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June 11, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
55:35
Episode 561 Scott Adams: Sleepy Joe Health Rumors, Alyssa Milano’s Influence on Biden, Nuclear
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boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom hey everybody Come on in here. It's me.
And it's you. And between the 1,500 of us, we're going to have something called the Simultaneous Sip.
If you would like to participate in the Simultaneous...
Man, I'm tired.
I'm still in Las Vegas.
It's possible I didn't get enough sleep last night, but I didn't want to miss coffee.
So I got up early anyway.
And if you are up and you've got a cup or a glass or a mug, a stein or a chalice or a tankard, some kind of thermos or maybe a flask, it could be a vessel of any kind.
Put your favorite liquid in it.
I like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous zip ah Ray says it did my first one hub yesterday Great. So somebody connected a call for money, I hope, on the Interface by WenHub app.
But let's talk about other things right now.
Here's my question for you.
Who would be famous as a political person and also self-identify as alt-right?
I can't think of anybody, can you?
Can anybody give me an example of somebody who calls themselves alt-right who would be a well-known person, politician?
Is there anybody? It could be a YouTube person.
It doesn't have to be an actual elected official.
It seems to me that alt-right just sort of went away.
I never knew what it was.
I never was one.
Of course, I'm left of Bernie, as I tell you often.
But it seems to me this whole all right thing doesn't exist.
And somebody says Richard Spencer.
I'll bet even he gave up on it.
I don't think anybody identifies with it anymore.
But this reminds me of the New York Times article talking about the radicalization of some poor young man who watched too many YouTube videos and got sucked down the alt-right rabbit hole.
Except that the article says the opposite.
So I tweeted a Daily Wire story.
That's really worth reading.
It's well done. In which they pull apart the New York Times story as essentially completely false.
It's not internally consistent.
It doesn't make the point that it claims to make.
The people that it labels as alt-right are not.
I mean, just everything about it is wrong.
But the funniest part about the story Somebody says Steve King.
I don't think he identifies all right.
But I don't think anybody does.
I think everybody ran away from that.
Anyway, there's a funny story about Ben Shapiro.
This is really funny, by the way.
I don't know. Maybe it's just me that I think this is funny.
So the New York Times piece I'm talking about is this horrible, slanderous hit piece on Ben Shapiro, which paints him as some obnoxious, terrible character that he is not.
So factually, it's just fake news.
It's just horrible, horrible fake news.
But here's the funny part. Ben Shapiro apparently went off the grid for, I don't know how long, a day and a half or longer, whatever it was, for a Jewish holiday.
So the entire time the United States was debating how bad Ben Shapiro was, Ben Shapiro was one of the only people in the country, you know, the small group of Orthodox folks who had turned off their devices for the holiday.
And so he was the only one who didn't know the country was talking about what a horrible person he was.
And he tweeted, if you didn't see his tweet, where he wakes up to the news like, well, I guess we'll see what's done.
I don't know, it must have been the funniest thing.
Where he's saying, well, I've been offline for a while.
Let's see what the news is.
What the? To find out the news is about him.
Now, being semi-famous myself, I have also had the experience of waking up and checking the news to find out what the news is, and to find out the news is about me.
And I'll be, holy hell, I'm looking about, I want to see news about other people.
I didn't want to be the news.
So that was pretty funny.
Anyway, you should read the Daily Wire piece that I tweeted because it just pulls that article apart.
I don't know how the New York Times stays in business, honestly.
Bloomberg... Apparently Bloomberg has announced some big expensive Green New Deal climate initiative.
I don't know the details, but I guess he's putting up a lot of his money.
And it's to push energy that would be better for the planet.
But it doesn't mention nuclear.
So here's Bloomberg talking about putting vast amounts of his own money up to try to figure out how to combat climate change, and it doesn't mention nuclear.
What do you make of that?
I think you'd have to make of that that he's a fraud.
I hate to say that because I've been sort of a fan of his.
I liked his quirky, do whatever it takes, not too wed to one side or the other.
There was something about his independence that I liked.
But what do I make of the fact that he leaves out nuclear, and nuclear is, as far as basically anybody who knows anything about energy, would tell you that that's the only solution.
It's the only thing you left out.
If the only solution is the only thing you left out, you're not really a credible player, even with your half a billion dollars or whatever it is.
Now apparently one of his aides was asked about nuclear, and the answer from one of his aides, and here again, it's not even Bloomberg they talk to, it's an aide, and the aide had some kind of passive, noncommittal statement about, well, we don't dislike nuclear.
