biden is just a sacrificial politician.
Everybody's thinking, okay, Biden is not going to ever want to run for president after this election.
I mean, he'll be far too old then.
So we can burn one.
He's an old white guy.
We can say, see, old white guys don't work, and then we can go back to what we wanted to do if you're a Democrat.
And so people are actually talking, like, this whole Biden thing, it looks like they're not serious.
I mean, it's starting to look like they're not even playing to win.
But here, let me give you a prediction.
The news business relies on exciting news.
So if you're CNN, you're Fox News, what do you think about having a President Trump?
Well, you love it. You love him or you hate him, but he's interesting all the time.
President Trump is interesting from the moment he wakes up to the time he goes to sleep.
If he ever sleeps, we don't even know if he sleeps.
But he's interesting all the time.
He is gold for the news business, and everybody would acknowledge that.
What is Joe Biden?
Joe Biden is whatever kills the news business.
Joe Biden is so freaking boring, you know, except for his gaffes and whatever.
That I think the news business looks at him and thinks, oh my God, he might actually get the nomination.
This election will be horrible.
It just won't be fun at all.
Because most of the things that they want to say about the president don't work if he's running against Biden.
Here are things that don't work.
Hey, we shouldn't have an old white guy as president.
Well, that doesn't work. Hey, we can't have somebody who long ago said something that, you know, 30 years ago sounds terrible to our ears in 2019.
Well, that's what they say about Trump.
Right? It's the same thing.
We can't have a guy who is always giving shoulder rubs and trying to kiss women who may or may not like it.
Well, that's like the main thing they say about Trump.
Some version of that, you know, grab them by the whatever.
So, Biden is the worst matchup because all of the fun stuff that they want to say about him, oh, and what about Trump has business dealings with, you know, whatever, he's in it for the money, and then you've got this Hunter Biden story in the Ukraine, completely ruins all of the attacks.
There's nothing that the news can use That's juicy and fun that you can use if Biden runs against Trump.
It's just empty.
So here's my prediction.
The news business can't let Biden get elected.
That's my prediction.
And I'll go further than this.
I'll go way further. And I want you to observe how far over my skis I am.
I'm way over my skis now, meaning that I'm making a prediction that should sound crazy to you.
And that is that the professional news organizations that are anti-Trump are going to start trying to suppress Biden's run.
It may not be obvious, but I think he's going to be starved of attention.
And I think they'll start promoting whoever they can figure out might give him a run for his money.
Maybe not Bernie.
I think they're going to have to look for something to make it a horse race on the left, to make it interesting, at least in the primary season, and also to make it interesting in the actual election.
So I would expect that you're going to stop hearing about Biden as much as you think you ought to for him being such a frontrunner.
Let me ask you this.
Is Biden still campaigning?
Think about it. When was the last time you saw Biden interviewed on CNN? Lately?
Who is the most important politician in the world who is not President Trump?
Biden. Because he's the standard bearer In terms of the polls anyway, he looks like he'll be the standard bearer.
Shouldn't we be seeing non-stop Biden coverage?
Shouldn't CNN and MSNBC have him on and his surrogates on all the time?
Shouldn't we be seeing clips of his speeches?
Shouldn't he be giving, what do they call them, sprays and gaggles and whatever, like doing what Trump does all the time, which is answering questions informally with the press?
Where's all that? Doesn't it seem to you that they're already starting to downplay him?
And when they talk about him, do they ever talk about him with interest?
When he's being reported on, they act like they're going to sleep just talking about him.
So, my prediction is this.
That the news industry will start to look obviously anti-Biden.
And it will become more and more obvious.
But probably not unless they can A-B test some other competitor to get their visibility up a little.
So you may see them testing all the lesser candidates to see if they can get somebody...
Anybody who would be interesting that they can sort of promote next to Biden and maybe take his place.
All right. That's my prediction.
I listened to an expert on Chinese trade.
He was actually a China expert.
He said that the real problem with the China trade deal and the reason that China backed out, or at least a big reason, it may not be the only reason, is the way it was written.
And that the trade deal, the one we thought China was almost ready to sign, apparently the language was humiliation.
So the deal was written in the form of, China, if you do this, we will punish you this way.
China, if you do this, we will hurt you this way.
China, if you do this, we will treat you like a child.
