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July 12, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:10:28
Episode 595 Scott Adams: The Census, Tech Summit, @Pulte #TwitterPhilanthropy, Climate Change
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Everybody, sing along!
Okay, if you forgot the words, it doesn't really matter, because the words are P-U-M, P-U-M, P-U-M. I know why you're here.
You're here because it's another great day.
A great day.
One of the best days.
If you were to compare today to all the other days, Top shelf.
One of the best. And that's because you're going to start your day with a dopamine hit that's going to just...
I don't know.
It's just going to last all day.
It's going to feel great.
It begins with a simultaneous sip.
And you know what you need.
That's right. A cup or a glass or a mug.
A stein, a tank or a chalice.
Could be some kind of a...
Thermos. Could be a flask.
And for our men and women in the armed forces, a canteen.
Could be a vessel of any kind.
But join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
I see in the comments that somebody has been misspelling pum pum pum pum pum.
It is not with a B as in boy.
No, no.
It's with a P as in Paul.
Pum pum pum pum pum.
There's so much news.
Let's get to it.
You all saw the excitement yesterday when Bill Pulte announced his hashtag Twitter philanthropy.
He was giving away over $100,000 to people who just said they needed it for real good reasons.
And he's already started giving away gifts of, you know, a thousand, several hundred, et cetera.
A number of other people, Mark Schneider, I think I just saw a few other people who said, Yeah, I'll give $100.
I'll give $300.
So people are starting to jump in.
But the most exciting one is that apparently Kanye West is in.
But Kanye, instead of vetting each individual person's request, which is a lot of work, seems to have delegated that To Bill Pulte's group who will be doing the vetting.
So Kanye West in for $250,000, which he'll get some help distributing.
How about that, huh?
So the world is so small.
So Bill Pulte has this idea.
He starts tweeting around with his phone.
I think the entire technological requirement of everything he's done was the phone that was already in his pocket.
That's it. That was the entire technological requirement, you know, that plus the Internet, to do what he wanted to do.
And the next thing you know, he's got the President of the United States retweeting him.
The Internet is lighting up.
People are giving it away. And more importantly, people are feeling good.
They're just feeling good about the whole thing.
And I think the psychology of it is the important thing.
And you should also look at where does this go?
What door does it open?
What does it make us think about differently?
And I want to give you a glimpse of what I think might be the future.
This is something I've talked about before, and it's part of this direct giving model that Bill Pulte is pioneering here on Twitter.
But I think this could even go someday to the next level.
Wouldn't you like to see an app In which a poor person or just somebody who's struggling at the moment needs a specific amount of small amount of money just to get out of the hole.
If they can just get out of the hole, they can do the rest.
Maybe they just need to finish a class, take a trading class.
Maybe they just need to pay off a bill or have somebody watch their kid, something like that.
But imagine, if you will, Any poor person could use an app and put in, essentially, a funding request.
Now, GoFundMe isn't quite the model because that's for bigger projects.
But how about something for somebody who has a job in another state?
They've landed a job, but they can't get there.
They can't afford it.
Would you pay I don't know, $1,000.
Maybe most of you would not, because money's tight.
But let's say if you're rich...
Would you pay $1,000 if all you had to do is push some buttons on your app and you could see the profile, the picture, the full request, maybe even tax returns, whatever it takes, that there's some person who just needs help.
And maybe you could push a button and you could talk to that person so you could find out if they're real.
How about that? You just push a button and talk to them.
Say, okay, are you real?
I just want to talk to you for a minute.
Because if you are real, I'm going to give you the money that you wanted.
No strings attached. It's not a loan.
It's just a gift. Imagine what that would do to the world.
Imagine every person who needs something can put it in a little app and the world can see it.
And then you can decide whether to help that person.
Maybe you get some updates on how things go.
Wouldn't that feel good? Maybe you get regular updates to the app.
That gift that you gave to Bob, he's back at his feet, he got his teeth made, he's out of trouble now.
It would be amazing.
All right. You saw that Trump came out against cryptocurrencies yesterday.
Did you see that? So Trump made a pretty strong stand that the U.S. dollar is the only real money.
I think he was specifically going after Facebook's idea for their crypto, the Libra.
But he was talking in general about Bitcoin, etc., Now, what did that do to Bitcoin?
Let us look, because it changes so often.
I have to look every moment to find out.
Bitcoin is up.
So the President of the United States says crypto is crap, and it increases in value.
Possibly because he drew attention to it, right?
But there are a lot of people in the crypto world.
I may have this wrong, so fact check me on this, but I think I saw that Mike Cernovich came down pretty hard on the president for that opinion, essentially indicating that it was backwards and under-informed.
Now, my take on all crypto, whether it's Bitcoin or my own startup's crypto, which is a token, not a coin, called the WEN, I don't know if anybody knows.
I don't know that there's anybody smart enough in the entire world to know what's going to happen with crypto.
I'll say one thing that I'm completely confident about.
There will be cryptocurrencies in the future, and people will use them, and some of them will be very successful, whether that continues to always be Bitcoin or Ethereum or something else.
But I'm sure there'll be something.
We just don't know what. This reminds me very much of...
And by the way, I've said this before.
If a new country formed today, if somebody could just start a country from scratch, from empty land, and they could make up all their own rules, one of the rules you would make up is you would get rid of cash money, because cash money is behind almost all crime, if you think about it.
If we did not have physical cash, which is the only thing that's hard to track, Most crime would just go away because we would know where everybody is and what they're doing and they couldn't buy illegal guns.
They just couldn't do a lot of stuff.
So in the future, crypto has so many advantages that it's here to stay.
I think the president is...
I'm going to say he's right and wrong.
He's right to alert people that there's a big risk.
