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June 10, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
51:15
Episode 560 Scott Adams: Mexico Deal, Housing Emergency, Crazy George Conway, Magic Mushrooms
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Yes, that's the happy sound of the beginning of Coffee with Scott Adams.
That's what happens right before the simultaneous sip.
One of the best parts of your day.
Be you just waking up.
Be you exercising already.
Be you running on the beach.
Talking to you, Joel.
Um, this is the time.
If you've got a cup or a mug or a glass, stein or a chalice or a tankard, could be a thermos or a flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
Ah, best one of the morning.
And I've had a few. Well, well, well.
Thank you for your belated happy birthday wishes.
It's always a fun day.
You know, one of the things that people always ask me is, what's it like to be famous?
And the answer to what's it like to be famous is that 99% of the time it's just like anybody else.
Because most of the time, my typical day, I get up, I work, I'm probably putting a load of laundry in, I'm driving to the gym.
It's pretty ordinary.
But every once in a while there are these little...
These little breaks in the simulation where things get weird.
One of those weirdnesses is that your birthday is announced in the media.
I could never hide my age because literally every year the news reports my age.
Like, what the hell's up with that?
Not that I'm hiding anything.
Alright, let's talk about all the news.
Now, I've been telling you for a while that there's something odd going on in the world, maybe just the country.
And if you haven't noticed it, it's because it's that blank space problem.
The biggest news is the complete and total lack of really bad news.
Now, I'm not saying there aren't bad things in the world happening, but because almost everything is heading in the right direction.
Not everything. We've got problems to work on.
But everything seems to be so positive that the news itself is running out of things to talk about.
Case in point, here are some things on a Monday that qualify as news.
Are you ready for this? These are things that are on the front page.
I'm in Vegas right now, by the way.
Would you like to see it? I'll show you the hotel.
Here's the room.
This is...
I'm at the Wynn in Las Vegas.
Alright. That's enough of that.
So I was telling you that the news is running out of things to talk about that are terrible.
So these are actual stories.
I'm not making these up.
Actual stories from the top page of CNN. Okay?
If you don't think we're living in a golden age, Listen to the top stories.
Number one, I swear I'm not making this up.
Justin Bieber challenged Tom Cruise to a fight, like an MMA fight in the octagon.
Why? Why did Justin Bieber challenge Tom Cruise to a fight?
I don't know. I'm sure he has his reasons.
But apparently, so Tom Cruise is 5'7 and reportedly 170 pounds and ripped.
Justin Bieber is very fit, but he's apparently 5'9 and 145 pounds.
And it might be the first time in my life where there's talk of a major MMA fight and I have a realistic chance that I could beat up both of them.
I mean, I don't know.
But if you put me in the octagon with either Tom Cruise or Justin Bieber, it would probably just depend if I was in a bad mood.
If I were in a bad mood, I think I'd win the fight.
So you'll never see an MMA fight where I have a good chance of beating both of the fighters.
Alright, so that's the headline.
Here's another one. George Conway, temporarily still the husband of Kellyanne Conway, I don't know how long this is going to last, the marriage that this is, is tweeting again about President Trump being crazy and unfit for office.
And I'm thinking to myself, based on what?
Based on what, George Conway?
What the hell news are you looking at where everything's going to hell?
Do you have your own source of news?
Do you have a little private news site with only bad news in it that we don't see?
But on Twitter, a Twitter user said, maybe Scott Adams can explain what's going on with this George Conway, Kellyanne Conway situation, where she's a top advisor to the president, and he's tweeting in public that the president should lose his job, etc., and that he's crazy.
And I thought about it for a while.
I was thinking deeply about, okay, what are all the ways that you could explain that?
And I came up with a simple explanation, which I tweeted, which was, he hates his wife.
If you can come up with a better explanation than that, because here's the thing, there's two questions here.
One is, why is this his opinion?
Why does he have a negative opinion of the president?
But that's not mysterious, right?
If he follows the news, the news tells him things and he believes them.