We're not completely opposed to it under the right situation.
That's my own words, not the aids.
But the sense of it was, Rather than saying, oh, we've kind of done a cursory view of what the big opportunities are, and it's obvious that nuclear is the only one that can work, therefore we're going to put a lot of emphasis on that.
That's what would have made sense.
That would indicate someone who had done their homework just a little bit, not a ton.
You don't have to do a lot of homework to find out that nuclear energy is the only way out of climate change disaster if you believe climate change disaster is coming.
And the aide just acts like, well, we don't completely rule it out.
Is that the bold leadership you want to see?
That the only thing that could work?
Well, we haven't ruled it out yet.
That's about as weak and I don't know what to make of it because here's what I think is happening.
So here's my hypothesis, and if my hypothesis is correct, you will see much of the same phenomenon.
So here's a prediction. Are you ready?
Prediction is this.
Number one, nuclear energy as the prime solution for climate change is guaranteed.
So this is prediction one.
That whatever people are saying about nuclear energy as a solution for climate change, it's becoming more and more of the conversation.
I think most of you would agree...
That a year ago, people were not talking about nuclear energy as the obvious solution for climate change as much.
People who knew stuff were talking about it, but the public wasn't kind of in that conversation yet.
But today, sitting here today, wouldn't you agree that the media has clearly made a turn?
There's a very clear turn.
You can see it in the reporting, the mentions of it, the frequency that Generation 4 comes up and all that.
And so here's the prediction.
The people who are associated with the left and even the right...
Are going to be in a condition where they know nuclear is the only thing they should be saying in terms of the primary solution, not the only thing we should do.
Because it makes sense to do solar, it makes sense to do wind, and at least try to iterate them to their best versions, no matter what.
So we should do all energy sources, but nuclear is the only one that's going to make a big difference.
You're going to find that people can't say they support it Because its reputation is so big, and there are still so many people who would be against it, and you wouldn't want to get that wrong, that you're going to have this weird situation, so here's the prediction, where people will, instead of coming out in favor of it, will come out, here's the prediction, people will start coming out not opposed to it.
It's going to look weird.
So instead of people saying, yeah, we should look pretty hard at nuclear, they're going to say, I'm not saying we shouldn't look at it.
Because nobody wants to say, nuclear is a good idea.
Why haven't we talked about it more?
I'm putting it right in my plan.
There is one and only one way to go.
Nuclear is the only way we know of that could possibly make a difference at the scale we need in time.
People can't say that because it would be such a big mental change from where they might have been even a year ago when they knew less about it, when they thought nuclear was dangerous before they learned that the technology has moved forward.
So look for that. That's the prediction.
Lots of people saying, I'm not saying we should not do it.
And fewer people saying, oh yeah, we should go do nuclear.
All right. Here's another one of my favorite stories of the day.
Chris Saliza on CNN. He's writing about the horrible, horrible, baseless speculation about Joe Biden's health.
He mentions on Fox News Kennedy and Hannity as two people who have mentioned the speculation of the possibility of the potential of Joe Biden might not be as healthy as he needs to be to run for office.
Now, of course, solicited the callback to questions about Hillary Clinton's health.
But here's the thing.
Wasn't everybody right about Hillary Clinton's health?
Was the public wrong about that?
It seems to me that when she collapsed at the 9-11 ceremony, and then her health was apparently not good enough to campaign as much as she needed to, and it probably cost her the election.
I count that as one of my most accurate predictions of all time.
Because I think I was probably in the top handful of people who said, I don't know about you, but she doesn't look healthy to me.
So I said that a long time ago, before it became popular.
And a lot of other people were saying it early as well.
Mike Cervich, for example.
But I think we were right.
Just because we don't know the full details of her health situation doesn't mean we weren't right, because it looked to me she didn't look like she had the stamina, and then she in fact demonstrated it by collapsing at a key point, having, she did in fact have allegedly had pneumonia.
So we were wrong.
Anyway, so that's the same speculation about Biden.
Now, let me say as clearly as I can, I personally don't see it.
So I do not see any sense that there's some kind of a health illness situation in particular.
What I do see, even from the video clips where you don't hear him talking so much, My impression, and I'm not saying this for effect, he looks like he's on his last legs.
To me he looks like a man who doesn't have much mental flexibility left.
He looks like he's struggling to run, let's say, run clips of best of Biden in his mind.