That's very fair.
If you don't get that, you could get yourself in trouble.
So I think that's a good service, to say there's a big risk.
It's just not for everybody.
But at the same time, something in that world, we don't know exactly what, will be around for a long time.
Probably Bitcoin. I will refer you back to what I call the Finman effect.
Finman being Eric Finman, the boy genius Bitcoin millionaire.
Who is prescient in his predictions, and one of his predictions...
By the way, he was one of the first people who saw President Trump coming before that was obvious.
But he's also made a call on Bitcoin not too long ago that Bitcoin was going to go on a run.
And almost exactly the time he made the call, boom!
Bitcoin has been on a pretty sustained run.
Let's talk about something else.
The tech summit happened yesterday.
At the same time the tech summit happened, Twitter coincidentally had a major outage worldwide.
It was out for an hour or so.
I don't know about you, but I felt disconnected in a way that was very unsettling.
You know, I'm completely aware of the fact that I'm addicted to social media, specifically Twitter.
I'm not addicted to any of the other social platforms, but I'm very addicted to Twitter.
And going an hour without Twitter and knowing that even if I wanted to check it, I couldn't, and not knowing when the outage would be over or what caused it, it was also unsettling to know why it was out.
It was very disconcerting.
I actually had a little mental anguish about that.
I was sitting in my backyard in my hammock on a perfect summer day.
The sun was out.
The temperature was ideal.
I had just the right amount of shade.
I'm in the hammock.
I'm under a lovely tree.
My trusty dog Snickers is next to me.
It was a perfect scene.
And as I'm in the hammock, I'm thinking to myself, I don't feel right.
I don't have access to Twitter.
What's wrong with me?
I've got to get out of this hammock.
Is Twitter up yet? Is Twitter up yet?
So, if you ever doubt the effect that the big tech companies have on you, I'll tell you, any doubt was I didn't know how this tech summit was going to go.
It really could have gone off the rails pretty easily.
There were just lots of ways things could have gone wrong.
And there weren't many ways.
If you look at all the ways it could go wrong and compare it to all the ways it could go right, the ways it could go right, that was a tight little hallway, right?
There were a lot of landmines there, right?
But my analysis is that it went right.
I think the president was really deft in the way he handled it.
I'll talk about that in a moment.
And I would also say that the organizers were very successful in managing the, let's say, the public impression of it.
Here's how. Have you seen any group photos of the event?
Because I haven't.
I think that there were no group photos.
Which was a very good idea.
It was very strong because the whole point of this gathering is that they invited the people who were the edgy people who were the first to experience any kind of bias.
Because the edgier you are, the more provocative you are, the sooner you're going to notice any social media bias.
So, of course, if you're having...
Let's put it this way. If you're going to have a...
Conference about theft on the high seas, you would invite pirates.
Because pirates are the only ones who know what's happening, right?
Pirates are the ones who are doing things on the high seas.
So, if you're going to talk about piracy, you invite pirates.
If you're going to talk about people who get possibly, let's say, shadow banned or throttled on the internet, Well, the only people who can talk about that are people who've had that experience.
And the people who are going to have that first are the people who are the most interesting, the most provocative, the most socially, let's say, socially non-mainline.
So, of course, that's who the group was.
That was the whole point.
Now, who can talk to a group of pirates, and I'll just say pirates in this generic way of people who are not doing what society wants them to do, who can talk to a group of miscellaneous pirates better than the President of the United States, this specific President, President Trump?
Nobody. Nobody.
Nobody feels more confident And more at ease in a room full of anything.
It's one of the things about this president.
Have you ever noticed him being uncomfortable in a room?
The only time he looks uncomfortable is when he's visiting the Queen in England.
He looked real uncomfortable with all the All the requirements of good etiquette.
But you throw him in any mixed crowd of who knows what, and he's perfectly comfortable.
And he was perfectly comfortable there and gave what I thought was a tremendous speech.
So here's another thing that the president did right.
I don't have the exact language.
Maybe somebody can put it in the comments.
So I'll paraphrase.
So here's the most...
The delicate thing he had to handle.
He had to handle the delicacy that some of the people he invited are not people he would necessarily endorse personally.
That's a very tight line, right?
Because he invited them, because they're supporters, because they have a legitimate complaint.
We don't know what's accurate and what's not, but it's a legitimate concern, let's say.
But he didn't want to say, therefore, I believe everything you believe, or your conspiracy theory is my conspiracy theory.
He didn't want to attach himself too strongly to all the various opinions there, because they were all over the place.
It wouldn't make sense. So he gives his speech and he says, I'm paraphrasing again, some version of this.
He looks at the crowd and says, you know, you're all amazing, incredible people.
And then in the same sentence, without stopping, he goes, not all of you.
I thought that was the most, that was like the best brain surgeon you've ever done.
Slicing just the smallest part of the brain off so he gets all of the tumor without affecting the brain.
The level of skill it took to thread that needle will never be appreciated because it was such a small moment in the larger tapestry of life that I don't think he will ever be recognized for how clever that was.
I'm saying it again. He looked at the crowd in person You could tell that he had affection for them.
So the first thing he did right was it was clear that he had genuine affection for this crowd.
He even talked about the things they produce.
He said, man, the crap you produce.
And he just laughs because he was saying a lot of it is just crap.
But it's funny crap.
It's creative crap.
It's well-intentioned crap.
He liked their crap.
He was even essentially calling it crap.
Not all of it, but some of it he said was crap.
At the same time, he was kind of happy about it.
Who could pull that off?
Really, who could pull that off?
And then he looked at the crowd, and he literally insulted them in such a funny way.
Not all of them. He said that, you know, you're great, you're amazing.