So there's no insight to say that he has an opinion of the president that half of the country seems to have.
You know, we understand where Trump derangement syndrome comes from.
So that's not the interesting part.
The interesting part is why is he doing it in public when his wife is working for the president?
Now, if you can think of a better explanation than Yates' wife, I'm open to it.
Now, people said to me, Scott, Scott, you're mind reading.
You shouldn't take this too seriously.
I'm just saying that no matter what else is going on, it doesn't look like he's a big fan of his wife, if you know what I mean.
Now, some people are saying, oh, it looks like it's really theater.
And the two of them are so clever that they're playing the media and that this is all kind of an act.
It's sort of a Carville and Matlin situation where it's going to make things more interesting.
And then after Kellyanne's out of that job, the two of them will have a career on television as two debating heads or something.
But it doesn't look that way to me.
Maybe. So I'm going to call...
I'm going to call BS on the idea that this is some kind of a planned, clever plot that's part of some reality show situation.
I don't think so.
I think it might be exactly what it looks like.
And exactly what it looks like is that he's not a big fan of his wife.
So there's that.
But I'm not reading his mind.
And keep in mind that we can never know all the possibilities.
Somebody says, is Christina a real human or a doll?
Well, if they ever made a doll that was as good as the real Christina, you would all have one.
Men and women, you'd be buying them.
All right. She's still asleep, so I'm speaking kind of low so I don't wake her up.
Here's some other news.
Jim Acosta has a book.
So, Jim Acosta's book...
It's hilariously titled The Enemy of the People.
Could that be any better?
So first of all, good luck to Jim Acosta on his book.
So politics aside, when a writer has a book, I'd like to see people know that it's out there and if they'd like to read it.
Go ahead. I'm actually thinking of reading it myself, because whatever you think of his opinion, it's probably interesting.
I'll bet it's a good book.
So I might check that out myself.
But it's funny that he names the book after the president's label.
You just can't get the president out of your head.
He gets labeled by the president...
The most awful thing that you could be labeled, which is Enemy of the People, and he makes it the title of this book, which I appreciate.
I like the fact that he did that.
But he's, I just watched a little clip of him where there was some event where he was talking to a White House official he didn't name.
And the official allegedly said to him that the president was insane.
Insane.
And so when Jim Acosta went to check back, he wanted to ask, okay, did you mean insane, insane?
Or are you talking about crazy like the good kind of crazy?
And the administration person said, no, no, not like the actual insane kind, but the unpredictable, you know, don't necessarily know where he's going kind.
So even Jim Acosta wasn't calling the president crazy.
He was calling that figurative speech himself.
So if the worst thing that you're seeing from Jim Acosta is accepting the president's insult of him as the enemy of the people while also talking about, oh no, when the aide called him and saying that was just figurative speech, that's it?
Where's all this conflict we expect?
Here's another one.
Oberlin College just lost a lawsuit over accusations of racial profiling.
So the story was there was some bakery in town near where Oberlin was, and the bakery, let's see, I guess they stopped an underage guy from buying some alcohol, and that caused some kind of a disturbance with three and that caused some kind of a disturbance with three customers.
But they were African-American customers, and the bakery was not African-American, and so it turned into a racial thing.
And apparently, I don't know the details, but it sounds like somebody associated with Oberlin spread the rumor that the bakery was racially profiling.
Now, apparently, somebody is filling in on the comments that it was a shoplift-lifting incident.
So I think that's the situation.
Some shoplifting, but there was also some attempt to buy something with a fake ID. But those details don't matter so much.
What the allegations of the crime are don't matter so much.
What matters is that the bakery was accused of being racist for stopping the shoplifting and the illegal purchase, and apparently somebody associated with Oberlin College was part of spreading that, and they lost it. A ruling, $11.5 million, the college lost for, wait for it, a race hoax.
That's right. Last summer, what were we talking about?
Last summer, we were talking about actual Or what we thought was actual.
Real events where, for example, some police action and there was a black victim and there were questions about whether the police acted right.
