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July 20, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:05:48
Episode 603 Scott Adams: Bill Pulte on St. Louis Blight, AC Giveaway, Veteran Gift
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everybody everybody come on in here because you know what time it is It's time for coffee, coffee, coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams, your host, and we are preparing for something I call the simultaneous sip, a big dopamine rush that gets your day going just the way you want it.
What do you need for the simultaneous sip, you probably ask?
Do you need to be prepared?
Do you need to have any particular items available?
Yes, you do. Yes, you do.
You've got to have a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein, a chalice, a tanker, maybe a thermos or a flask, a canteen, or a vessel of any kind.
You've got to fill it with your favorite liquid.
And then, you've got to lift it to your lips, follow along, and have the simultaneous sip with me.
Oh, shudder.
Oh, good stuff.
Well, today, fairly soon, we're going to have a very special guest, Suzy Logs On, Bill Pulte.
We will be talking to him.
But let's talk about a few fun things while we're at it.
You know, one of the things that one of President Trump's biggest problems is...
Oh, it looks like Bill is here.
Let's see. We're going to go to Bill Pulte.
He's got some exciting updates.
If you haven't seen him, this will be fun.
Bill! I'm amazing.
Man, you've been lighting up the internet lately.
You had one of the busiest days.
Anybody's ever had.
It was insane.
It was insane. So for anybody who hasn't seen all of the reporting coming out of yesterday, start with your morning.
And then tell us about your afternoon, because there's two incredible things.
I really have to start with my evening, because I drove down on what would have been Thursday night from Chicago to Nashville, and I drove a brand new Chevy Mini SUV for a two-time combat veteran who had traumatic brain injury, 100%. And I couldn't even sleep at night.
I was so excited to give her this car.
This is a lady who fought for us in Iraq, and she has to walk to the grocery store.
She has to take an Uber to her doctor's appointments.
So I woke up, and we went and gave her the car, and I get goosebumps even thinking about it.
I mean, she was just totally blown away.
So for anybody who hasn't seen the video of it, you have to watch the video just to see her reaction and the hug she gives you.
I didn't think she was ever going to let you go, Bill.
I mean, that had to be like a satisfying hug.
I will tell you, I have learned so much in the last few weeks that I never thought I would.
I mean, I always knew that giving was powerful.
But it is incredible now.
I mean, it is such a joy to be able to give back, especially to our veterans who fought so hard for us.
And I call my followers on Twitter, at Pulte, my friends and my teammates, because they're helping me also raise money for amazing causes.
We've raised, in conjunction with the whole family, you know, the Twitter family, we've raised over $50,000 for a colonel in the military whose belongings were burned.
We've raised over $13,000 for a paraplegic Marine.
It is just amazing the momentum that we have now.
So yeah, that was yesterday morning and then, you know, I'll tell you about the rest of it.
And you're getting the country a little bit addicted to the feeling of helping other people, which is an amazing service that you're doing there.
So anybody who's now following you, you really should.
How many followers are you up to?
We're going to be at about 80,000 a day, and you should also follow at Code of Vets.
Code of events.
I will follow them as soon as we're off of here.
You actually drove the car yourself?
I did. And I got to tell you, I didn't even want to get out of the car.
I just bought a Tahoe and I said to myself, why the hell did I spend all that money?
And I think I'm maybe selling the Tahoe and getting this car.
It's a pretty good car.
It's a Chevy? Chevy Trex, $20,000 car, $10,000 she got in cash.
Nice. Oh, my God.
Well, she was obviously very thrilled.
You can see it on the video.
She was crying and hugging.
And it's great to see our veterans getting that kind of treatment, that kind of respect.
Because I think a lot of it is also just people caring.
I mean, they had to, you know, on top of the money, which, of course, is very important in the car, very important.
But it had to be very meaningful to her that her country cares about her.
I mean, she was in the combat zone, okay?
Single mother, comes back, has a traumatic brain injury from being over there, and, you know, she's left to walk to the grocery store.
This shouldn't happen in America.
This should not. Now, and that was just your morning.
That was just my morning.
Then I got on a plane, flew to St.
Louis. Go ahead.
Yeah, just keep going.
All of a sudden, the Daily Mail came out with a piece which started to go viral.
The video started to go viral.
Everybody from everywhere was calling saying, hey, this is amazing.
How can we give back?
How can we donate? People just want to donate.
People just want to help.
And so then we went to a blight elimination zone, which is, as you know, my passion is cleaning up inner city neighborhoods that have gotten no attention from the government.
And I love doing it.
I absolutely love doing it.
So we walked into the neighborhood.
And Twitter co-founder and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey, billionaire, is my partner in that, the St.
Louis Blight Authority. And so we were delighted to announce yesterday that we're going into St.
Louis and turning around the neighborhoods in St.
Louis. That's amazing.
So Jack Dorsey actually flew in to be with you at that event in St.
Louis, right? He did, and I have you to thank for it because many of your listeners don't know this because many times you're behind a lot of these amazing things that nobody even knows.
But I have you to thank.
I have you to thank for introducing me to Jack because you did it and everybody should know that.
So just everybody, if you ever doubt what Scott Adams is saying or how involved he is, you really have no idea.
He's an incredible guy.
Scott, it wouldn't happen to stay without you.
And I'll tell you, there's 59 families, Scott, in St.
Louis in this area.
And I'll show you the video.