I think he's beyond the point Where he comes up with new ideas and puts them together in complicated ways and presents them.
I think he's just running recordings at this point.
So it's clips of things he said before that he can sort of still very well put them together in the order that turns into sentences.
But the cracks are shown.
And if you were to put Biden and Trump on stage at the same time, Your contrast is going to be just deadly for Biden.
Because Biden, if you see him all by himself, you can allow yourself the luxury of thinking, well, he's old, but he's still got it.
Looks like he could give us a few more good innings of pitching.
To use a baseball analogy.
But you put him next to Trump, and Trump's energy, he looks like he'll never die.
Trump looks like he's somehow, you know, living on the blood of young children or something, because he doesn't look like he's even aging.
He's not going to look even older at the end of his four years.
So that's a deadly...
But here's the funny part.
If Chris Eliza at CNN was concerned that the Fox News folks are starting to speculate about Biden's health, the worst thing he could do is write a big old article about how other people are speculating about Biden's health.
Because you know what that makes you do?
If you read an article that says you should not be speculating about Biden's health, it kind of makes you speculate about Biden's health.
There's no way around that.
So, Hannity...
This feels like more of a Hannity good play.
I think just bringing it up causes the other side of the political world to complain about the fact it was brought up, which just brings it up again.
So, I don't think CNN has yet mastered the art of focus.
What Hannity does well is he makes you think about something that he wants you to think about.
What the president does well is he makes you think about something that's good for him if you're thinking about that instead of other things.
So this is something that maybe CNN should have just avoided if they didn't want us to think about it.
But at the same time, CNN and the Democrats are playing the association game with John Dean.
Now, John Dean is a very old, let's see, what was he?
He was jailed at one part for his part in the Nixon-Watergate stuff.
I forget the details, doesn't matter.
But he was an attorney who went to jail for a while for whatever he did.
And apparently he's made a full-time career of writing books and complaining about Republicans being awful.
And watching, who was it?
Matt Gaetz was interviewing him in Congress, interviewing John Dean, and he asked, Have you made a career out of just criticizing Republican presidents?
And it was just devastating to see Matt Gage frame him as someone who doesn't do anything except criticize Republican presidents and say that they're worse than Watergate.
It really made him look like a silly, doddering old man.
I didn't see Jordan interviewing, but that would have been good, too.
Now, CNN, of course, is playing along with the Democrats who are trying to smear Trump simply by having characters and people and conversations about Watergate.
Any mention of Nixon or Watergate is good because then people associate it.
And indeed, I'm talking about it right now.
So the same way I was saying that CNN was talking about Hannity stuff, here I am talking about CNN stuff.
So the association thing works here as well for them.
But CNN's headline is that it says, Trump's Nixon-like numbers on impeachment.
Could you ever do anything more manipulative and skeevy as a news organization than to have a headline that says, Trump's Nixon-like numbers on impeachment?
First of all, impeachment's not going to happen.
Or at least if it happens, the Senate's not going to confirm it, whatever the legal terms are for that.
So it's not going to happen.
And whether or not there are Nixon-like numbers in terms of the polls, that would be because of CNN. It's because of the media that the polls are the way they are.
It's the most ridiculous thing in the world to see the media report on what the opinion polls say.
Because the opinion polls are what they create.
The news industry creates your opinions and then they measure them and they say, hey, look what those people think.
As if they didn't just give those people their opinions.
If the media wants the polls to change, they could just report the news differently, and they would.
Because the public is just reporting on what they see on the news.
So if the news says Trump has Nixon-like impeachment numbers, well, that makes it a little bit more likely that the next time they do a poll, somebody's going to say, well, I don't know the details, but I keep hearing he has Nixon-like poll numbers, so maybe I'd better agree with those people.
All right. Let's talk about Russia and all of their provocative, allegedly provocative actions.
I guess they're doing flight intercepts.
They've been intercepting U.S. flights in international waters.
They came too close to a Navy ship with their Navy ship.
So people are asking, what's up with this?
And here's the question I ask, and I'll ask this forever until somebody can give me a question.
Remind me again why we're having trouble with Russia?
Can somebody explain to me a path by which Vladimir Putin is saying, we'll do these things because we want to get to this place that's good for us, Russia, or even just good for Putin?
Can somebody explain that?
Because I feel like that used to exist.
You know, back in the Cold War, you could imagine that both sides were trying to hit each other as hard as possible to weaken the other one so we could do all the things we're going to do.