We'll punish you. And the China expert said, it doesn't matter if it's a smart deal, a good deal.
It doesn't matter if it makes sense.
It doesn't matter if the numbers work.
None of that matters because it's just a humiliation.
And that the hardliners in China looked at it and said, I don't care about what's fair or anything else.
We can't sign this.
This is completely disrespectful.
It makes us look like children who needed to be scolded.
And I don't know.
I'm not a China expert, so I'm not going to put my own opinion on that.
But if that's what's happening, then the only way we're going to get past it is some kind of a deal that makes it look like they won, while at the same time it looks like we won.
So somehow this has to be recast.
Maybe they need to add variables.
For example, there may be something else outside of trade that China wants.
Something that we wouldn't have as big a problem giving them.
So there might be something that we could widen this negotiation so that there would be something in the deal where the Chinese could say, oh yeah, we got that.
Now there may also be a way to word the deal so it's not humiliating.
In other words, it could be just the way it's presented.
So you could say, for example, if either side does X, the penalty will be Y, knowing in advance that only one side is likely to do that thing.
So, for example, if we said, if either the United States or China steals the intellectual property of the other, the penalty will be X. Even if you think that that will never happen, that the United States will never steal their IP in any important way, and that really the only problem is that they're stealing ours.
Even if you believe that's true, you can certainly write the deal so that you disguise that, so that China will sign a deal that says, yeah, finally, we Chinese got a deal that says the United States will stop stealing our intellectual property.
Maybe they just need to be able to say that.
So I certainly hope that our negotiators are smart enough to frame a deal so it, at least on paper, doesn't look like a humiliation.
I hope we're smart enough to do that.
But at least one person who knows more than I do thinks we're not smart enough to do that.
So we'll find out.
I saw a news article that, I like to point out positive scientific news, just so you know what's coming.
Apparently some researchers, I think it was at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, figured out how to make a type of plastic that is easy to recycle.
Now, that might not sound like a big deal, but apparently current plastics have lots of different forms, and they've got coloring dyes in them and other chemicals in them, and if you try to recycle them, it's sort of a mess.
It's hard to sort out and repurpose plastic the way it's currently made.
But in this lab, they came up with a form of plastic, which apparently is as good as any other plastic, But it has the unique quality that you can break it down to its, what do they call it, to its smallest level and then reconstitute it and it becomes a perfectly good new product.
So there's a new kind of plastic That could change forever.
The plastic that's floating in the ocean, it could change forever how much oil we need to use to turn into plastic.
It could be at the molecular level, yes.
So it's something you can reconstitute at the molecular level.
Thank you for that word.
Anyway, who knows if that will be a big deal or not.
But when you see that kind of development, you have to say to yourself, We have a very resourceful world, and maybe plastic is another one of those things we just solved, or is on its way to being solved.
All right. Let's see.
We have to talk about Alyssa Milano's sex strike.
I told you that I gave Alyssa Milano an A-plus for persuasion and getting our attention with the so-called sex strike.
The idea is that she was suggesting that women stop having sex with their boyfriends and husbands until women have control of their bodies, meaning the abortion debate.
And, of course, she's getting pushed back even from her own side.
So this is another example of how the Democrats are eating themselves.
So even feminists are saying, Alyssa Milano, the way you frame this, it's as if you're saying that sex is something that women give to men, like a gift, instead of saying we both like sex.
Which would be the more modern interpretation.
And I don't really have much opinion about the pushback of this.
I think that...
I would say that Alyssa Milano is probably more woke than the people who are criticizing her for being under-woke.
And I think that you can't tell.
And when I say that she's more woke...
I think that she's beyond the old stereotype of sex as something that women give to men.
I think she's beyond that to the scientific level.
And at the scientific level, men really like sex.
They'll do a lot to get it. All right?
So people are trying to treat Alyssa Milano as though she's somehow taking this backwards.
It's like, oh, it's like the old days when it was like, you know, the thing that women have to offer is just making babies and giving you sex.
You're taking this back to the past, Alyssa Milano.
No. I'm no fan of hers, by the way, not her politics, but I am a fan of her political activism because I think she's sincere.
She's putting the work in.
I always respect it when people work hard, no matter what it is.
And she's getting attention for a cause.
Those are all very effective things.
So you can disagree with her all you want, but it's hard to disagree with the effectiveness of it.
She got her attention.