Well, not all of you.
And as soon as he said that, everybody felt like a moment of honesty.
Right? Because I think he does think a lot of the people in that group do great things and in fact got him elected.
They were a big part of it. So I think his gratitude seemed sincere.
I thought his affection seemed sincere.
And then somehow he actually gave himself some distance by saying, well, you're great.
Well, not all of you. It was really brilliant.
It was one of his best...
Public performances, I think.
But my favorite part about this was...
Oh, and the reason that it was smart not to have all the group pictures is because when you have that kind of a group, anybody who's standing next to somebody else becomes a news story.
It's like, wow, look who's standing next to somebody else.
And somehow they avoided all that.
Apparently there were some rules in place about who could be photographed.
The photos we've seen is of the backs of heads.
And then it's actually the best photo they possibly could have engineered.
It's the backs of heads of all the supporters, so you can't really tell who is who.
Perfect. And then the genuine, let's say...
Is that the right word?
No. Let's say the mainstream press are all forced to stand in the back.
They don't have chairs. And, of course, they're getting abused the whole time.
So that photo...
It was just perfect.
It was just perfect. So that was like A++ for how to handle that situation.
But here's my favorite part.
You know I'm going to talk about Sebastian Gorka, right?
So there was a writer for Playboy, a credentialed reporter, who was there, and I guess he yelled out something.
Maybe he wasn't happy about the reporters having to be in the back or something.
I don't know what it was. It doesn't matter.
But he got into it in the Rose Garden at this event with Sebastian Gorka, who you've all probably seen the clip by now, who started yelling at him that he was a punk and, you know, coming toward him like he's calling him out, you know, let's make this physical.
So it was the strangest scene to see, you know, a shouting match calling for essentially directly, indirectly calling for physical confrontation.
At this peaceful little Rose Garden event.
Gorka Hulk, somebody is saying.
Now, there's some, let's say, ambiguity or confusion about what actually happened.
It's a little unclear what the Playboy reporter, Karam, is that his last name?
It's a little unclear what he said, and it's a little unclear what he meant, because he said something like, take it outside, and Which I think Gorka interpreted as, let's go outside and fight, because his response to it was as if that had been said.
But then the guy who said it said, no, I didn't mean to go outside and fight.
What I meant was take the conversation outside or something like that.
Now, I have no opinion on who said what, what anybody meant, what anybody should have done.
I don't know. It doesn't matter.
Here's the part I love.
What's the only visual and the only video that's worth a damn that came out of the event?
Well, there's the president's speech.
That's always good for the president, because the focus was on him, and he was really magnificent in the way he worked that particular crowd.
That was just... Real strong performance.
But the only other thing that was a visual element, and the news needs visual, right?
It's not news if it's just a concept and you're talking about it.
It's boring news. Nobody wants to click it.
Nobody wants to see it. You need a picture.
And the only picture that anybody got out of that was Gorka yelling at a mainstream reporter who probably had it coming.
Now, You could argue that maybe Gorka overreacted or anything, but none of it matters.
None of it matters, to my point.
In terms of how we received this event, you saw Gorka yelling at a mainstream reporter.
You probably thought he had it coming.
You know, if you're a Trump supporter, you probably just assumed that.
I don't know if he had it coming or not.
All I know is that Sebastian Gorka got a lot of attention.
It's probably going to help his ratings on his show.
And it was his Salem radio.
He's on there. And it also sort of demonstrated a key theme of Trump supporters, which is don't back down, don't apologize.
That's sort of becoming the unofficial theme.
Don't back down, don't apologize.
You know, it'll never be a campaign theme and shouldn't.
But among supporters, you hear that a lot.
And he demonstrated that.
So he demonstrated it in a big visual way that you'll remember.
And I just thought it was sort of perfect.
Obviously it wasn't planned, but the only video that came out of that whole event was something that would totally entertain Trump supporters.
And other people would say, you know, it's just a guy yelling.
They wouldn't care one way or another.
So it was perfect. Accidental, but perfect.
All right. So, we got a decision on the census issue about whether the census would include the question about citizenship.
The president decided, and the attorney general, Barr, decided that because of logistics and timing and they had to get the census out and there was no way to work the process through the courts again to get the question on there, they knew they could.
And I think they're right about that, that if they'd gone through the process, they could get that question on there, but there wasn't enough time and they didn't want to wait.
So they decided. To take their temporary loss in the courts and rather than try to reverse it, which I think they would have succeeded at eventually, it would have taken too long.
So they decided to, the president issues an executive order to tell the rest of the government to provide their databases to the Commerce Department because the collective databases of all the different government entities will actually tell you who's a citizen.
Now, where did you hear that idea before?
Anybody? Anybody?
So... I'm just waiting to see...
Yeah, okay.
So I'm watching your comments now.
Right. So I'm pretty sure the first time you heard that as even a suggestion was from me the other day.
And I was noting that we probably don't need to ask people if they're citizens, as long as they're willing to tell us their name and where they live and that sort of thing.
If you have that stuff, you can compare it to your social security database.
And if they don't have a social security number...
Well, probably not a citizen.
Remember, the census doesn't have to be 100% accurate.
You're just doing the best you can.
Everybody knows it's an estimate in a number of different ways.
And sure enough, that was exactly what the administration decided to do.
Now, here's the funny part.
The funny part about this is that the opposition to putting that question on the census was entirely about that it would discourage people from filling it out.
Everybody banked on that reason.
The opposition, you know, who may not be legitimate in the sense that they automatically disagree with Trump no matter what the question is.
But what they had settled on is that putting that question in the census would make people not fill it out if they were afraid of being deported.
I'm not sure that's the case, but it was enough of a worry.