The lady told me yesterday, the abandoned building's been there for over 20 years, and we knocked it down.
And that's thanks to you, Scott.
So, I appreciate that, but let's keep the credit where it belongs.
I mean, you and Jack funded this, correct?
Yes, but in a certain way you funded it, so thank you.
So this is Jack's hometown, right?
This is where he grew up? Yeah, see, everybody loves you, Scott.
You see all these comments.
Well, don't make it about me.
Well, it should be, because, you know, people need to get recognized for doing good work in America.
And we no longer recognize people for doing good work in America.
That's what I'm trying to do on Twitter.
That's what you're helping me do.
There are people who do acts of kindness every day, and they go unrecognized.
And it shouldn't be something that we're shameful anymore.
We have to promote it.
The same vigorousness which we promote, you know, all this negativity and crap that we see on TV. It's about time we get some positive news and we start as a country promoting positive things.
And I like that we're attaching, or you are, you're attaching emotion to giving in the sense that giving to the veterans is sort of a twofer.
You're helping a person, but you're also helping a veteran Which also helps the entire, you know, the way we think about our country, the way the veterans are treated.
I mean, you get a twofer for that.
And then with St. Louis, having somebody as successful as Jack Dorsey, who came from there, still has family there, I believe, and cared enough after, you know, making his way in the world and doing spectacularly well We're good to go.
Probably feel like, hey, everybody just moves away if they do well, and here it's been reversed.
You can see that St.
Louis gets the love, as well as the money, as well as the great treatment of knocking down these buildings that were nothing but eyesores and crime traps.
And we did it in a big way.
I mean, Scott, I mean, I don't think Jack had ever seen anything like it.
And I think he was very impressed because, as many in the media were, frankly, because they've never seen so many tractors and so many haulers and so many things done in a contiguous area.
You know, the government, they go and they get rid of these abandoned buildings and they do one little home here or one little home there.
We went in bang, bang, bang.
And, you know, I was watching some of the newscasts just before I got on here in St.
Louis, and I'm trying to reframe the way that St.
Louis is thinking about it. They're thinking about it as, and you talk about framing, so it's kind of interesting for everybody, but what I'm literally trying to do is get St.
Louis to reverse the way that they've been thinking about blight, and as opposed to thinking, oh, we have all these abandoned buildings, and they throw their arms up in the air, and they roll their eyes, and they say, oh, my God, what am I going to do with all these buildings?
No. I'm trying to get them to think we've got 7,000 buildings in St.
Louis that are demolished. We can get capacity up to 2,000 homes a year.
And we can have this blight problem solved.
I said 15 years yesterday, but it can be done a lot quicker.
So in real time, we're trying to change the psychology of people to know that it's achievable to be able to turn around the city of St.
Louis. Yeah, you know, you used what I call the, I've referred to this before as the new CEO move, which is when people, you know, get a new CEO, the new CEO, if they're smart, will immediately make a big change that sort of tells you who they are.
So it might be that if it's a company that's bloated, they might get rid of a bunch of people on day one.
That's the negative version. Or they might bring in a big deal or they might announce a kind of a change or some kind of improvement, you know, so that your first impression, the psychology of it, gets on their side right away.
And when you go to these blighted areas, if you're looking at this terrible, you know, run-down blighted area and you live there, you're just thinking, oh, there are a million miles between what this land looks like and what's happened to it and where you'd like it to be.
But you go in and instead of saying, how do I solve the entire million miles?
You say, well, the first 10 miles are going to tell you everything.
Like, that's where the psychology starts.
That's where momentum is.
That's where direction happens.
That's where progress happens.
That's how people feel good.
That's how people know there's energy.
So you seem to understand this on...
All the levels. I talk about talent stacks, putting together ordinary talents until you have something.
So you come to this with a construction development background.
You bring the psychology to it.
You understand the show.
You understand that putting it on TV, getting news coverage is essential.
It's not just the extra.
And you get this amazing result here.
Your effectiveness is just astonishing.
And the rate at which you do these things.
Is there some secret to how you can get politicians to do things without getting caught in the politics of it?
You know, I don't know. I mean, some of this stuff just comes, you know, off the top of my head, probably like you with your creative inspiration.
I just come up with this stuff.
But, you know, I just basically try to convince the people through thinking about things differently that them as politicians...
Need to get on board or else why the hell aren't they looking after their citizens?
Why should this lady yesterday, great lady, 65-year-old African-American lady, a mom, a mom like we all love, a mom like many of us have, that we love, she's sitting there and I get goosebumps as I'm saying it.
She's sitting there and she's saying for 20 or 30 years this building has been decrepit next to her.
So I try to really get with the human beings.
These are human beings just like you and me.
And am I making you cry?
I don't mean to make you cry. I'm just giving you shit.
But, you know, you show that human impact.
And I think that is probably the secret sauce to getting the politicians to do the right thing.
Yeah, plus you package it so that you reduce it to a yes-no in some ways, because the human mind can't deal with lots of complexity.
If you say, well, we've got a problem, here are 15 ways you could go about it.
Nothing's going to happen because people can't deal with that.
But you come in, tell me if I'm wrong here, you come in and say, I'm going to do this discrete set of things with a discrete set of money that I've already arranged or can arrange.
It's going to look just like the discrete thing I did in Pontiac or someplace else.
Yes, no. I'm oversimplifying.
Yeah, that's 100%.