Everything is reversed.
Now we're talking about Jussie Smollett, a race hoax.
We're talking about now this Oberlin thing.
It's another race hoax.
And the jury concluded it was a race hoax.
So if those are the stories you're hearing, if you can't find enough real racial problems that the only stories about race in the headlines are about race hoaxes, you're in really good shape, aren't you?
Alright, here's another one.
Motorcyclists hit by lightning.
Now, it's tragic, and I feel very bad for the family, and for the victim, of course, but What are the odds that you would take on a hobby as dangerous as riding a motorcycle, and it's not the riding the motorcycle that killed you.
It's the getting hit by lightning while you're riding the motorcycle.
Now, I don't know if karma is a real thing.
I don't know if there's a vengeful God in heaven.
But if you're riding your motorcycle and you get hit by lightning and killed, Fill in the rest of that.
All right, my other favorite story is, have you all seen the alleged video security camera footage?
I'll say alleged, in which there seems to be some kind of elf-like alien creature.
Have you all seen that?
So it's one of the top stories on the news sites.
So there's a little video of what looks like some kind of a weird little elf creature that looks like, I don't know, Three and a half feet tall or something.
And everybody's saying, who is it?
What is that thing?
I would be willing to bet a large amount of money that it's nothing but somebody's five-year-old kid in a costume.
But it is very funny.
Now, what's funny about it is that it's top-line news.
The fact that this is on the front page of the news...
That's a good news.
I mean, that's a good sign.
What else we got? So, California is apparently going to provide health care for all illegal aliens in California at the price of $98 billion per year.
Now, I gotta say...
When I hear stories like that, and I know what California is doing to my taxes, I think, I gotta get out of this place.
I gotta get out of California.
And then I read stories on Fox News, usually, about all the needles and the human waste and the homeless people and all that stuff.
And let me give you my first-hand account of living in California.
Are you ready? So, I live here full-time, and it's a country with all this bad stuff happening.
Here's the thing. If you don't go to those places, you don't see it.
Imagine, if you will, whatever room you're in, it's probably carpeted, or maybe you've got a hardwood floor.
Imagine the entire...
Area of the floor in the room you're in.
Now imagine you took a BB, you know, just like a little teeny BB, you know, dropped it on the floor.
The BB would represent approximately all of the square footage where every bad thing is happening in California.
Pretty much an entire room with a BB sitting on the floor, that BB would be all the places in California That you would run into a needle or a human feces or homeless living on the streets.
Any of that stuff.
The rest of the time, all of the rest of your floor that doesn't have that BB on it, there's really nice weather.
It's nice people in nice weather.
That's what it is.
99.99% of it is nice people Enjoying the nice weather.
It's really hard to move out of this place.
So when you look at the taxes and all the bad news, those are compelling things.
But the whole state?
It's pretty amazing, got to say.
So it's hard to move out of the state.
I would if it were just taxes, but you can't beat the weather, really.
Here's something else.
Apparently, the next story, the White House blocked some State Department analysts from testifying about the global security risks of climate change.
And the critics said, this is unheard of.
When is the last time somebody was blocked from presenting facts?
Blocked from presenting facts?
That's not what this was about.
The analyst was going to make predictions.
Predictions aren't facts.
And apparently the predictions were not in keeping with the administration's either current or evolving view about the real risks of climate change.
And I'm thinking to myself, well, there's more fake news.
It's the worst thing that was happening, and it's fake news.
So the fake news part is that they did block the analyst from giving his predictions about how bad the security situation would be for the country, etc., from climate change.
But they didn't block him from facts.
They didn't say, don't bring us your facts.
They said, don't bring us your predictions.
Because the predictions are almost certainly ridiculous.
I haven't seen them, but you can assume that they're ridiculous because it's not really a predictable thing.
All right. Let's talk about the Mexico deal.
So, predictably, the president threatens to tariff, put tariffs on Mexico if they don't do something about the border.