I think it was a legitimate worry.
But having the government just do it with its own data completely eliminates that problem.
It doesn't just eliminate it a little, it completely eliminates it.
Because people will just be saying stuff that they say all the time.
What's your name? Blah, blah. And there are some people estimating that doing it through the database will get you a much more accurate count.
So the president managed to find a solution that has no objections.
And is more accurate and completely feasible, as far as we can tell.
Now, we might find out later that it's harder than we think.
Maybe some parts of the government will resist.
Who knows? Maybe the databases are not that compatible.
But here's a...
I want to give you a thought. That forms the basis of my upcoming book that won't be out until November called LoserThink.
This is just an uncorrected proof.
This is not the actual book.
And one of the central themes of the book is that if you have experience in a number of domains, let's say economics and marketing, politics, whatever the domains are, If you have some experience in more domains, you can see the world more clearly than people who have only seen the world through one domain.
So, for example, I often say that reporters miss business concepts.
If you're a reporter, you probably came through a path of learning to write and literature, maybe had an English degree.
You haven't had a lot of experience being a manager or an entrepreneur in most cases.
And to me, that creates a blind spot because when they're covering business people, they don't quite always understand why they make the decisions they do.
And when they're covering President Trump, President Trump is the perfect example of someone who has experience across all kinds of domains.
He knows how to put it on the show.
He's done business, he's done politics, money, finance, you name it.
He's been involved in so many things that he's got some visibility on all those domains.
This is important. On the census question, we were all focused on the question of whether or not you could put a question on the form.
And it became like a magic trick.
Because a magician's trick is that while he's distracting you with this hand, the actual magic is happening with the other hand while you're not watching.
It's like, oh, I'm doing something with this hand.
Don't look, don't look. It's redirection.
Somewhat accidentally, the census question became a magic trick.
Because we were all focused on that question about citizenship question, yes or no, and it accidentally limited your thinking about alternatives.
Because the alternative of just using the databases you already have, it was always there.
It was always completely there.
There was nothing to discover.
The moment you heard it, let me ask you if this is true.
When I explained this idea the other day, the moment you heard it, did you say to yourself, oh God, that's right.
Yeah, why wouldn't that work?
Did you have a feeling like that?
Because you should have. Because it's completely practical.
And as soon as you hear it, you say, why weren't we talking about that before?
Here's the blind spot to get back to this concept of people having limited visibility because of the skill sets they have.
I would say that my experience in corporate America, in which my normal everyday job was often a discussion at the phone company about whether this database Could be compatible with this one.
What's the differences between these databases?
Why does our customer database not line up completely with the billing database?
Can we combine two databases to find something new?
Can we mine the databases to get something else?
If you had a corporate job, sort of a headquarters job, you probably had that sort of discussion a lot of times.
Let me see in the comments how many of you have had a day job You know, just your career, where you've routinely had the conversation about what's in the database, how do you get this out of a database, how do you compare these databases?
You know, look at all the yeses going by.
So here's my bottom line.
Because I have that experience, I'm automatically primed to ask the question, hey, do we already have a database with that information?
It's just automatic.
I would argue that if you had replaced all the people in government who were focused on putting a question on the census, if you just replaced them all, With a randomly selected people who just work in cubicles.
Just ordinary cubicle people who have ordinary cubicle jobs.
You just take them and say, okay, you're in charge of the government for a day.
You have no experience except your own experience, which is working in a cubicle for a corporation.
Now take care of the census thing.
It would have taken five minutes.
Am I wrong? In five minutes, somebody from the cubicle world would have said, have we looked at our databases?
You know I'm right, right?
It would have been obvious.
Anybody in a cubicle who had experience with looking at databases and trying to manage them, etc., which is most people, because it always comes up.
It's the most common thing that comes up.
They would have said, hey, maybe we already have a database.
Let's see what we already have.
How far can we get with that before we do something that's hard to do?
So I would say this was always hiding in plain sight.
It was hiding in plain sight, and that's what this book is about.
This is how you get in the bubble.
You get in the bubble and you stay there because you don't have vision through other lenses.
And whoever came up with the idea to use the databases in the government, I'm going to assume that it was an obvious enough idea that there's somebody in the administration who had the same idea.
I would think that that's somebody who probably had a little bit more business experience.
And when they told other people, the other people said, oh, why wasn't that obvious until you told me?
And then they implemented it.
So that was just a delightful little conclusion to that question.
All right. I got retweeted the other day by Ann Coulter.
Now, Ann Coulter does not follow me on Twitter, so it was unusual that I got a retweet, but of course the topic was about illegal immigration, so that was sort of in her wheelhouse.
And I don't know why I mentioned that.
I'll tell you why I mentioned it.
When you're on Twitter and you have a big account, you have all these weird little objectives that don't really have any purpose that you sort of keep in your mind.
And I always wondered, huh, I say so many things about Trump, you'd think that Ann Coulter would probably retweet me now and then.
So, to know...
To no important reason whatsoever, I was excited just because I'm a big fan.
So let me close that point by saying, whether or not you ever agree with what Ann Coulter says, and I often do not agree with her, she is a wonderful writer.
I would say one of the best writers this country has ever produced.
Just an amazing communicator.
So I respect her on that level, even when I don't agree on the details.
But I did a little Twitter poll the other day.
This is what she retweeted.
And, of course, a Twitter poll is non-scientific.
A Twitter poll doesn't tell you.
You can't rely on it for anything, right?
So we're not claiming that there's any science to this.
But I thought it was interesting.
And I asked the question, in your opinion, what is the biggest long-term, key words long-term, long-term threat to low-income people in the United States?
And I gave four choices.
Of course, there are lots of potential choices, but I wanted to see how people would select among these four.