You know, I think Naval talks about this specialization, you know, and really being good at something.
I mean, you know, this is something that I know very well, so when a reporter tries to play some gotcha or bullshit political question, I can say, hey, hey, hey, look, you know, this is really what's going on.
And I think the St.
Louis media knew what was going on yesterday.
I've never seen, I think maybe one other event in Detroit I'd seen that much media.
I mean, it was stacked.
I didn't even know there was that many media outlets in St.
Louis, to be honest with you. And so, anyway, so I think the media gets it.
It's going to take a couple more times, frankly, of conditioning to get their heads screwed on the right way.
Because if we can get their heads screwed on the right way in the philanthropic community, this problem in St.
Louis, which has plagued a major U.S. city for 20 or 30 years, can be removed.
I did it in Pontiac with the mayor.
It can be done. Right. Right.
Well, this is amazing, and I just saw before I came on live here that you made an offer, and I swear I was thinking about talking to you about this, and then I saw you tweeted it like, well, it was just one of the greatest ideas.
You're doing some kind of a giveaway with air conditioning because the record summer heats are literally going to be killing people.
Tell us more about that.
Well, you know, air conditioning is a blessing.
And it's the same thing with the abandoned homes.
You know, having safe neighborhoods is a blessing.
And so many people don't have that, especially the elderly and otherwise.
So I'm trying to find people.
And if you know of anybody who needs air conditioning, you know, please tweet at me.
We'll try to get to as many as we can.
You know, I'm only one guy, but we're figuring out how to Hopefully do this at scale, but please let us know.
We're looking for people who are really in mission-critical need, who are getting exhausted by the heat.
This is amazing.
Basically, you're going to be looking at your Twitter feed about people requesting air conditioning, people who are really in tough situations where their health could be seriously at risk to the point of actually risk of death.
And you're going to go in and make sure some of those people are comfortable.
Can't get everybody, but...
Well, what's fascinating is Twitter philanthropy has really taken off.
It's a movement, and I would encourage everybody, please go to my profile, retweet, like the stuff, let's get the stuff out there.
It's really a wave of momentum, Scott.
So to answer your question specifically, yes, I'm helping provide many air conditioning systems, but what has been even more impactful, at least for me, The number of HVAC professionals, I don't even know these people, all across the United States and some in the globe, who said, hey, we'll install the units for free.
One in LA and one in, I believe, in the hurricane zones.
And I'm currently having dialogue with them to see if they can do it.
That's what America should be about.
That's what we should be using social media for.
And as far as I'm concerned, we're really the only platform right now who are connecting those immediate needs using social media.
And I think it's the way of the future.
And the hashtag is Twitter philanthropy?
Hashtag Twitter philanthropy.
You got it. All right.
Well, you should all be following the hashtag, following at Pulte, at P-U-L-T-E, and at Code of Vets.
Yeah, Code of Vets.
Let's get them to follow.
They're amazing. Amazing.
The unsung heroes for these veterans.
All right, Bill, anything else we need to know?
No. Let's just keep going. Let's get the momentum.
Keep going. Trump retweeted again today some of that stuff, so let's just keep going.
Great. You're amazing, Bill, and we will talk to you again soon.
Thanks for coming on. Have a great day, everyone.
Have a great weekend. Make it a great day.
Do something positive for somebody else.
Love you all. Bye-bye. All right.
I love that. Bye, Bill.
All right. That's amazing.
Let's talk about some other things.
So, once again, we saw another example of how people believe they are rational creatures, but it can be easily shown that they are not, especially in politics.
So you've probably seen it on the internet.
There's another one of these interviews where students, college students, are asked to give their opinion on what they believe is a Trump policy on immigration.
And it's a quote that actually came from Obama.
So they read an Obama quote about immigration, tell the students it's from Trump, or indicate it's from Trump, and then they say, what do you think about it?
And of course the students say, well, that's totally racist.
How racist could that be?
But of course it was Obama's policy.
Now, that tells you everything you need to know about the human mind.
If you believe that people are looking at the facts and they've decided, well, based on my analysis of the facts, I've decided to be a Democrat or I've decided to be a Republican and I've chosen these policies as the ones I like, nothing like that is happening.
Now, you might be tempted to say to yourself, well, these are students.
These are college students.
By the time they become real adults in the real world, They start paying attention and then their opinions are actually useful, you know, they're rational.
No, no, nothing like that's happening.
Those college students are locking in opinions or have already locked in opinions that will probably never change, meaning that they've decided that as a lifestyle, as who they are, they're on a team and they're going to say the things that the people on that team say.
They're going to say we do not like President Trump, or if they're on the other team, they're going to say we do.
But it's one of those things, of course, it's not a scientific test, so I'm not going to suggest that every person in the country would answer so poorly as these students did.
But when you see how clearly they are completely confident in their opinion that And it can be shown to be ridiculous, because they've all decided that Obama's a giant racist, even though they don't know that he's the one who's...
without knowing that he's the one who said the comments, they think he must be a racist.
So that tells you that we're not reacting to the facts, we're not reacting to the policies, we're reacting to the personalities, and we're taking sides.
On that same point...
There's a famous robotist, roboticist, is that a word?
An expert in AI and robots.
And he says that it's unlikely that humans are going to be, it's unlikely that computers and robots will ever reach the point of having human intelligence.
Let me read what he says.