But what exactly is it that Russia wants to do that really would be good for Russia and we're trying to stop?
What is that list?
Can somebody show me the list of things that Russia wants that we somehow don't want them to have?
That they really actually want it in a sense that they're trying to get it.
There are things they might want in some general way.
But I don't understand, and the news is derelict and not explaining it to me, I do not understand why Russia and the United States don't want to be best friends.
Let me compare these two alternatives.
Alternative one. Putin says, you know, we've got a bad history with the United States, but as of today, we're just going to stop doing that stuff.
As of today, we consider ourselves a strong ally of the United States, and we're going to trade with you, and we're going to work with you internationally.
What would that do to Russia's economy?
It wouldn't make it worse, would it?
I would think that if Russia said we want to play well with the United States and the Allies, that Russia would save money on defense.
Right? They'd save money on defense.
They would have more trading opportunities.
Everything would be better.
Now, so somebody's saying pride.
I'd like to see the facts connected such that Putin would risk Half of his GDP for pride?
When President Trump is clearly saying, look, I'll give you all the respect you want.
You just have to play nice.
I think President Trump is very clear that if Putin just acts like a good player, he's got all the respect he could ever have in the world.
It's very clear that Trump is offering that.
Should Putin play?
So here's my problem.
When I see these reports of Russia doing things that could start a shooting war, I mean potentially, I think the odds are low.
But how does that make sense?
And why can't the news business, who should try to put things in context for me, why can't they describe it?
Watch for the next time there's some general or pundit or expert who's on one of the news shows, and somebody asks them, why is Russia doing this?
Watch how their explanations sound like word salad.
They don't make any sense.
Because I recently heard, I can't remember who it was, some pundit, general, expert, and when he tried to explain why Russia's doing this, it all fell apart.
It wasn't even slightly coherent.
Because it doesn't make sense compared to the alternative.
Now, here's the way that they fool you specifically.
People on the news, pundits especially, like to speak as though the alternatives don't exist.
They'll just talk about the one thing they're talking about.
So they might say, Putin's testing us in all these different ways internationally because they want to poke us.
They want to get some advantage. They want to weaken us.
Okay, so let me say that I accept that that's what they're doing.
They're trying to weaken us by poking us in a variety of different ways to get slight advantages psychologically, etc.
How does that compare to business case opportunity number two of being nice to us and doing trade and not spending as much on military?
How are they even close?
Seriously. Are they even close...
In terms of benefit for Russia.
They're not close.
If you look at the sanctions, you look at trading opportunities, etc., Russia should be acting as friendly as possible.
Right now we're having this conversation with Germany.
Should Germany be accepting as much natural gas, I guess it is, from Russia?
Because that puts them in a weak position, because Russia can control their energy.
The only reason that Germany has this problem is because they perceive Russia as being, you know, maybe an enemy.
Well, why doesn't Russia just maybe do something about that?
Why don't they say, you know what we'd really like to do is sell a lot of gas.
So why don't we just be your friend, and then you can buy all our gas.
You won't have to worry about it.
We've got lots of gas. Have some gas.
Alright, so...
Don't believe anything you hear about Russia until you hear at least one pundit Argue that there's some reason that they're not being friendly with the United States.
So somebody's prompted me to talk about the New York Times and other people are saying that the so-called Mexico tariff-inspired deal is a fake because most of that stuff was agreed on before.
I don't know. It seems to me that whether it was agreed on before or not, it wasn't happening.
So that seems like an important distinction, right?
You know, if you're saying, hey, what Mexico agreed to, they had already agreed to back in March in these secret agreements, so there's nothing new here.
But if you agree to something in March, and we're having a conversation in June about maybe you should do the thing you agreed to do in March, I'm going to conclude that whatever you agreed to in March wasn't going to happen.
Obviously, they needed a little bit of a push because they showed up within, what, 24 hours or something.
They'd booked a flight to Washington to negotiate this thing.
It's obvious to me that...
That the pressure made a difference.
Now, of course, you can never compare what would have happened without pressure to what did happen with pressure.
And this is, again, the trick that the media does.
They give you the story without the comparison.
You can't compare. Nobody in the world can say what would have happened under the other conditions.
Nobody can say that because we didn't have that test.
We didn't have We didn't play out another reality under the other conditions.
It never happened, so we can't compare it.
Alright. Somebody says in the comments, it's the difference between getting engaged versus actually getting married.
Or maybe it's the difference between getting married and consummating the marriage.