And I said climate change, national debt, economic slowdown, or illegal immigration.
Now, of course, most of my Twitter followers are Trump supporters, and you should not be surprised that they said that the biggest threat to low-income people Was illegal immigration.
And they said that at a 70% level.
The other ones, climate change, 5%.
National debt, 10%.
Economic slowdown, 15%.
Now, of course, they all overlap, right?
You know, each of these influences the other.
And somebody said, hey, you left out drugs, etc.
Somebody says, what's my choice?
Good question. Oddly enough, I'm not sure I have one.
All of these things could end us, and they could all end us pretty quickly.
I'm not going to give you my opinion because it would sort of be a weird, boring mix of I wouldn't want to choose one.
It's all about risk management spread across multiple risks.
You don't want to hear that. So I'll just say this.
Here's what I was trying to get out of this survey.
What I was not trying to get out of the survey, and also the reason you don't need to hear my answer to it, is that I didn't really care what the right answer is.
So there's no right answer because we're not really good at predicting this sort of thing.
No right answer.
But I did want to know what the intentions were of the people who are Trump supporters.
Because I wondered if the intentions behind wanting a border wall We're purely crime, racism, whatever is the worst thing you can think of.
Or is there actually some altruism that's baked in there?
Now, I don't think this unscientific Twitter poll can get to that.
So I'm not going to say that we've concluded anything.
But I'm fascinated by the question of what do the people on the left think that the people on the right are thinking When they say we need strong border security.
What do they think they're thinking?
What do they think their intentions?
Well, their intentions, the people on the left, believe the intentions on the right are entirely racist.
I believe there are some people on the right whose intentions are sort of racist.
So certainly those people exist.
The David Dukes, etc., you know, might just want fewer non-white people.
So that's real. But by far, my impression is that it's some tiny minority and that other people are just sort of team players and they buy into the larger stated purpose that is good for the economy.
And good for the economy means very much good for the lower end of the economy, the people who need the help, who need the jobs.
And so... I would love to see if there were any way to create an actual scientifically, statistically valid poll.
I would love to see if you could tease out the intentions on the people on the right.
Because imagine you're a person on the left.
Let's say you're an African-American citizen of the United States, which I guess is the same thing as being African-American.
And you're looking at this border question.
And the people on the left, who are your people, for the most part, are saying, hey, these Republicans, they're all racist, and that's why they're doing it.
Now, what would you conclude?
If you're a black citizen in this country, what would you conclude?
I think you might look at it and say, yeah, you know, I'm a little suspicious of why they want this.
And if they're going to be prejudiced against immigrants, well, they're probably prejudiced against me too.
You know, a bigot's a bigot.
So I can imagine it would be easy to have that opinion.
But what would happen if black Americans...
Saw a valid poll that said that by far a huge majority of conservatives are primarily interested in employment and good economic outcomes for the people at the lower end, which is, you know, there's a greater concentration of African Americans in the lower end of the economic spectrum.
And the intentions behind that are really pretty good.
They're really pretty good intentions.
And I don't think that that question gets asked or answered.
You know, we have the discussion and, you know, people make their claims and other people make their claims.
But doesn't, if you're a black voter in the United States, doesn't it all come down to the intentions?
You think it comes down to the economics, the numbers, the crime.
You think it comes down to the data.
You think it comes down to the facts.
But not really. You know, we're not that kind of species.
Our species doesn't use facts to make decisions.
We make decisions because things feel right, and then we rationalize them with our facts.
That's who we are. If you're a black voter, don't you really want to know what conservatives are thinking?
Are they thinking, let's get a strong barker so we can keep out all the brown people?
Are they thinking that?
Some. Undoubtedly, some people on the right are thinking exactly that.
But what are most people thinking?
Because that's what you care about, right?
You don't care about the outliers.
You don't care about the pirates.
You don't care about the provocative people.
What do most people think conservatives' intentions are?
And is there any way to get to that?
Is there any way that if you're a black American, you could find some way that you would believe that That would tell you what the intentions are for most of it.
Again, there are going to be a portion of people who just have the intentions that you can't support.
But I think it's important.
I think it's an important question.
And let me give you a framing, suggested framing, for...
The people on the right.
Let's say you're the president and you want to sell your border security plan, whether it's a wall or just stronger border security, whatever it is, and you want black Americans to feel comfortable with the decision and to feel that their interests are being served.
How would you frame that?
Let me suggest this.
I would say that resources are limited.
So this statement everyone in the world agrees with.
Resources are limited.
The United States doesn't have unlimited resources.
We have to decide where to put it.
If we put it with illegal immigrants, that would be a very kind thing to do.
It's the sort of people we are.
Being kind to immigrants is who we are, and that's one of our choices.
We can be kind to people who are not citizens who want to come into this country.
With our limited resources, that's one of our choices.
But, I say to you, the black citizens of the United States, I choose you.
I choose you.
Resources are limited.
We could give it to people who are not citizens.
We could have more resources for people who are in this country.
I choose you.
That's a very powerful thing to say.
Because it's not just some concept.
That's personal.
It's not a concept. It's personal.
If you say, well, I'm looking at the numbers and the best thing for the economy in the long run and our GDP and our unemployment and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
People hear statistics, numbers.
They don't hear anything about intention.
It just sounds politics.
But if you say, money isn't unlimited, it's limited.
I can give it to these people and they're great people.
We love immigrants.
We're a country of immigrants.
Love them. But we don't have unlimited money.
I choose you. My limited money is going to go in your direction, if you don't mind.
Somebody's saying in the comments that Acosta just resigned.
I don't have a confirmation on that.
Maybe in your comments somebody can confirm it.
I would say that bordered on guaranteed, right?