Mexico allegedly quickly complies and steps up and they're going to do some real things.
And then also, predictably, the New York Times writes a story from unnamed sources saying, ah, it's basically what Mexico already agreed to do.
But then you dig a little bit deeper and you find out, yeah, it's something they said in words they were willing to do, but apparently now they're actually willing to do the things that they indicated they might have been willing to do, and even more than they had predicted.
So while it's slightly sort of almost true that the things they agreed to are sort of almost kind of, you could imagine, similar to and very like what they talked about before, They weren't doing anything.
And it didn't look like they were going to do anything.
The doing something is the part that the president alleges he's getting done.
That they're actually going to do something now because of the threat of the tariffs.
So, I was looking at how CNN would create a negative out of a positive.
Because this Mexico situation might be, we don't know yet, Don't know yet.
But it might turn out to be one of the cleanest wins a president ever had.
And indeed, I would argue that although there may be no physical wall that gets built because of any of this, either on the Mexico southern border or northern border, there may be no physical wall, but it would be hard for me to say If this thing goes through, it would be hard for me to say that the president didn't make Mexico pay for the wall because they're paying.
It's expensive. They're paying for their own security forces to go down there.
They'll probably build some...
They might even build some fences on the southern border.
So, in a non-literal sense, It kind of looks like the president just got Mexico to pay for the wall, in the sense that the wall is standing for security, border security.
But here's the first sentence on CNN's article about it.
So here's CNN turning a positive.
A substantial accomplishment, I would say, of the president.
Probably. We'll have to wait and see, but probably.
And here's how they say it.
Their first sentence of their article about something good that he did.
They say, President Donald Trump is riding into a fresh week of constitutional collisions with Democrats.
Okay, is that how you frame a story about a great accomplishment by a president?
He's riding into a fresh week of constitutional collisions with Democrats.
I don't even know what that has to do with the story.
Does that have anything to do with the story about the Mexican immigration?
Here's the next sentence.
It's comma, and then he continues, hitting back at critics who are dismissing his new border agreement with Mexico as a mirage, rather than the huge victory he is claiming.
So their lead-in is about the critics calling it a mirage.
And then later in the story, they add some details that even CNN seems to be saying, this could work.
So they frame it talking about the critics instead of framing it talking about the star of the story.
The star of the story is the president.
What the president did, if you're a news organization, you're going to say, huh, Mexico wasn't doing enough.
He caused them to say they will do enough.
It looks like they're starting to do real things.
Objectively speaking, it looks like the president got some action there.
But instead of doing that, they talk about what the critics said first.
Are you kidding me?
The critics are dismissing his agreement with Mexico as a mirage?
That's the first sentence?
If there were any bit of objectivity on this, they would simply say, what happened first?
So the first sentence would just be, what happened?
And then they say the president is saying this is a good deal.
And then, after you said what it is, and after you said what the president claimed, then it's totally fair to say that the New York Times and his critics say it might not be enough.
That's totally fair.
I'm not saying you should leave out of the story what the critics are saying, because that's always part of the story.
But to put it in the first sentence...
That's not plain fair.
All right. Here's another story.
So Ben Carson's talking about the national emergency for affordable housing.
Now, Ben Carson's point is that red tape and regulations and all kinds of permitting delays and all that stuff, all the red tape of government is primarily the reason that housing is unavailable.
And by unavailable, I mean unaffordable.
So the rise in homelessness, according to Ben Carson, Ben Carson is HUD, Housing and Urban Development, right?
So Ben Carson is saying that the government is sort of in the way.
That's the big problem with this.
But I ask myself, which of those regulations that are in the way could you reasonably get rid of?
For example, there are cities that have height restrictions on building.
But I assume that the reason they have height restrictions is because they don't want that much traffic, right?
Isn't the whole point of a height restriction more about the traffic?
And then they also have housing safety regulations and permits.
Well, do we want to get rid of those?
I mean, maybe there are some that are unnecessary, but you sort of need some standards.
So, here's what I'm suggesting.