Yeah, let's talk about Bill Maher.
He was actually next on my list.
So, Bill Maher is like the canary in the coal mine.
In the sense that there are very few people in the world who you could trust would change their mind on a political topic.
And now, I've been no fan of Bill Maher's political opinions about Trump, although I've been a fan of Bill Maher's show for years.
He puts on a good product.
And I separate that from the political views.
The product he produces every week is very good, and I've watched it for years.
And I'm glad I was on his show.
But he is one of the few people who is capable of saying, you know, yesterday I thought X, but then, you know, these new facts came out, now I changed my mind to Y, and here's why.
Very few people in the whole planet who are well known anyway can do that.
He just happens to be one of them.
Now, if you see him changing, it's a pretty big deal because it means that there's something out there that matters.
There's something out there that's big enough that would change somebody's mind.
One of the things that Bill Maher said when he was talking to Chris Cuomo, he was on, I guess, Chris Cuomo's show maybe last night.
Bill Maher complained that the facts don't matter and that we can't even agree on basic facts.
Now, do you remember when was the first time that Bill Maher heard facts don't matter?
I suppose he's heard it lots of times, but that was my primary message when I was on his show.
And in those simpler times, back in, was it 2016 or 15?
I'm not sure. I think it was 2016.
Back then, it was more of a controversial statement.
So when I said clearly and unambiguously that people won't use the facts to make a decision, It seemed like sort of a provocative thing to say, and now it's an ordinary thing to say, which I also predicted.
I predicted it would go from a fringe thought that nobody is rational and nobody uses information to make decisions.
I thought that would be a weird fringe, sort of out there thought that would become a mainstream understanding within the Trump administration, and that's exactly what happened.
So seeing that change is important, because it means that That Marr is understanding that the factual level has a modest effect on how people operate.
And he acknowledged that he thinks people look at strength and that if they see more strength than of Trump and less strength than of a competitor, the strength will dominate the decision, not the policies and the facts and the details, which I agree with.
with.
I think that largely that's true.
But he also, Bill Maher also said that Hillary committed obstruction of justice with the destroying of the disks and the phones and And I thought, well, there you go.
That's what I'm talking about. How many people are anti-Trump?
And we'll say in direct language, but it's also true that Hillary Clinton obstructed justice.
And here's why.
He might be the only person in the world, as far as I know.
Can you think of one other person who holds both of those opinions?
Well, who's famous, I guess.
A lot of you hold those opinions, but among famous people, it's a rare opinion.
So I would keep an eye on Bill Maher.
Because it feels like he's at something like a turning point where he's understanding that his viewpoints on Trump have been largely a hate-based opinion and that the facts are not lining up.
With where the earlier, let's say, hate-based opinions of Trump, because he does make people hate him.
You know, for every person who loves him, there's going to be at least one person who says, I like him less.
So I think Bill is turning, and I hope we all give him the room to do that, because I think a lot of people are going to turn when Trump gets re-elected.
Now, as I've said before, I believe that the Democrats have given up on 2020.
I think that they know that they're not going to win 2020, or they think it's a low chance.
They'll still try if it's easy, but I think they know there's a low chance of anybody beating Trump with this economy, etc.
And especially with the candidates they have.
So I just don't know that you're going to see much energy for Biden or anybody else.
Although I would be surprised if Biden gets it all the way to the nomination.
So I would say it would be unlikely for Biden to be the final one.
Somebody said, talk about Andrew Yang.
Yes, I will. Andrew Yang is interesting.
He is interesting. Now, he did say something, so full disclosure, he did make some comments that seemed racist to me.
I don't know how to define them any other way, but he's made some gross generalizations about white people wanting to target maybe Asians because Asians...
are over, let's see, over-represented in college, for example, and having more success than other people, and that that might make people resentful and want to dislike them.
And that feels like a fundamental, you know, misunderstanding.
Maybe somebody can help me here, because this is just an opinion, it's not a fact-based thing, but it feels to me that the average conservative Is pretty happy when anybody works hard, goes to school, follows the law, and is successful.
Have you ever met a conservative who had a bad opinion about somebody of any race, any gender, any ethnicity?
Have you ever seen a conservative who thought less of somebody who followed all the rules, stuck to the Constitution, stayed out of trouble, studied hard, got a job, and succeeded?
Maybe. Maybe. You know, I've often thought that I wanted to teach a class on what I call black strategy.
I'm sure I'd get in trouble for even talking about this, which is why I haven't done it yet.