Did anybody think he wouldn't be out of a job?
I think the heat was too strong.
I don't see there's any way that Acosta could have stayed in the job, so if he hasn't, who knows.
Let's talk about something else.
Let's talk about Epstein, since the Acosta thing came up.
The more we hear about Epstein, the less we know.
I mean, we know more and more about the allegations against him, but we don't know where he got his money.
And we don't exactly know why he got such a sweet deal in the first place.
We hear information.
We hear facts.
We hear explanations.
We hear rationalizations.
But I don't know why.
Do you? It feels like, and the rumors, of course, are that either he had some kind of blackmail over somebody important, or that he was an intelligence resource, or somehow he had some value, or he was a... What was the third thing?
An intelligence resource?
He was blackmailing people, or he'd helped law enforcement with Bear Stearns or something.
So going after some other group, and he got a deal for that.
Now we don't know. And I think that's a big deal.
It's a pretty big deal that we don't know why he got a good deal.
And it's an even bigger deal that we can't figure out where his money came from.
Now, if you were Epstein, and you watched the entire country concerned about where does money come from, and then of course all the legal stuff and the blackmail, wouldn't you, at the very least, tell people where your money came from?
Even if you were lying, right?
At the very least, you try to make a case that the money was legally made.
So you might say, well, I don't like to talk about it, but let's say I do this kind of work and I stay under the radar for good reasons, but this is what I do for a living.
He doesn't do that.
He's got some kind of weird hedge fund guy, but we don't know much about that.
So everything about this It is a little concerning.
And I'm trying to pull back my full opinion on this because I'm so aware that we don't know the real story here.
We certainly know that something bad happened in terms of the allegations, but we don't know the context because that other stuff might be equally bad as well.
Let's talk about the debate between Pelosi and AOC. Other people have covered it, and it's fun because watching AOC accuse Pelosi of racism, this might be the point, as they say in television, where the Democrats jump the shark.
That's an old TV saying, meaning that your show used to be good, but then you got crazy because you ran out of ideas.
So jumping the shark means you ran out of ideas.
So you start building crazy things into your plots for your TV show.
The Democrats appear to have jumped the shark because when they start accusing each other of being racists, that really reveals them to be frauds.
As long as the Democrats were united in calling Republicans racist, the worst you could say is that they were wrong about it or that most people weren't and they were exaggerating it.
But it was in the realm of normal politics, or at least normal the way we've come to expect it.
One side is accusing the other of being bad people, blah, blah, blah.
But as soon as the Democrats start blaming themselves for being racist, and even the Republicans are looking at it and saying, did you just call Nancy Pelosi a racist?
Because I'm pretty sure she's a lot of things.
We may not agree with all of her policy preferences, but even the people on the right are saying, come on, Nancy Pelosi?
A racist? Say what you will about Nancy Pelosi, and Republicans have said a lot, but even Republicans can't get on that bus.
Even they're saying, ah...
You know, we'd love to join you, AOC, in criticizing your own leadership, but even we can't go there.
I mean, that's so batshit crazy that even we can't jump on just for fun.
I mean, even for entertainment, we can't agree with that.
So, I feel as if that might have been...
We might look back at it and see that as an important point.
In other words, the cries of, you're a racist, you're a racist, you're a racist, which is the entire fuel of the Democratic Party, when they're not saying misogynist, it's the entire fuel of their party, it looks like it just, you know, flamed out.
You know, maybe it just goes on forever like a zombie idea, and I would say there's a good chance of that, but maybe, just maybe, we saw a turning point there, and it was somewhat accidental.
Here's one of my favorite bits of persuasion yesterday, and it came from Twitter.
So as I mentioned before, Twitter had this major outage.
The entire world was talking about it.
It was, you know, headline news.
If you turned on, you know, Fox or CNN, they were talking about Twitter's outage.
There were millions of us all over the world, hundreds of millions, looking at our phones, trying to refresh.
What's wrong? What's wrong? It was a big, big story.
And if you're Twitter...
And the tech summit is happening, and it's the biggest story in the world that you went out, and then you get your system up, what's the first thing you say?
Well, if you're a normal company, normal meaning boring, you say, well, we had this sort of outage, and our servers were doing this, and we're so sorry, and we love our customers, and we're doing what we can to be more reliable in the future, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, bore me to death.
That would be what a normal company would do.
Twitter writes two words.
Miss us? And even funnier, and even better, the M in miss us wasn't even capitalized.
They made the statement, the smallest the statement could be, two words, not even capitalized.
Miss us? Miss us?
It was brilliant.
So, compliments to whoever it was at Twitter who's in their messaging department.
I guess they probably have some communications staff.
But whoever it was who came up with that idea to minimize the statement to really so personal that you can't not love that.
You cannot love that.
It was just perfect.
Because what it does is by going so small, say, miss us?
It turned that whole thing into a personal event.
You know, it started now as a corporate event and we're the customers or the users, I guess.
And And that's one level of how to think about it.
But when the response comes up, it was so personal, I felt like a connection to it.
So this is, again, this is the sort of thing that nobody's going to write a book about.
Nobody but me will even mention it again.
But it was genius. I don't know who it was.
Just one person probably who said, why don't we just say...
Miss us? And then probably somebody said, let's not even capitalize the M. Like, I would love to have been in that meeting when it was discussed because somebody is really, really smart at this stuff.
So I'd love to know who that was.
All right. Tom Steyer, as you know, has announced he's going to run for president or likely to run.
I don't know. But does anybody have less charisma than Tom Steyer?
Have you ever seen any human being who had less likability than that guy?
And I welcome him to the fight because, I don't know, it's just going to be something fun to watch.