This is, Kim Sang-bae, he's a world-renowned robot scientist.
And he's saying that there's no technology that can make machines understand concepts and judge values like humans.
Yes, there are.
Of course there are.
Are you kidding me?
What kind of world-renowned robot scientist says there's no technology that can make machines understand concepts and judge values like humans?
Even I could program that.
Here's how you get a robot to judge values.
Okay, what language am I programming in?
If you see somebody say racist things using these words, if that, then you will react as if you were horrified.
I gave it a value.
If anybody asks, you'll say you disapprove of whatever that thing was I programmed into you.
If I say, what do you think about war?
And I program into it, does not like war, believes that human being and human life is very important.
Click, click, click, click, click, click.
What could be easier than giving a robot values?
You literally just program them in there.
It's exactly like people.
Do you want to make a robot that likes modern art?
Click, click, click, click, click.
If modern art, then like.
I don't know how it could be easier than that.
Somebody says, you're out of your depth, Scott.
Well, I'm not out of my depth for you because you just got blocked.
I block people who say stupid things that are just personal.
If somebody said, that's not true because of X, they would not get blocked.
But when somebody says, you're out of your league, Scott.
You're out of your league! Then they get blocked.
Because saying somebody's out of their league is just not helpful.
It's just not part of a world I want to be part of.
You know, you can tell the...
Well, I won't even go down that path.
Anyway. But he also talked about understanding concepts.
He says there's no technology that can make machines understand concepts.
Really? Really?
What concept can I not program into a machine?
I'm pretty sure I can get a machine to understand a concept.
Give me an example of a concept.
If a human can understand it, it's because there are rules.
There's a structure to the way we think about it.
You can program that!
Here's what I think about the world-renowned robot scientist.
I believe he does not have a good talent stack, meaning that this robot scientist might be one of the greatest people who ever lived in terms of the technology, in terms of AI, in terms of robots, etc.
He could be the best at that.
What he doesn't seem to understand is psychology and the irrationality of humans.
In other words, there's a whole scientific field that I'm speculating because I can't read his mind, but it looks like he's not aware of.
For example, the story I told you about the students who believe that Obama quotes were actually racist if they thought they were coming from Trump.
Does that tell you that humans are finely operated, let's see, finely engineered rational machines?
No. No, you could easily program a robot to do what those students did.
And it's easy. You just say, which team are you on, robot?
I will make you Democrat.
If Trump, then Orange Man bad.
Easy. You know, If a Democrat says it, probably good.
Easy. So I think this robot expert needs to know a little bit more about human psychology.
I've been saying this for years.
There are very few things I'm more confident in than that someday robot AI experts will say what I've been saying for 10 years, which is the reason we can't make robots as smart as people It's because people aren't smart.
It's an illusion.
You can't make robots as smart as people because you're trying to catch an illusion.
We are not rational.
If you made a robot that was rational and was the smartest, let's say, clever, moral, consistent, and ethical machine, It wouldn't look like a person because people look like babbling idiots.
And you're not going to program your machine to look like an idiot while chasing AI because you can't be intelligent and an idiot at the same time.
So there's a logical, mental, I'd say a blind spot in the entire industry that they think they can...
They think they can't make human intelligence when they've already surpassed it by far.
Let's talk about one of the biggest problems that the president has is that he's accused of separating children, and apparently that really happens at the border, and putting children in cages.
Here's what I would like to see just because it's funny.
I would love to see a petition...
That is worded this way.
We, the petitioners, demand that the Trump administration stop putting children in Obama cages.
So that's how it would be worded.
We demand that the Trump administration stop putting children in Obama cages.
Is that wrong?
The cages were literally designed and built by Obama and To hold children and families and people.
So what I see online all the time is people keep saying, hey, don't you people on the other side understand?
Let me give you a fact.
Here's the fact.
Obama made those cages.
And therefore, if Obama made the cages and they weren't racist then, they can't be racist now.
Trump is just using the cages.
They were built for this purpose by Obama.
How persuasive is what I just said?
It's not. Literally, nobody cares because they use it as a political tool.
It's not about the children at all.
It is not about the children.
People are going to cry on television.
It's about the children.
And we all care about the children.
I'm certainly not mocking anybody's empathy for the People were suffering at the border because it looks pretty bad to me.
It looks pretty bad. I wouldn't want to be in one of those facilities.
I really wouldn't want to be in one of those facilities.
Like, really, really wouldn't want to be in one.
So I'm not going to try to minimize how bad it is because it looks plenty bad.
Scott's a very dishonest idiot, says this person before getting blocked.
You can tell who the Democrats are.
The Democrats are the ones who come in here and just have no respect for any type of rational discourse.
It's just all about the personality.
It's just all about me.
Well, there's got to be something wrong with you because what you're saying makes sense, but I'm pretty sure you're defective.
Well, there's something badly off about you.
So those are the few Democrats coming in.
And I'm not even anti-Democrat, but it's just a fact that if somebody comes in and says something like that, they're just always Democrats, you know, probably 85% of the time.
All right, so that's what I want to see.
I want to see a national poll demanding that the Trump administration stop putting children in Obama cages, just for fun.
All right. You probably saw in the news that the President said that he had, in a tweet yesterday, he said he just spoke to Kanye West, so already it's a great tweet.
The President of the United States starts a tweet with, I just spoke to Kanye West.
Like, you don't even need to hear the rest of the tweet, right?