And the idea is this.
That if you're black in America and you want to succeed, most of the rules of success are exactly the same for everybody.
So 90% is all the same.
Work hard, stay in the trouble, don't get pregnant, don't get anybody pregnant.
So there's a lot of basic stuff that's true for everybody.
But there's some special things.
That I think the black population has a blind spot for because everybody has a blind spot for how other groups think.
So, you know, everybody has a blind spot for how a different ethnic group thinks, the other gender thinks.
We all have our own blind spots.
But it's worse if you are black in America because your blind spot is about white people And white people have control of a lot of the jobs and opportunities.
So, misunderstanding what white people care about is a big problem, strategically, because it makes your strategy less effective because you're trying to influence people to give you jobs and opportunities to buy your products, that sort of thing.
You're trying to influence a group that you have a blind spot about.
And I've often thought, well, what if I just taught a class or wrote a book or something to teach people who have that blind spot how to get past the blind spot?
Not by really understanding how other people think exactly, but at least have it explained to you so you can navigate it better.
For example, If you thought that you were going to apply for a job at a company where you were worried there was a bunch of white people who worked there and that they might be bigots, what would be your best strategy?
Let's say you thought it was a bunch of conservatives.
You walked in and the office TV was tuned to Fox News.
You're an African-American man.
You walk in and you're like, oh, I want to work here, but man, how do I convince all these conservatives?
Well, I'll tell you how. You walk in and you mention your church.
You mention your church.
And if you don't belong to a church, join one.
Assuming that that's compatible with your beliefs.
Join a church and talk about it.
Wear a nice suit.
Here's another idea.
So the first thing is, if you think you're talking to Your classic, you know, white, older male or conservative or older female or just female, it doesn't matter what your age is.
If you think you're talking to a conservative, mention your church.
You don't have to rub it in anybody's face, just mention it.
You're immediately on the same page.
The glass ceiling just fell apart.
So you're worried about, like if I'm black, I can't get past that ceiling?
Mention your church to a conservative.
I spend a lot of time, I work with my church.
Bam! The ceiling just evaporates.
Now, if you're black and you don't know that, that just mentioning your church to some conservative is enough to completely shatter all of the boundaries, here's another one.
Mention your love of the Constitution.
I mean, I don't know how you work it into the conversation, but you'd probably find a way.
Mention your love of the Constitution.
You don't even have to agree on how it's interpreted.
But conservatives want somebody who's going to play by the same set of rules.
Well, the Constitution is the set of rules everybody likes.
Mention it. Let me give you the greatest suggestion.
This is so powerful that I almost am afraid to mention it.
It's so powerful as an influencer, and I don't know if the black community completely understands this about your typical conservative white person.
If you do a favor for the typical conservative white person, They will be almost obsessed with paying back the favor.
You can control somebody's behavior almost entirely by being nicer to them and more generous than the situation called for.
Now, if you don't understand that about adult white conservatives, how would you deal with them?
Right? It's a simple formula.
Now, why is it that I, as a typical white person, could go into an interview with another typical white person and have a good result?
Is it because I'm white?
Well, that's a little bit of it.
I'm sure that helps, right? People are always more comfortable with whoever's most like them.
But on top of that, I would know And I do this routinely, and by the way, people do this routinely with me, and it works very well.
They will simply offer me something that I didn't ask for, something that really had value.
So if you're in a job interview and something comes up, and you haven't even gotten the job, you could say, you know, I'll tell you what, I could do this thing for you or give you this information or connect you to this person, and you just offer it for nothing in return.
Every white conservative wants you on the team if you've offered something for nothing in return.
That's the magic sauce.
I'm afraid to even tell people this trick because it's so powerful you can change people's behavior like that.
It'll work. Well, let me say this.
If you do this with somebody and it doesn't work, like they don't respond to it, you don't want to work with that person anyway because they don't get it.
So, it either works, and you've joined a good team because people understand reciprocity, or it doesn't work and you don't want to join that team anyway.
You don't want to be in a team with somebody who doesn't even know how reciprocity works.
It's magic. Alright, so strategy, I'd love to teach a class on it.
Somebody's asking for similar tricks for liberals.
I'll have to think about that.
All right. I love the story about Alyssa Milano.
Reportedly, I waited a while because I wasn't sure this was real news, but enough people are talking about it.
I think it might be real.
And that is that actress and activist Alyssa Milano We've convinced the Biden campaign by contacting them personally to change Biden's views on the Hyde Amendment, I guess, an abortion question.