He certainly can't become president, but it'll be very fun.
I was watching Aaron Burnett.
She did a monologue talking about the tech summit and some other stuff.
And the reason I pointed out was it was basically a monologue that was anti-Trump.
And Trump did this, Trump did that, blah, blah.
And I watched her face, the pained expression in her face.
She could almost not keep her eyes open.
She seemed so upset that her eyes weren't even normal.
They were squeezed with some kind of distress.
Now, I'm not a doctor, so I'm not going to diagnose anybody's inner thoughts, but I will tell you that as a consumer of the news, The impression that she sent me, and again, I don't know what her inner thoughts are.
This is not a medical diagnosis.
But the thing I received was mental health.
That she has an actual, I don't mean some kind of permanent mental health problem, but on this topic, it didn't even look a little bit normal.
Because she couldn't keep her face in the normal zone.
There was some kind of personal anger or stress that was informing what she said that completely stepped on whatever she said.
Like, I don't even remember what she said.
But I remember she looked like she was having an actual psychological trauma.
Now, again, there's no medical diagnosis here.
I'm not a doctor. I'm just saying how it was received.
So the only thing I can talk about is how it felt to me as a listener, and it was striking.
I mean, it was actually hard to watch because it seemed like...
And whatever it was she was saying was so weak and ridiculous that the words didn't even matter.
They didn't even sound rational.
So it doesn't even matter what she said.
All right. I heard a good nickname.
I'm hearing these nicknames for AOC and her three freshman radicals who get lumped together.
And was it Lindsey Graham who referred to them as the Fab Four?
And I thought, Fab Four?
Yeah, maybe. It's a clever nickname, but it's not really a great one.
And then I heard on Tucker Carlson's show...
He referred to AOC and her three other freshman radicals there as the four morons of the apocalypse.
The four morons of the apocalypse.
I gotta say, that's pretty, pretty good.
Pretty, pretty good.
So, humor-wise, it won't change anything, but in terms of humor-wise, it's pretty, pretty good.
Let's talk about, I tweeted just before I got on here, There's a new study about climate change.
And it comes from Finnish and Japanese researchers.
And before I get into this, let me give you some context.
Don't trust any individual study you see about anything.
Just period. The fact that there's a shocking new study with a provocative conclusion...
And their real scientists worked on it, and at least on its surface, it looks pretty like it's credible.
The first thing you should say about that is there's no more than a 5% chance it's true.
Now, the scientific studies in general, about half of them end up being things that should not have been in peer-reviewed journals, but were.
So we know that from studies of peer-reviewed science, we know that about half the time, peer review doesn't catch something that's a major problem.
Now, when somebody goes against the most agreed-upon facts in science, you have to lower even further the likelihood that the challenger is correct.
So I put the odds of this new study about climate science.
It's actually debunking climate science.
I would put the odds of it being true at...
Maybe 5%.
You know, maybe 5%.
So that's the context you should hear this.
I'm not saying this study is true.
I'm saying it's a new study that says that man-made climate change is literally nothing, or so close to nothing that it's irrelevant.
And these two researchers are making the claim that cosmic rays...
Influence cloud cover so much that they're the primary drivers of what we're seeing.
And that the cosmic rays have shifted in some way that we can measure.
And they're highly correlated with cloud cover for reasons I guess they feel like they can understand.
And that when you include that in your science, which scientists don't, it's one of the variables that is not in general science and it's not in the climate science models.
But these new researchers, the Finnish and Japanese scientists, say that if you do include them, they are the major influencers of cloud cover, and cloud cover is the major influencer of temperature, they say.
Now, here's what's interesting about that.
It's interesting, first of all, because it goes against the mainstream science.
Well, I see somebody clapping here.
Don't get too happy about it.
Like I said, 5% chance this is true.
Or 5% chance it could be reproduced and become something serious.
But there is some chance.
It's not a zero. But what I like about this is it seems to be the kind of claim that's easy to check, would you say?
If the claim is that cosmic rays are influencing clouds, and I think all the scientists would agree that if something was influencing cloud cover and they hadn't included it in their models, I think all scientists would agree that if clouds are part of the story, that's important. So that part, there's no controversy.
The question is, do the cosmic rays actually influence clouds?
Now, that feels to me like something we could figure out.
Maybe not with the first study, but as people start looking at this and say, well, let me look at it from another way and see if I get the same result.
Let me see if I can reproduce this.
Let me see if this is a correlation or a cause.
Do we know why it would be a cause?
Can we break this down in the lab?
Could we do a lab experiment?
You know, just within the lab where somehow you reproduce cosmic rays.
I don't even know if that's a possibility.
And just see if at least the chemistry and the physics work in the lab.
It seems to me That this is a very testable hypothesis.
So that's what makes it interesting.
5% chance, I would say, if you don't know anything else, I give it a 5% chance that it ends up being meaningful.
But, could be.
At least we can test it.
Did you see the video that...
President Trump tweeted out of the Coast Guard interdicting a semi-submersible submarine full of cocaine.
You have to see this video to make you feel amazing about being an American.
You can't watch the video without having a good feeling about who you are, if you're American.
Who you are and your place in the world.
You know, I generally tell people that they should not take pride in the work of other people.
So, for example, the fact that white people invented a lot of stuff in the past, I don't take any pride in that because I wasn't involved.
So I say, don't take pride in strangers.
If your favorite basketball team does a good job, well, you can't take pride in other athletes.
That's other people.
Don't take pride in other people's work.
But you watch this video, and I'll just describe it.
There's a semi-submersible sub.
It's a pretty big ship.
Semi-submersible means that there's only a little bit of it above the water, and most of it is below the water, I assume, to avoid radar or detection or whatever.