Given that all the states and cities and every entity has its own set of rules, what if...
I'm just going to throw this out.
I don't even know if this works.
So this is the bad version of the idea.
Maybe it gives you a better idea.
Suppose the government, the president, declared a homelessness or, let's say, a housing emergency.
So it's a housing emergency, meaning that the government can cut some corners and do some things that ordinarily you couldn't do.
And then let's say, instead of trying to override...
Cities that are working well-ish, instead of just, you know, overriding their rules and regulations, which would be a problem.
Suppose you said, we're going to take the blighted areas, the areas that already exist in metropolitan areas, and we're going to say that only for the blighted areas, we'll declare an emergency, and for only the land that's already useless, because it's just blight and broken down homes and nobody lives there.
For that land only, not the rest of the country, there'll be a housing emergency that says the regulations and the permitting will be faster and lower regulation so that you can build something there easily and that you can iterate and you can test some things.
Now, you might have to have some regulations, such as you might say, if it's an experimental home, it can't be more than one story high.
Because I imagine all of the risks come when you get that second story, right?
One story, anything is going to be safer.
So there might be some commonsensical little regulations you have to keep.
But what about a housing emergency?
Use the blighted land because it's basically free.
The government can just say, all right, we're going to pay you for it if you own it, but it doesn't cost much.
It's $100. You've got all the land you need.
We'll get rid of the red tape.
We're going to invite in industry to build some experimental homes.
Build a little neighborhood and see if you can turn it into something that's low cost and good.
The other question I would ask you is, is it time for Bill Pulte to be the replacement for Ben Carson?
Most of you know of Bill Pulte, right?
He's the blight authority leading voice in the country.
He's the person you would most associate with this and has had the most success clearing blighted lands.
He's doing some more. By the way, you're going to be hearing some more from Bill Pulte over the summer and you're going to like it.
There's some stuff happening that I know about that I can't talk about yet, but there's some good stuff happening.
It's probably time for somebody who has the Bill Pulte kind of experience, specifically not only in understanding the blighted inner cities, but he also has a background in building because that's his background is home building.
You need somebody who's got both of those skills specifically.
So you need somebody who's got the right talent stack for that job.
And I would see those two things.
Ben Carson probably is not going to do a second term with Trump, I'm thinking.
Probably not. He's not going to be there forever.
So I'd say let's draft Bill Pulte into that job, declare a housing emergency, and turn him loose.
Because if anybody could do it, he could.
And if you're not willing to get that serious, maybe we're not that serious about the problem.
But I say Bill Pulte to replace Ben Carson when Ben's done.
All right. Let's talk about My prediction that The states that were restricting abortion would have some economic problems because of that.
What I predicted was that companies would not want to do business there because the company's own employees and the company's own management and the company's own customers would resist.
And sure enough, you already know about the Netflix and the Hollywood people saying they don't want to do business there.
But now there's 180 business leaders Have signed on to a letter saying that they don't want to do business or that it's bad for business to restrict abortion in those states.
So you've got 180 leaders.
With big staffs, big companies, who are willing to sign on to say, we wouldn't move there.
We wouldn't do business in that state if we had to have a location there.
That's sort of a big deal.
And keep in mind that that's 180 business leaders who are willing to sign it.
That's not how many are the only ones not willing to go.
That's just the ones who signed it.
So you have a big, big problem that won't materialize maybe for a few years because it takes years for a company to pick a location and decide to move.
But I would think if you had a way to bet on the individual economies of states, you should bet against any state that restricted abortion.
Here's the problem. Half the country wants roughly restrictions.
Half the country wants no restrictions on abortions or approximately something like that.
And if the state does what all the other states do and allow abortions, I mean what most of the states do, they're not going to lose business for that.
So no state would lose business Because they were doing what everybody else was doing.
But as soon as a few states, and this is the key thing, because if it's only a few, then there are lots of other states that people can choose instead.
But if only a few want to restrict it, restricting it, you can say 180 business leaders signed something and said, that's a reason not to go.