Anyway, so my point is that I think Melissa Milano is taking a scientific point of view and a more modern view than her critics.
And the more modern view is, yes, obviously women have more to offer than just sex.
We should already be past that question.
But it's also true that men really like sex, and they'll do a lot to get it.
So this might work from a political standpoint.
It's not crazy.
It's funny. It's funny, but it's not crazy.
Somebody says, LMFAO, you trying to say she's smart?
Now that's funny.
Well, I have not offered an opinion on her intelligence.
I have said that she is working hard, I've said that she's sincere.
Neither of those have anything to do with intelligence.
And that the effect of what she's done is that we're talking about her.
That's just the fact. We're talking about her.
She's in the news. She's a headline.
She got attention. None of those have anything to do with intelligence.
I'm just saying that what she did was all what she wanted to do.
If somebody says, I'm going to do X, and then right in front of you they work hard and they accomplish X, Why can't we just say so?
She's trying to do X. It looks like she's succeeding at that.
That's the beginning and the end of the story.
I just don't think it's helpful to just automatically hate everything about the people that are on the other side.
You can say they're doing some good stuff, you just don't like the other stuff.
It's okay. You can do that.
There was a book I was recommending yesterday called Invisible Influences.
It's about how easily people are brainwashed and persuaded.
One of the tests that they do is one you've seen before in these street interviews.
How many times have you seen somebody do one of these gotcha street interviews?
Where they'll pretend that a Democrat policy is a Republican policy and vice versa, and they'll try to get people who say they're in one side to back the policy of the other side, just by not telling them it's the other side's policy.
And how often does that succeed?
Almost every time.
Almost every time you can get a Democrat to strongly back a Republican policy if you fooled them and told them it was a Democrat policy and vice versa.
It works both ways. Now, that has been demonstrated scientifically.
In other words, they've done tests Where they'll present information without context and see what people think.
And then they'll present it with the context of a different group.
And they'll say, this is the Democrat view.
What do you think? Or this is the Republican view.
What do you think? And what you find is that it doesn't matter what the facts of the case are.
It doesn't matter what the situation is.
It doesn't matter what the argument is.
Completely doesn't matter.
It only mattered to people which team it came from.
The moment they heard that it came from their own team or the other team, they took a side and then they argued why it made sense.
But that arguing why it made sense was an afterthought, because they didn't make a decision based on it making sense.
They simply heard which team it was, and then they joined the team.
And by the way, many of these studies, they're looking for a statistically significant effect, right?
It's like a lot of studies would be like, well, yes, we move people by 5%, so we think this is pretty valid.
This isn't a 5% effect.
This is closer to 100%.
You can move almost 100% of Republicans and Democrats to a view that's the opposite of their own view simply by telling them that their team agrees with it.
That's it. Almost 100%.
Think about that.
Do you believe that you have free will?
It's been disproven.
Your free will, in terms of political opinion, has been scientifically conclusively disproven.
You can repeat the experiment in a hundred different ways in a hundred different varieties.
And do you know what happens?
It's always the same.
People don't use any kind of common sense or facts to make political decisions.
Now, I think it might be different for the professionals because they've got a lot going on.
But for the voters who are simply watching the news and then forming opinions, None of it has to do with the reason.
None of it has to do with the fact.
People simply take sides and then argue why it made sense for them to take that side.
Anyway, that explains all the word news that you see.
The reason that each team is making news and of the way somebody worded something is because they can and because they actually talk themselves into believing everything the other side says is crazy and stupid.
All right. Free will does not exist.
That is correct. It is an illusion.
How did we get on our teams in the first place?
That's a good question. So there's also research that shows that there's a genetic component to whether you're conservative or liberal.
And that has been pretty well established.
So there's a big part that you're just born.
Born with some kind of impulse one way or the other.
Beyond that, you're probably born into a family that shares those same impulses because DNA. So you're probably born into it with a natural inclination to lean one way.
It's reinforced by the fact that your family leans that way.
They have a similar DNA. So it's a combination of genetic and social forces.
Now, there are people who change sides.
But I'll bet they don't change signs often unless at the same time there's something else changing in their life.
In other words, they may be less close to the people who they used to agree with, and they may have met a few people that are influential on the other side.
And so it's because the people change them, not because the argument changed them.
It might be because they get older.