And so people are saying, my God, this...
This candidate Biden is so weak that some actress calls him and he changes his mind.
I think we're seeing this all wrong.
I've been saying for a while that social media is essentially the government now because social media tells us what to think and then what we think gets translated into the news and it gets translated into polls and it gets translated into political action.
But the government is no longer People who got elected and sat in rooms in Washington and worked things out and then told the people what they decided and tried to get their buy-in.
That was the old model.
Now opinions are created on the internet, and they're assigned to people.
You know, in the media and the internet are sort of working together.
And then the politicians sort of have to do what the public is forcing them to do.
So social media is the real power, and the people who are most influential on social media Or the biggest power within the biggest power.
Within that category, we have Alyssa Milano.
She's used the internet and social media to perfection.
So I know you're going to want me to dump on her because you don't agree with her opinions.
But I'm just going to separate from the opinions and tell you this.
If you're still complaining that Alyssa Milano is just an actress and she should butt out of it, You're way off base.
Alyssa Milano has changed her power, I guess.
So she is no longer Alyssa Milano just the actor or actress.
She is an activist.
She is successful.
She is powerful.
She is influential.
She's the real deal.
You want to dislike her because you don't like her opinions on stuff, and I get that.
And you're welcome to that.
But she is effective.
She is sincere.
She's putting in the time.
She's putting in the energy.
You don't want to underestimate her because apparently she just changed a major political platform piece.
That wasn't a coincidence.
It's not a coincidence that she's developed this much influence.
She worked for it.
She did it the hard way. She took the risk.
She took the arrows.
Think of the pain. Think how much abuse Alyssa Milano has put up with over her public opinions.
Gargantuan. I mean, more than most people, certainly.
So, I would say that independent from her opinions on politics, and I stay out of the abortion stuff especially, I would say that her participation is In the best tradition of America, I would say she's a patriot.
You hate that, right?
You could disagree with her completely, but she's a patriot.
She's working the system, she's involved, she's trying to make a difference, she's trying to make the world a better place, she's capturing our attention, and she, in fact, moved the needle.
I don't know. I have to respect that, even if I might disagree on some topics.
Now, keep in mind that, at least with the abortion topic, she picked a topic which she can understand.
So she's not saying, you know, if Alyssa Milano were out being active about, let's say, TPP or the trade negotiations with China, I'm not sure I would have the same feeling.
But I don't think she is.
Is she? I don't see Alyssa Milano leaving the field of topics where you really can understand them.
You can understand guns.
You can understand abortion.
There are a lot of things you can understand.
Climate change is a hybrid because of the skepticism and the complexity of it.
But anyway, I give her A-plus for being a good American, even if she's persuading in a way you don't like.
Is the Hyatt Amendment something men can weigh in on?
I'm not interested in that question.
Let me restate my opinion on the whole abortion thing.
That no matter what the laws are, half the country is going to be mad and say it's an abomination, like a serious abomination, no matter what the law is, if it goes left or if it goes right.
So the best you can do is have a law that people are willing to put up with, even if they're on the losing side, the side that didn't get the things they want.
So you need to make them happy to have a stable society.
It's not good enough to make the people happy who got what they want.
And the only way to do that is to make sure that the people who were involved in the decision, are the people with the highest credibility.
And if women as a majority want the laws either way, That's the most credible situation for those laws.
Now people want to attack me by that point by extending it to something ridiculous.
So they say, Scott, would you take that same thinking that men or women should recuse themselves from the decision, would you take that to other topics?
To which I say no, because there's no other topic like abortion.
Abortion has a very specific life and death situation in which our energy and our caring about it are through the roof.
Nothing else is like that.
If there were another situation where society might be ripped apart by getting a non-credible law, I might have the same opinion, but it's just not like any other thing.
And as soon as you say, Scott, but would you take that same thinking to this other situation?
The answer is... It's a different situation.
The thinking that I take to a different situation is it's a different situation.
Start from scratch, look at the pluses and the minuses.
Yeah, everybody wants to win on abortion by words.
The people you should not pay attention to on the topic of abortion are the ones who are trying to win by definitions.
So if somebody will say, well, I define it as a life, therefore I define it as murder.
That's not a reason.
Those are just the definitions you put on words.
Somebody else says, I define it as not alive, and therefore I define it as not murder.
Well, there was no thinking, no reason, no facts there.
It was just two people using words differently and acting as if that meant something.