I don't need to buy myself a new problem.
If you're a leader of a business, why would you go to a state that you know is going to be a problem when the state right next to it is not going to be a problem?
That's an easy decision.
From a business perspective, from a business perspective for every company, you know, that, well, let's put it this way, people will leave a state Because of abortion laws, but they won't go to a state because of restricted abortion.
So it's a bad deal for the state.
Let's talk about AOC. AOC is...
I have quite a dilemma here.
Because there are some things that she's promoting that don't seem practical to me.
I think her Green New Deal, for example, has lots of stuff in it that would be hard to accomplish.
But as aspirational stuff, it's not too bad.
Not too bad. If you were to look at the Green New Deal as a place you'd like to get to, but without specifying how to get there, I like that there are people who say, let's give health care to everybody and let's clean up our environment and all that stuff.
Now, the mechanism to get there probably needs to be capitalism.
And socialism probably is not the best mechanism to get there.
So I can't sign on to all she agrees with.
But I'm not going to ignore the fact that she keeps doing brilliant things.
I know you don't like to hear it, but it's good to learn from her technique.
So in the same way when I talk about President Trump's technique, that doesn't mean I endorse all of his policies, because I don't.
It doesn't mean I don't criticize him for things that should be better, because I do.
AOC is going to be the same rule for me.
I'm going to say I don't like this part of what she likes, but technique's good.
Here's an example. One of the things I say about President Trump is that he often will pick up money that's laying on the table that for some reason nobody else wanted.
He walks into a room and there's a pile of money on the table and he looks around and he says, pile of money on the table?
Is this your money?
Whose money is this on the table?
Nobody? There's nobody who's going to claim this money?
All right, and then he picks up the money, he puts it in his pocket, and he walks away.
And what I mean by that is that he'll find this, you know, as we say, low-hanging fruit, this free things that all he has to do is say the right thing, and he gets a free thing.
He does it all the time. AOC does the same thing, and it's a really...
All right, I'm going to block you.
Technique, if you can't listen to technique because you don't like the person who's doing it, then you probably shouldn't be on here right now.
All right, apparently you're not quite ready to deal with adult ideas.
If you're not ready to deal with adult ideas, this is not the right place for you.
All right, so here are some examples.
So recently AOC came out in favor of limiting lobbyists, which was such a practical idea that Ted Cruz agreed.
Now when you saw that and you said, wait a minute, AOC wants to do this?
And Ted Cruz agrees?
That's free money laying on the table.
All she had to do was write that tweet, and she picked the free money up off the table.
Because nobody on the left is going to say, at least in public, they're not going to disagree.
And people on the right like it too.
Why did nobody else do that?
Why was AOC the one who wrote that tweet?
And every other member of Congress has access to Twitter.
They all have access to Twitter.
But only one person wrote that tweet.
That was her. Alright, here's another one.
Today she came out in favor of magic mushrooms.
Now, most of you are not up to date on what this is all about.
If what you think she's talking about is that the psychedelic mushrooms should be recreationally allowed, that's one question.
But the bigger thing is that these have immense mental health benefits.
Now, most of you are not quite at a place where you can accept that what I just said is true.
So I would encourage you to research it.
I've personally had conversations with people who are the top doctors in this field.
So literally, I have had personal conversation, you know, standing in the same room with one of the greatest experts in the country on this.
And let me tell you, there are a lot of people with PTSD, a lot of people with various mental conditions, in which a little bit of doctor-regulated exposure to psychedelics is sort of a complete cure.
Now, you're talking about fixing things that are completely unfixable with other technology, as far as we know.
And no side effects.
As far as I know, there's probably been zero cases of a doctor-supervised person taking magic mushrooms, the psychedelic ones, and having any kind of a bad mental outcome.
Probably never. I mean, I don't know that that's true.
And that's not even true of aspirin.
Keep in mind, aspirin kills people.
Anything you do in the medical world has some risk.