It might be because they have discovered something.
But for the most part, People just join a team and then argue why it made sense to be there.
Now, I've told you for a couple years that one of the tricks I use to remain independent in thought as much as a human can is that I don't vote and I don't identify with either party.
And part of the way I do that, which is hard, it's hard to not identify with the left and the right, is that I spend most of my time saying good things about Trump's skills as a persuader, but I also identify myself as left of Bernie, which is sort of a category that I'm not even sure exists.
But because I brand myself as ambiguous, in theory, according to everything we know about science and persuasion, it should give me a more clear Opinion of both teams.
Because I don't say I'm not on the team, and I don't say I am on the team.
I observe. Very few people in the United States are actually observers.
Somebody says, no, you're lying.
I'm not sure which part you think I'm lying about, but you can put it in a comment if you want.
I'll be happy to comment on it.
So the part that I would say for sure, and those of you who have been watching me can say this with, you can confirm this, I do take opinions on both sides.
So you have seen me spread my opinion across various political ideologies.
So when I see President Trump say the fine people thing, I'm not predisposed to think he's a monster.
So I can see it more clearly.
When AOC or Tulebi, I wish I knew how to pronounce her name.
I feel bad about that.
But when they say things that I may not agree with, but I can at least understand what they intend to say because I'm not on a team.
And I do believe it gives you some ability to see the world more clearly by not being associated with a team.
It's like a superpower.
Taliba. I see lots of different people helping me pronounce that, but none of it's helping.
Could you change the impact of a speech with a laugh track?
Yes, you could.
Yeah, you could change how any communication is, how it is received, by changing the context.
And a laugh track would be part of the context.
So yes, you can absolutely change Communication by changing the context.
These are the disingenuous arguments that cost you credibility.
Do you notice there's no reason there?
So, if whoever just said your argument is disingenuous and it's costing you credibility, that is a sign of cognitive dissonance.
It means that I've said something that's triggered you, and your response is to imagine that you can read my mind.
So somebody here believes they've read my mind and that something I said is disingenuous.
In other words, that I'm intentionally misleading or lying.
Why would I do that?
It's exactly the opposite of all of my ambitions.
My entire ambition is that I can disagree with you and do it honestly.
This is my entire brand.
My brand is not to convince you of something that isn't true or useful.
What possible incentive would I have for that?
I don't get paid by anybody to do that.
I have no financial interest.
It doesn't help my reputation.
It doesn't make me feel good.
I have no interest in being disingenuous about any of these topics.
I don't have a personal stake.
I'm not running for office.
I just don't have an interest.
If I had an interest, then I think it would be reasonable for you to say, I think he's got a self-interest here.
He might not be saying the truth.
Because people who have self-interest do not tell the truth.
My entire ambition is for people to think that I am willing to tell the truth on both sides.
That's all I want to accomplish.
Because that's what would give me value.
To have value, I have to be legitimate on both sides.
And if I were to say something that you could sit there and say, oh, that's obviously a lie.
He's not saying what he means.
If I did that even for a second, it would completely ruin everything that I'm trying to do.
All right. There's a Forbes article about me that says I have an agenda.
Whenever you see anybody writing about anybody, whether it's me or anybody else, and they purport to know what you're thinking or your real intentions, sometimes they're right, but you should assume that by a large margin they're usually not.
Maybe 60% of the time.
Somebody says you want to be recognized as the smartest person in the room.
Not smartest.
That would be a...
That bar would be too high because, you know, the smartest people in the world are so smart that they're almost alien creatures.
I'm not going to make a play for being the smartest person in the world.
That's completely out of reach.
I would like to make a play for developing some systems and techniques to keep one relatively open-minded and free from the bubbles that we get into.
So I would like to stake out That I have some technique, and it's just technique, something anybody can do, that keep me relatively free from bias.
Not free from bias, because people can't do that.
Nobody can be free from bias.
But you can use some tools to put a control on it.
And I try to demonstrate that through prediction.
So if you've been watching, you know that my claim is not that I have been right about something, but rather that I'm predicting something.
And you can see that if this filter on the world that I present, the persuasion filter, as I like to call it, that if it's accurate, you'll see that the predictions are accurate.
So that's the only standard that I'd like to be judged on.
All right. I've got other things to do, and I'm going to go do them right now.
And I hope that you have an amazing day.
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