You know this is going to be good.
And he spoke to Kanye about, I guess, Kanye's friend, Aesop, Aesop Rocky.
Who's a rapper who was incarcerated in Sweden.
And the president said in his tweet, I will be calling the very talented prime minister of Sweden.
I like that he calls him the very talented prime minister of Sweden.
In other words, he's signaling to the prime minister very clearly, Hey, prime minister, you're a very talented guy.
Wink, wink, you get this, right?
That's what that sentence means.
When he says the very talented prime minister...
This is the president saying, okay, Prime Minister, you get what's happening here, right?
This isn't just about the legal system.
This isn't just about one person.
This is about you and I. You and I got an opportunity here to do something that the world is going to like a lot.
So the very talented Prime Minister of Sweden to see what we can do about helping Aesop Rocky.
So many people would like to see this quickly resolved.
Now, what do the people who have been calling this president racist for three years, and especially this week, what do they do when they see this?
What reaction does Anderson Cooper have when he sees President Trump's tweet that he's talking to his good friend, African American citizen and patriot Kanye West, About Kanye's friend, African-American star Aesop Rocky, and that the President is personally intervening to get him out of this situation overseas.
There's no way you can look at that and say, all right, he's a terrible racist and he's sending all these racist whistles, but this doesn't look like much of a whistle.
Like, why doesn't this make sense?
Why does it not fit my movie?
Whose movie does this fit?
Yours, right?
This fits your movie, doesn't it?
Most of you are Trump supporters.
It fits your movie.
This says he will certainly insult absolutely anybody, including African Americans.
He will insult anybody who needs an insult for political or other reasons.
But when it comes down to brass tacks, He's the guy who's approving pardons of a lot of African Americans, several, I think.
He's the guy, President Trump is, who backed prison reform.
He's the guy who can't stop bragging about what he's done for African American employment levels.
How does any of that fit Anderson Cooper's movie that this guy is a giant racist?
It doesn't fit.
but it completely fits the movie that says he says politically incorrect things and indeed when he ran for office he ran on a platform explicitly in direct language the president said he told us he was not going to respect political correctness and then once elected he did not respect political correctness at all That fits my movie.
He did exactly what he said he would do.
He said, I'm not a racist.
I mean, in lots of ways, in different language, he said that.
And so everything that I see fits my movie perfectly.
He's not politically correct, but he's doing the things the country needs, things that Obama did before him in terms of immigration, etc.
All right. And then I guess he's followed up with a tweet this morning.
He said he talked to the Prime Minister, but he didn't get a good result, which tells me that the very talented Prime Minister of Sweden may not be as talented as the President wants him to be.
Because I think the President was winking pretty hard.
Like, wink, wink, you're very talented, you get this, right?
Wink, wink, wink, you get this, right?
You see what we can both do here.
But apparently the very talented Prime Minister of Sweden either had some obstacles he couldn't overcome easily, or maybe he didn't get the wink.
And he said that they would make sure that Aesop Rocky was treated fairly, which is really sort of a nothing.
And then apparently Trump reports that he would personally vouch for Aesop Rocky's bail.
Personally. President Trump said to the Prime Minister, the very talented Prime Minister of Sweden, that he would personally vouch for Aesop Rocky's bail.
Now, who knows how serious-ish that really is, but the fact that he said it is pretty darn good.
Pretty darn good.
So, the country loves the show.
We love that the President got involved.
We love that it was personal advice.
I love everything about this story.
I hope it works out for Aesop Rocky, because at the very least, the entire world is paying attention.
You know, a week ago, I didn't know what Aesop Rocky was.
I literally never heard of him.
Now, it's a national story, and this president has put a marker down.
We're watching this situation.
You know what we want, and we'd be quite disappointed if things don't go the way we think they should.
Let's talk about the bubonic plague in Los Angeles.
So, Dr.
Drew was on my periscope yesterday.
He's been on Fox News and other outlets, I think, talking about the amazing number of rats and the problems that are caused by all the homeless.
The homeless are not really people who can't find homes.
They're mostly people with drug problems and mental health problems.
And that we're reaching a point where it might go full bubonic plague.
And when I say might, I mean probably.
Because there's nothing that looks like it's going to change the trend in the short term.
And we're right on the edge of bubonic plague.
Apparently a certain number of rats and you're just going to be there.
And we're right at that point.
So... How do we do something about it?
It feels like the country is not concerned about something that's horrible.
And I think that some of this needs to be visual.
And we need to have something that looks like a proposed solution.
So if anybody can come up with such things, that would be great.
I'd love to see a specific proposed solution, something that you could say yes, no to.
Remember, I was talking to Bill Pulte earlier.
And I was complimenting him on how he packages decisions for politicians.
You've got to make it simple and visual.
That's what Bill Pulte does.
He keeps it simple, he keeps it visual, and he connects emotion to it.
Makes sure that there's an emotional connection.
That's a big part of his power.
This L.A. situation needs that.
It doesn't yet have sort of the personal connection.
I mean, we care about people in a general way, but it doesn't have a personal angle.
It needs a visual, and it needs to be packaged in a way that there's something specific that people want.
What is it the public is demanding?
We don't know. In general, we want fewer rats.
We'd like the people to have some kind of care, but that's too general.
What exactly do we want?
Do we want a czar appointed?
Do we want FEMA to come in?
Do we want to approve $10 million from the government just for rat eradication?
