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Aug. 2, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:10:56
Episode 616 Scott Adams: Racist Don Lemon, Racist Voters and Trump Derangement Syndrome
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Guess what time it is?
That's right. You guessed correctly.
It's time for Scott, for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I forgot who I was and what I was doing here for a moment.
Not that unusual.
But I know why you're here.
You're here for the simultaneous sip.
Doesn't take much to enjoy this simultaneous sip, and everybody knows it's the dopamine hit that gets you going for the rest of the day.
It's the best part of the day.
Hey, Carpe Duncum, good to see you.
And the rest of you?
Jordy, always good to see you.
Ken? Well, you know what you need.
You need a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein, a chalice, a tanker, a thermos, a flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now.
For the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous step, the part that makes everything else just go better.
And now.
I got myself a little coffee warmer now.
No more cold coffee for me.
I have upgraded.
So let's talk about the news.
Okay, we're done talking about the news, because there's no news.
There's just a bunch of made-up stuff that people are selling as news.
I'm almost positive that things happen somewhere in the world.
Didn't we used to call that news?
What happened to all the stuff happening?
Check CNN. And find me some actual news.
There's nothing happening in the world.
The whole world is just on summer vacation, apparently.
Now, I don't think that's true. There are probably just as many things happening as usual.
But for some reason, they're not making it to being newsworthy.
Let me tell you some of the things that are newsworthy.
Mario Lopez said something insensitive about transgender children.
That's like a major headline.
What did Mario say about transgender children?
Before I make this comment, I will remind you that I'm very pro-transgender, and I've been arguing that they should have more access to sports, especially.
But I haven't really talked about transgender children.
And apparently Mario Lopez said this deeply offensive thing.
He said that if your kid has, you know, maybe the potential to be trapped in the wrong gender, is that the appropriate way to say it?
I don't know all the appropriate words if I accidentally offend anybody.
Don't mean to. So, Mario Lopez was saying about children deciding what their own gender is, he said that parents have to be the, quote, adults in this situation and wait until their child's formative years to make determinations about gender or transitioning.
And for that, Mario Lopez might lose his job.
Are you kidding me?
I don't know. It seems like, yeah, there ought to be some kind of an age limit on that.
Now, worst case scenario, he was wrong.
This is sort of a parenting technique, right?
It's not like he's saying bad things about transgender.
What part of this is bad In terms of bigotry or anything like that about transgender.
This is technique.
He's talking about technique.
It's either right or wrong.
If an expert says, you know, Mario, I see where you're coming from, but the technique should be different.
And then makes the case, and then you compare the two techniques, and you go, ah, I don't know if anybody's measured this.
Has anybody done a study?
For example, is there any science that would back one way of parenting over the other in this specific case?
Maybe. I don't know.
But the worst case scenario is that Mario had a suboptimal parenting strategy for an unusual situation which he hasn't experienced.
That's it. That's the worst thing this could be.
And the news is that he might get fired over it.
Really? There's nothing in this that suggests any kind of, what do you call it, bigotry against transgender.
In fact, it seems very accommodating.
It feels like he's open to it all.
He just wants to have a technique that plays the odds the best.
Yeah. Yeah, I know we're talking about three-year-olds here.
So he's either right or he's wrong.
But I don't think you get fired over that.
If you do, it's a bad world.
I have a Mario Lopez story.
Want to hear my Mario Lopez story?
I was at an airport in L.A., Burbank or someplace, some smaller airport in L.A., and went into the gift shop.
And you know airport gift shops, they're just little hole-in-the-wall, fairly small space, and there are only two people in the gift shop.
One of them is the cashier, and the other is Mario Lopez.
So it was me and Mario Lopez in this little...
This little airport gift shop.
And here's the weird thing.
You probably know he's unusually, you know, fit.
He's really muscular and buffed out.
And he was wearing, I believe he was wearing like a tank top, you know, t-shirt.
So like his entire shoulders and arms are hanging out.
And it was actually uncomfortable being in the same small space with him because he's actually so good looking in person.
That you feel like you don't want to look and you don't want to stand next to it.
It was actually uncomfortable to be in the same space with him while he was half naked looking all buffed out.