But I don't even know if, as long as you're taking mushrooms that you know where they came from and you can measure the dose and stuff and the doctor's watching you, not really a risk.
Yeah, and somebody's saying here in the comments, it's often a single treatment.
Think about that. One experience with mushrooms...
Can change your whole life in a positive way.
Now, I've said before that I did mushrooms once when I was in my 20s.
Only once. I've also said it was the best day of my life easily.
Not even close.
It was the best day of my life.
And it changed me permanently.
Taking mushrooms allowed me to see the world as a simulation.
Meaning... From that day on, I no longer thought that the limits that I could see in my environment were necessarily real.
For example, when I tried to become a cartoonist, Did that seem like a realistic goal?
Did it seem realistic that I would go from cubicle guy to arguably most successful cartoonist in the world right now?
At least for adult properties.
There's kid properties that are bigger.
That wasn't reasonable.
But I had experience with psychedelics, and I just don't view my world as limiting me.
I view it as something that I change on the fly, because it's a subjective world.
And so if it's a subjective reality, I changed it to be the way I want.
Most of you know of Christina.
If you were to say to yourself, if you've seen her Twitter or her Instagram, do you look at her and you say to yourself, well, it makes sense that she's with this guy?
Yeah, it totally makes sense.
Why wouldn't she be? No, it doesn't make any sense.
But I don't live in a world where any kind of restrictions like that apply to me.
They just don't. So, I continually run my life as though it's a simulation.
Now, only in recent years I've used the word simulation, but I had my own version of it I wrote about in the Dilbert future back in the 90s.
It was the same idea as the simulation, just sort of different framing.
But Because of mushrooms, I completely changed my view of reality in such a productive way that it made my life an ongoing wonder.
So that's a pretty good deal.
All right. Then the other thing that AOC did was she was saying, why isn't birth control over the counter?
Now, I'm not a doctor, so I can't answer the question of whether that's a good idea or a bad idea.
But, as a tweet, it's brilliant.
Why is it brilliant?
Because when AOC says, why don't we get rid of a government regulation, who is she talking to?
The people on her side say, yeah, more birth control, that's great.
So her side likes it. Then people on the right say, wait a minute, there's a regulation we can get rid of?
We like that, right?
So, I can't speak to the medical risk involved.
But in terms of the politics of it, it was just one of the smartest things anybody ever tweeted, ever.
Because it appealed to both sides.
It was, again... AOC walks into a room, there's a pile of money on the table, and she says, hey, anybody?
Is this your money? Nobody says yes.
She goes, I guess it's my money now, and she picks it up and she puts it in her pocket.
How many times do you have to watch President Trump walk into a room and be the only one to pick up the money off the table?
How many times do you have to watch AOC walk into a room and be the only one to pick up the money off the table?
It's not a coincidence.
This is all I want you to know.
It's all I want you to know.
This is not a coincidence.
This is technique.
This is somebody, in both cases, Trump and AOC, they are operating on a whole higher level than the rest of us.
Even if you don't like it.
And I know a lot of you don't like it.
All right. Keep in mind also, the AOC has said that she's open to nuclear energy as part of the Green New Deal.
That's a big deal.
Imagine she's like the greenest of the greeny greens, and she just said, nuclear energy?
I'm open to that. Because she's probably looked into it enough to know that that's sort of the only thing that's going to work.
Not sort of, as far as anybody knows, unless something new is developed right away.
That's probably the only way to get to a good end.
So, somebody says no, she rejected it.
The most recent statement was accepting it.
I think she might have had older comments in which maybe she was more skeptical.
But I think at the moment, her current thinking is pro, or at least not against.
So, there you go.
Somebody's asking, is it natural or studied?
Well, keep in mind, many people don't know this, that AOC is not a, let's say, a grassroots, not grassroots, she's not an organic politician.
And by that I mean she did not go through a normal process to become a politician.
She literally did sort of an American Idol trial workout With a Democrat group that was looking to develop new leaders.
So she was one of many people who actually auditioned to be a politician.