I just realized that eradication has rat right in it.
So that's where we need to get to, and maybe we can get there soon and make a difference.
Let's talk about Iran.
Iran seized a British oil tanker.
They say there was some kind of accident slash mechanical problem, something they need to figure out, so they didn't really just grab it.
They had some perfectly good reason.
Now, of course, we in the United States do not believe their reason.
We believe it is a lie and that they're just holding the tanker for leverage or to cause trouble.
Prior to that, Gibraltar, and I guess with the UK's help, Now, some people have said, my God, things are escalating.
This president has ruined everything.
He's just making things worse.
Now Iran is escalating and we're escalating and pretty soon it's going to be a war.
That's not what I see.
I see the opposite.
And I know that at least one smart person, I just saw an article, agrees with me.
I don't know how many other smart people agree with me, but I'd like to think there are more than one.
Here's how I see it.
If you're preparing for a negotiation, it helps to To create chips that did not exist before.
In other words, in a negotiation, you know, I'm putting some of my chips on the table, you're putting some of your chips on the table.
Wouldn't it be nice if you had more chips before you start?
This is one of those situations where they can create trouble.
It won't go too far because they can control it.
You know, they can release the tanker if they have to.
So they have full control of the situation.
It is an escalation, but it's also something in terms of the general troublemaking in the Gulf or the Straits.
The general troublemaking is something we would like less of.
So now Iran has created a chip.
The chip is obviously we can create trouble in the shipping lanes.
Wouldn't you like to see less of that?
So that's a chip that they can give up in negotiating.
So what I see is not an escalation toward war, because that would look very different.
Poker ships. Pretty good.
I was calling them poker chips, but they're actually using ships as poker chips.
So they're poker ships.
Very good. Whoever came up with that in the comments.
Nerdy, but excellent.
I like my nerdy humor.
So I would say that what we're seeing is the signal that they're preparing, they're setting the table for conversation.
I believe Iran has been signaling very strongly that they really do not want war, as in really, really, no joke, don't want war, as in we're not kidding, we really, really don't want a war.
So I think Iran's Position of we don't want a war is very, very clear because it just wouldn't turn out.
There's no way it would turn out well for them.
Now, the United States, especially with President Trump, really, really doesn't want a war.
And I mean really, really doesn't want a war.
But, unlike Iran, if we were to start a war, It wouldn't be the end of the United States.
We just wouldn't like it.
But it would be the worst problem in the world for the Iranian population, and we don't want that for them either.
And the president is unpredictable.
So Iran can't be sure we won't at least try a decapitation strike, which I think would be the obvious play.
So We have this situation where, I've said this before, and I'll keep reminding you, we have never been this close to something really good happening in the Middle East.
All of the leaders, except for one, the Ayatollah, is the last person who has not explicitly said, let's just live with Israel.
We can be okay with this.
We don't have to be at war. So Saudi Arabia is on our side.
Israel is playing nice with its neighbors who are important to it.
Saudi Arabia has even offered great help to the people of Iran if they can get past their political difficulties.
Israel has explicitly offered to help them with water purification and who knows what else.
The United States has specifically said we'd like to be part of watching Iran become a great economy more than it is.
So everything has been set up.
Somebody's saying Abbas and the Palestinians.
The Palestinians are not...
How do I say this without being insulting?
If they lost everybody's support, including Iran's support, they would have to accommodate the situation.
They would sort of have to, over time...
Just give up on their ambitions and try to work something out.
So I would say that we may be closer than we've ever been to some kind of a good arrangement over there.
And we're just one person away, which is the Ayatollah, and he looks like he's getting ready to negotiate.
So we'll see. There's a tweet That I tweeted today.
Somebody else did a post and summarized my post from a few years ago called The Day You Became a Better Writer.
Now, what's powerful about it is that it summarizes in a very short form the most important techniques for moving from a bad writer to a good writer, and they're pretty easy.
You just see the tips and you say, oh, that's pretty easy.
Make shorter sentences.
Got it. Write direct sentences.
Got it. So I would recommend that.
Go to my Twitter feed. You know where it is.
And somewhere in the last day, I think yesterday, I tweeted it.
Look for the day I became a better writer.
Probably you could consume the entire lesson, if you will, in five minutes.
So in five minutes, almost everybody who's done this, by the way, would agree.
So I would say a near universal agreement is That five minutes reading this little post on how to be a better writer will actually make you a better writer.
Jordy here is agreeing.
Yeah, that quick.
Because none of the techniques require practice to understand.
They require practice to get great at it, but to understand it and put it immediately into use is easy.
So, I would say if you're trying to develop a talent stack, just being better or pretty good at a variety of skills that fit together really well, writing is one of those things that fits together with everything.
Every job you can think of, most of them, there's something at which writing would be an advantage.
Even if you don't do writing in your current job, if you want to someday be in management For the people who do your job, well, you should learn to write well.
And this will do it for you in literally five minutes.
Five minutes, and you will be a substantially better writer.
I guarantee it. It's that easy.
So do that. There was an interesting article about the...
There's research on the health effects on the physical and mental symptoms linked to...
The Trump presidency.
So in other words, there are a number of studies showing that people are having stress and mental and physical problems because of the stress of the Trump administration.
What is wrong with this story?
So Trump is being blamed for people's bad health.
Yeah, and apparently you can measure these effects of...