And there's a big Coast Guard ship that's coming up on it and it's essentially giving chase.
And they're coming up real close to it and the video is showing this.
And you say to yourself when you're watching this, how in the world is this big Coast Guard ship Going to get this little semi-submersible that has no windows, no human beings are showing, looks like it's probably bulletproof.
How are they going to stop it without just sinking it?
And I didn't think they were going to shoot it and kill the people in it.
And as I'm thinking that, you see the big Coast Guard ship, you know, the view from the cameras from the Coast Guard ship, and you see them coming upon the semi-subversible sub, and the water is going crazy like this, and the sea is going everywhere, and the ship is coming right up on it.
And I'm thinking to myself, oh my god, they're actually going to just come up on the ship and maybe, like, disable it by what?
Crashing into it? And then all of a sudden...
You see a uniformed military Coast Guardsman jump from the military ship Onto the top of a semi-submersible, meaning that his feet are in the ocean.
The waves are coming up everywhere all over the top of the ship.
They're traveling at a high speed.
There's a Coast Guard ship right on the tail of it.
God knows what. And he jumps on here with full military gear, grabs onto this thing, pulls himself up to the...
To the, I guess, the little thing that sticks up where the people in the sub climb down.
And, you know, it's sealed, of course.
And you see him going bang, bang, bang, essentially just warning the people that he's up there.
And then you see him pull this up.
And you know that the people in that hole are armed to the teeth and expecting somebody opening this thing who could put them in jail.
Who in the world is that brave?
It was the most amazing thing you'll ever see.
It was like the bravest thing.
I mean, I wouldn't have done it.
Yes, you see some of the comments, people saying that their eyes bugged down.
Anyway, the fact that this was an American military person, I assume a member of the Coast Guard, but watching that level of just bravery Heroism.
Resourcefulness. Don't take no for an answer.
Determination. It was inspiring.
And I just said, you can't take credit for the work of other people.
Somebody says it was a SEAL. I wonder if that's true.
It certainly looked like somebody who was pretty highly trained and didn't have any fear about anything.
But I don't know who it was in the military.
It was just a military person who was very competent.
And I actually felt amazing.
I felt amazing because our country, collectively, we created this military group of people.
We came up with processes collectively in which we could vet people, train them, find the best people, get the best people for the job.
So he is, this person was, among the best of us.
So we don't get credit for his actual act of heroism, but we do get credit for creating and supporting the system that could surface this kind of hero and let him do his work.
We get credit for that.
I mean, we're the back office.
We're the support team.
But we did support.
We do pay our taxes.
We do support the military.
We support them with our honor.
We give them the holidays.
We treat them like heroes that they are, and that creates them.
The fact that we treat them like heroes It's what allows them to be heroes.
Let's be honest. People wouldn't do this if they knew that doing this would give them no appreciation in America.
I'm sure some people would do it just because it's a good thing to do.
But we make it more possible and a lot easier for heroes to do what they do because of the way we treat the entire system.
And we can take some credit for that.
We don't get credit for his bravery, but we do get credit for creating a system that can surface a hero like that and put him in the right place.
We get credit for that.
Alright. Tropical storm is coming.
It's named Barry. Is that a coincidence?
That, you know, Barack Obama was, of course, Barry in high school.
Is it a coincidence that That during the Trump administration, a major storm that's going to wreck a lot of stuff was named Barry.
I mean, it could be, right?
Because they start with the alphabetical letters that are closer to A, and they work on it.
But I wonder, do you think there's any kind of a Trump supporter in that group who said, huh, letter B, letter B, Barry?
It's just a generic name.
I think it's just time for Barry.
Now, it would only be funnier if it were Barack.
Right? And let me ask you this.
All of our hurricanes are named after people, and I believe that they try to use new names all the time.
And you end up running out of names, don't you?
Is there anything that would prevent a future hurricane from being named Barack?
Barak is a name.
It's a name we are all familiar with.
It starts with the letter B, so it should be one of the first ones that come out of the chute every year because they start with A and work their way out.
Is there any reason we can't have a Hurricane Barak?
I don't expect it to happen, but it would be hilarious if it did.
It would be hilarious.
All right. I think that's about all we got for today.
It's another wonderful day.
You know, the economy is great.
There's mostly peace in the world, at least, you know, the parts that America cares about.
And, oh, I'm going to tease something that's upcoming.
I haven't nailed this down.
But there is a credible claim that cancer may be a thing of the past.
I'm going to interview. I've got a request out.
I think it's going to come together.
There's somebody who has a practical idea for virtually eliminating cancer.
Do you believe it?
We'll see if I believe it after the interview.
But I have a preview of it, and based on the preview of it, I actually think there's something there, and it won't require me to know too much about science to answer the question.
When you hear it, you'll understand what I'm talking about.
I don't want to give it away.
But there is a completely reasonable story At least two people who are not scientists like me.
It doesn't require too much science.
It doesn't seem to require testing something in humans.
It doesn't seem to require a new drug that might have a side effect.
And I can't give you too much because I don't want to ruin it.
But there seems to be, let's say...
Let me put it this way.
There seems to be a system...
That we have never used, that if we did, would kind of be really effective.
I don't know if that's the case, but we're going to talk to somebody, I hope, next week on that.
But that just gives you an idea of where things are.
Somebody says when, next week.
I'll set it up. I don't have a date yet.
Somebody says it won't happen.
The industry is too big. Well, just wait and see.
All I can tell you is that the initial description was good enough for me to want him to be on the show.
It's not diet-related, right?
So it has nothing to do with diet.
But we'll talk about that.
Anyway, there's a lot of good stuff going on, and I hope you enjoy your day.
I hope you enjoy your weekend.
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