She actually auditioned.
So she was selected based on her natural talent, clearly.
But now she has access, because of her job and her visibility, she has access to the best advice in the world.
And you can tell that she's absorbing it like Like ordinary people don't.
And everybody has access to the same information, but she seems to be absorbing the good stuff and not absorbing the bad stuff.
That has a lot to do with the fact that she was selected by audition to have a certain set of qualities that would scale up pretty quickly.
So whoever selected her, the people who did the selection process, did a really good job.
They pick somebody who can build a talent stack pretty quickly.
All right, so that's enough about that.
So you can see from my discussion of all of this, do you notice that it's all sort of good or good-ish news?
We're really running out of bad news, and it is because of this president.
This president is the primary reason that the news is just going away.
It's like irrelevant today.
All right. Speaking of the simulation, you probably know how many cryptocurrencies there are in the world.
I don't know. It might be tens of thousands of cryptocurrencies that have been created.
Bitcoin did well, and then everybody wanted to create one.
Well, my company, WenHub, has a cryptocurrency.
It's a token, actually.
Crypto token. It has utility within our app, the interface by WenHub app.
And as of yesterday, it was, I think it was yesterday, it was a top-traded token, crypto, On one of the big exchanges, Hotbit.io.
It was the number one.
And of all their cryptos, it was the number one one.
Now, Eric Finman said some good things about it, and he's followed as sort of a...
Crypto investment genius, so his recommendation is primarily what's moving it.
But as soon as it gets some momentum, then people notice, and when you notice things, you're more likely to act on them, and then it becomes a little bit self-fulfilling in a perfect world.
But think about what were the odds That I could be associated with a crypto anything that would be one of the ones that wins, because most of them don't.
It's sort of a graveyard of crypto tokens.
Again, I seem to be in the middle of something that is so unlikely, so statistically, ridiculously unlikely, and yet it's become part of my normal life.
So all I'm saying is if I do get in the octagon with Justin Bieber and Tom Cruise, they better watch out because I'm on a winning streak.
All right. Yeah, I have visibility, so it helps the process, but by itself that wasn't enough, because I had visibility last week, and last week it wasn't moving on the exchanges.
This week it is. But is it going up in value?
Yeah. I think Eric recommended it when it was around three cents, and it's up to five cents.
So you do the math.
What is the percentage gain in a week of something that goes from three to five?
It's a lot. It's better than whatever you're doing in the stock market, but I warn you, it's not an investment.
Not an investment.
So, yeah, I'm not recommending any investments.
I want to be clear about that.
Cartoonists are not good sources for recommendations of investments.
Oh, speaking of investments, I'm going to tell you an investment.
This has nothing to do with crypto.
I'm going to change the subject for a minute.
I made an investment a while ago that was either really smart or really dumb, and every day I try to figure out which one it was and I can't tell.
So I'm going to ask you, if there's anybody out there who has some information on this, and here's the investment.
I own stock in the Turkish cell phone company, Turkcell.
So Turkcell is the name, one word.
And it's way down.
So I bought it here, and it's way down.
But I bought it as a super long-term investment.
Super long-term meaning probably won't sell it.
It'll be part of my estate or something.
And the reasoning is this.
Nobody loses a phone company.
It should be the safest investment of all time.
It has very low P.E. And I think all of the risks are political.
But I don't know, because there's not good information there.
So I'm not recommending anybody buy it.
It looks like it's a pretty risky thing.
But I own it, and I can't tell.
Yeah, WorldCom is a good example, but they weren't a cell phone company.
So let me tighten up my statement.
It's not that a phone company can't go out of business, but a major cell phone company that already has a huge customer base, has that ever been a problem?
So somebody's saying it's a currency issue, which would get to the socio-economic political situation there.
Anyway, I just wondered if anybody had any visibility on that.
I'm not suggesting it whatsoever.
Yeah, and it could be their leadership.
Erdogan might be ruining everything here.
All right. It's not Turkcom, it's Turkcell.
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