You can measure the impact of trauma in civilization on birth rates and how quickly people give birth and stuff.
Yes, somebody got it right.
Susan, you are all over it.
There's nothing that Trump has done that would worry people if the news reported it objectively.
Nothing. Think about what is the worst thing That Trump's accused of.
Just think of all of the worst things.
And then imagine if they'd been reported just objectively.
Nobody had a dog in the race.
They're just telling you what happened.
Take Charlottesville.
It was reported that the president called neo-Nazis fine people.
That literally never happened.
He said exactly the opposite of that.
He condemned them absolutely at the same time.
But the edit of the condemning was taken out and it leaves a misleading idea that he said they were fine people.
Imagine if the news had simply reported what happened instead of making up news.
What was it about that story that made people nervous?
Was it what Trump said?
No, because what he said is what everybody wanted to hear.
I condemn the neo-Nazis totally.
That's exactly what everybody wanted to hear.
It's exactly what he said in those exact words.
The news reported that he called them fine people.
I mean, seriously, whose fault is that?
It's not his fault.
I mean, I get that people say he could have said it more elegantly or better or clearer.
He might have put more attention on it.
Maybe that's true. But none of that matters if they had simply reported it accurately in the first place.
Let's take this latest scandal where the president said that some members of the squad, maybe they should go back home and figure out how to fix everything there before they come back here and show us how it's done.
Imagine how that could have been reported compared to how it was reported.
Here's how you could have reported it.
He said that they should have gone back home, but only one of them actually was born in any other country.
So you probably got a fact wrong, which was probably very similar to what most of the country was thinking.
If you said, a couple weeks ago, if you said to most of the country, at least the people paying attention to politics, not the people who wouldn't even know who was on the squad, if you went to them and said, Rashida Tlaib, What country was she born in?
If you're following politics, what would you have said, average citizen?
I can only speak for myself.
I would have said that I believed she was born in another country.
I did. I thought she was born somewhere in the Palestinian areas somewhere, only because of the way she speaks of it.
Now, I was not judging her for that.
I was not saying, and therefore, you know, I like you less or anything.
Nothing like that. In fact, I had often thought, well, it's good that we have that voice because that one was sort of missing, you know.
Even if you disagree with it, it's good to have that voice.
I just thought, ah, maybe she's a good mix, you know, a good addition to the conversation.
Maybe she's a good addition to the mix.
Even if you disagree with everything she says, She does represent a line of thinking that's somewhat popular, or at least there are a number of people.
So, worst case scenario, the President thought what a lot of us thought, that at least two of them were born in other places.
Now, I don't believe the President was talking about all four of them.
I don't believe he was talking about Presley.
I don't think he thought that she was born somewhere else.
But like most of us, I thought at least a couple of them, the ones that are the loudest.
I don't believe that the President thought AOC was born in another country, do you?
I don't think he thought that.
So I don't think he was talking about Presley, and I don't think he was talking about AOC. I think he was talking about two of the people, and he got a fact wrong about one of them that most of us would have gotten wrong too, or a lot of us would, not most.
I would have. And suppose that had just been reported.
He said, go back and come back.
And suppose the news had not told you that you're supposed to think it's racist.
What would you have thought of it if they just reported the facts?
Oh, he got a fact wrong.
He thought they came from other countries and he trash talked them on Twitter by saying, hey, you should go back and then fix that and then come back here.
If the news had reported it just the way I described it, would we be coming apart?
No. No.
Not at all. So the news is creating a problem and then pegging it on the president and actually saying it's killing people.
Well, it's making them less healthy.
We don't know if it's killing anybody.
But what kind of world is it where the news can create the problem And then report on it, like it's somebody else's problem.
By the way, I predicted this exact situation in my book, The Dilbert Future, back in the late 90s.
I predicted that the news business would evolve to killing famous people for news.
They might not do it directly, as in murdering them, but they would create situations in which People would die, so they had something to report.
And here we see that their news coverage is literally causing major health problems.
The news is literally killing people to have something to report on.
Antifa is another example.
They are very supportive of Antifa, the mainstream media is.
And Antifa is clearly, at least on the border...
Of killing people. They're hitting people on the head with blunt objects on a regular basis.
It's not going to be that long before somebody dies.
And clearly the news business is sort of pro-Antifa in terms of giving them attention, giving them oxygen, not condemning them.
I guess Ted Cruz and somebody else have some kind of a resolution being considered to What is it?
Categorize, I guess you'd call it, Antifa as domestic terrorists.
Now, just the fact that that's even being seriously considered should tell you that there's something different about the news coverage than there is about at least how the politicians are seeing Antifa.
Do you think that the mainstream media is doing a lot of reporting?
Let's say CNN. Do you think CNN is doing wall-to-wall reporting On the fact that serious senators, Ted Cruz, is a pretty serious senator, right?
I mean, even if you don't agree with Ted Cruz, he's a very talented, qualified, serious player.
You know, could have been president.
Maybe he will be someday.
And he's pushing ahead to call Antifa domestic terrorists, and that's not a story.
Have you seen that on CNN? Has CNN covered that as a story?
Have they looked into why they're being considered domestic terrorists?
I haven't seen it.
Maybe they covered it once.
Maybe they mentioned it.
Am I wrong that it's just being ignored?
How big of a story is that?
Are there other organizations that are in the news every day that the Senate...
Is considering labeling a domestic terrorist organization?