So abortion is largely a fake debate in the sense that people are trying to win it with words instead of win it with reason.
Which is not to say, and I've said this before, that the moral argument is squarely on the conservative side.
If the only thing that mattered in the world was morality, you would say, well, we don't know if it's life or not life, but you wouldn't take any chances.
So the most moral thing you could do is act as if it's all life and life is precious.
That's the most moral thing you could do, no doubt about it.
But morality is not the only factor.
There are other factors and other considerations, and one of them is who gets to make the decision and what are the economic and other consequences of all this, social consequences.
They all count. And on the practicality level, the left has the best argument.
So if the only thing that mattered to you was whether something is practical and economical and good for adults, They have a great argument, but the moral argument's on the other side.
So you have two irreconcilable points of view, and I'm happy to take the lead of women collectively on that topic, because that's the most credible situation, even if I personally disagree with it.
Somebody says, where are the father's rights?
Well, when it comes to money, I think men have a say.
So that's the part that I can say for sure.
All right.
I lose all of my followers when I talk about this topic, and it's not fun anymore, so I'm not going to talk about it anymore.
So I'll just put in a closing statement that my...
Oh, this is actually interesting, a different topic.
I'm writing an experiment, and we'll see if I can check on that today.
So, you know, there was a helicopter crash in New York, and I wanted to do an experiment to see on, let's say, citizen journalism.
And the experiment was this.
I offered that I would pay $500 For anybody who would go on my startup's app, Interface by WinHub, and sign up as an expert.
So you can be an expert or you can be somebody who buys the time of the expert.
And let's see if anybody did this.
And they said if there were witnesses to the helicopter accident, that I would pay $500 just to talk to them.
And it didn't even have to be publicly.
So I don't have a sign up yet.
But the idea was this. Imagine, if you will, there's some big national event.
It could be a tragedy. It could be something.
And let's say you're a rich person and you thought, I want to get the news directly.
I actually want to talk to somebody who's standing there.
At this big event, whether it's a tragedy or anything else.
Well, if those people knew that they could just sign up on my app and they could set their price, it could be zero if they just want to get their story out, but it could be $1,000 if they have the best story in the world and they were standing right there when something happened.
And so people like me, I would pay, in many cases, a few hundred dollars just to talk personally Without exchanging any private information because we wouldn't have to.
No private information.
I wouldn't have anybody's phone call or vice versa.
But the app would connect us and I could say, what did you see?
And I could find out the news before the news on TV even knows because I'll be talking to somebody who was there.
Likewise, I wanted to see if I could create a news source that's a commercial news source.
So I'm trying to create the idea that there will always be a demand for telling your story on my app, even if I'm the one who creates the demand.
So right now, if even one person in New York City who was, let's say, in the building when the helicopter hit, if they simply signed up for the app, I would contact them and they would give $500.
So the demand exists.
You don't have to worry if anybody else would ask you.
Because I just said, I'll pay $500.
First person who comes on here and is an eyewitness to that helicopter accident, $500.
Now, you don't even have to do it on Periscope.
You could just take the call from me personally.
And I can validate whether you're the real thing or not before you get much money.
So the name, the app is called Interface by Wenhub.
If you just search interface, it'll pop up on the app stores.
It's been there for a while. Works real well.
Somebody says, would you envision police using it for informants?
That's interesting. Probably not because it does create a digital record and probably informants don't want to do anything except talking in person, is my guess.
So anything that's digital is going to make people skittish, even though we don't exchange information.
Alright, so let's see if we can create that model.
So you get stories, but I doubt the validity.
Yeah, but it's just like the real world, isn't it?
That you would have people who might be pretending to know what they do.
But here's the standard that I would suggest.
So I was going to do this if anybody answered it.
I was going to say, if you say you were in the building, Since it's a video call, I would say, can you show me a picture of your ID for the building or a photo that you took standing there or a selfie that you took in front of the burning building or something like that.
So I would ask people, To give me some credible information that would tell me they were really there and it's a real person.
And the call doesn't start for, I forget where we sent it, a minute or 30 seconds.
So you have a little bit of time to decide if the person is real.
Now the other thing you could do is you could agree to a low cost or even zero connection and then once you've decided who they are, you can use the app to send them a donation.
So you don't have to agree to pay in advance.
You can hear what they have to say.
And you can say, look, if I like what you said, you're really who you say, I'll give you X dollars.
And then you can just send it as a donation.
So you have a number of ways to do this.
All right. That's all for now.
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