Is there any other group who is in the news all the time that's under that situation?
That's a pretty remarkable situation, even if ultimately they're not labeled that way.
It's news, but it's not being reported.
All right. You know, every now and then, there'll be just something that happens on its own.
That changes how you see things.
And one of the things that's happening on its own is that Puerto Rico's local government appears to be very corrupt.
Remember how much heat President Trump got for what his critics said was not doing enough for Puerto Rico.
What was President Trump's at least partial explanation of why things weren't going well with Puerto Rican recovery and assistance?
Well, President Trump's report is that the locals were not capable.
He basically blamed it on the local government.
Now, when President Trump blamed the local politicians for the aid not being as effective as it could, what did people say?
They said, well, there's that crazy orange man again blaming people he must be a racist because Puerto Rico.
Right? That's sort of the way it was reported, is that, oh my God, he's just being a racist again.
He is making Puerto Ricans look like they're all incompetent or something.
And then time goes by.
Time goes by.
And through no actions on the president's part, it turns out there's a massive corruption scandal in the Puerto Rican government that, you know, I don't think we'll be surprised to find out most of it's true.
So the news sort of caught up to where the president was, that there's a local talent problem there, to say the very least.
You want to hear a bad sign for Joe Biden?
So there's another set of debates coming up, and the funniest thing about the debates that are coming up is that by complete chance, All of the white people, well, one of the two groups of Democrats that will be on different nights, just by chance, one of them was all white.
And all of the diversity was in the other group.
Now, CNN did the picking, and I'm sure it was actually random.
I don't think they planned it that way.
But could that be a funnier outcome?
Yeah. It just sort of makes the whole race issue just looks ridiculous.
Like, if even CNN can't get it right, let me put it this way.
A lot of racism allegations against anybody are based on the fact that there was some outcome, something happened in which there was a racial imbalance.
And the assumption is, well...
If there's a racial imbalance, somebody probably caused that to happen.
Somebody either didn't fix it, maybe they should have tried harder to get a little more diversity.
Just the mere existence of a lack of racial diversity makes people say, well, there's some racism going on here.
Now, CNN, through a completely public and random process, chooses one side with all white people on it and another side with all diversity on it.
And they can't really reverse it because they showed their process and it was actually just random chance.
But how lucky is the president that this particular outcome happened?
Because what it shows you is that even CNN, who one would imagine would bend over backwards and then bend over backwards again and then keep bending over backwards, To get something like more of a diverse situation both nights.
And even CNN, because of just the oddities of how they chose things, couldn't get it right.
What's that tell you about all the allegations that you see about everyone else?
Well, it might make you a little more circumspect about how much is people being racist and how much is sometimes stuff happens.
Imagine, if you will, that Fox News had done exactly what CNN did, which is hold a random drawing in public while you're watching, and they pick people who are going to be in the debates for each night.
If Fox News had done that and one group turned out to be all white, do you think CNN would ever stop talking about it?
No. It would immediately be labeled racist and suspicious.
And even if they said, okay, we watched the process, we do believe that it was accidental, do you think CNN would have said, let's just go with it anyway?
No. CNN would have said, once you pick these people...
Fox News, why didn't you notice there was a diversity problem and mix it up a little bit?
It's not the law that says you have to go with these selections that you did on TV. That's just something you did for entertainment.
You can change the rules anytime you want.
You made the rules, you can change them.
So, hey, Fox News, why don't you switch a few people until it looks a little more balanced?
You know that would be the attack.
But even CNN can't Can't reach, you know, an ideal racial diversity level without a hiccup now and then.
So here's a bad sign for Joe Biden.
First of all, Joe Biden is in the all-white group, which is, I don't know, maybe it'll work in his favor, but it doesn't go...
If you're Joe Biden, the last thing you want to do when you've been accused of, let's say, being racially...
Not insensitive, but let's say racially...
I don't even know how to describe it because Joe Biden is certainly not a racist.
Not even close.
Not even a little bit.
I'd love to tell you if you were, but I don't see any.
But he's going to be sort of...
Harmed by putting in the all-white group.
It's just going to look like...
It's just a bad look.
But here's the bad part for him.
Van Jones was on CNN and he said that in this next debate, Biden is going to have to show some spine.
Ouch. If your team, meaning let's say Democrats and Democrat supporters and CNN, if your team...
Says that you need to show some spine and you're running for the presidency of the United States and the spine you didn't show was in the most tame situation of a public debate.
If you can't show spine in a harmless little debate, that's not a good look for the leader of the United States.
So I think the fact that anybody would even raise that Question or put that phrase on it.
Somebody says hashtag white spine.
That's pretty funny.
Anyway, that's a bad sign for Biden.
All right. What else we got going on here?
I believe that's about all we have going on here.
So I'm going to take my leave.
Somebody's asking in the comments, who cares what Van Jones says about anything?
I do. I care a lot about what Van Jones says.
Here's why. Van Jones is in a very, very, very small group of people who seems legitimate.
Van Jones seems to be willing To agree with a Republican if they have an idea that makes sense.
He worked with Republicans on prison reform, for example.
He's in a very small group of people who do seem to be free from team sports.
He has a preference. That's okay.
We all have a preference. But I'm pretty sure if Van Jones saw his team do something egregious, he would call it out.
Because I believe that's That's who he is.
You should pay attention to Van Jones.
He's the real deal.
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