I'll probably get fired for that if I had a job.
All right. Let's see what else we got going on.
I guess Ben Shapiro had said that the Kamala Harris moment is over.
And he thinks it's now becoming a Joe Biden versus Elizabeth Warren race, and it's doing so quickly.
He likened Harris's previous rise in the polls to Carly Fiorini having a good week and then fizzling.
Well, I don't know.
He might be right.
I'm not going to say that that's wrong.
I'm going to say it's premature.
Because here's what I think is going to happen.
We don't know what happens when Biden's poll numbers decrease, because I think they will.
Where do those votes go?
Do you think a Joe Biden vote Would more likely go from the more centrist Biden supporter.
Do you think those votes would be transferred over to one of the two most radical people running, Elizabeth Warren?
Do you go from centrist conservative type of Democrat to the most extreme?
When you change horses, because the biggest change will be people abandoning Biden and then choosing a second choice.
What will people choose?
Will they choose Warren or would they choose Harris?
Well, I think a lot of people are going to choose Harris.
And then the second thing that you need to look at is what the matchups look like in the states.
So, and the timing of that.
So whoever seems to be polling best in the early states has a big advantage.
So I'm going to say, I'm going to keep my Kamala Harris prediction.
It might be right, it might be wrong, but I'm showing my work, and here's the basic calculation.
I think they want to beat Trump more than they want anything else.
I think that if you have a woman running, you're locking in a lot of women voters.
If you have a person of color running, you can lock in a lot of people like that or identify with it.
And Harris brings both.
I'm reading that the biggest hit on her from Tulsi Gabbard was the hypocrisy hit, which was you put all these marijuana violators in jail, Which I don't like a bit, one bit, but it was the law.
At the same time, you laughed when you were asked if you smoked marijuana.
Now, the attack here is that she was a mean, heartless person who just put people in jail for a crime that she herself committed.
Well, I just don't know that people care about that topic at all.
Because I think almost everybody looks at it and says, wait, what was her job?
Her job was prosecutor.
And what was the law?
This stuff was against the law.
What choice did she have? Did she have a lot of choice about who she prosecuted?
I don't know if that's an evidence.
How much choice do you have if something's clearly against the law and you have somebody in custody who clearly broke that law?
Does the prosecutor get to say, you know, I don't like that law?
I think I just won't do that one.
Do they have that option?
I don't know. Now, I of course have been quite vocal about wanting to decriminalize or legalize marijuana, so I don't like it one bit that she put people in jail over marijuana offenses.
But it might have been her job.
If it hadn't been her, then wouldn't the next person they put in that job have to prosecute people because they broke the law?
I don't know what choice she had.
So I don't know that people see that situation and they say, oh, if I were in that situation, I would have played it differently.
Because you wouldn't have.
You wouldn't have. You would not have played that situation differently if it were your job to be a prosecutor.
You probably would prosecute people who broke the law, even if you didn't like those laws.
So the people claiming that there was some kind of a knockout punch, I didn't see it.
I did see Kamala Harris looking unconfident.
And I'm going to say again, because I think this is so important.
She doesn't act, this is Kamala Harris I'm talking about, she doesn't act like she thinks she belongs in the White House.
She acts like somebody who's been forced to pretend she's a candidate, meaning she doesn't seem like she has conviction that she's the one who needs to be there, that she's the future, that she's the one.
And it comes across in her reactions when the other candidates are attacking her.
You can see it in her body language and in her expressions and all that.
But, because I'm wrong, somebody's saying I'm wrong, I almost said that, because I'm wrong, no, because I'm older than many of you, there's something I've seen that many of you haven't seen before.
And what I've seen is how people's confidence, or at least the way they project their confidence, can change on a dime.
I'll give you my own example.
When I first submitted my sample comic strips to syndication companies to see if I could get a job as a cartoonist, meaning I wanted to be published and represented by these cartoon syndication companies, and they're the ones who sell it to the newspapers, etc., So I was trying to get my big break, send some samples in, and most of them rejected me.
But one of them, it was called United Media at the time, doesn't exist anymore.
But the editor for United Media called me and said, hey, we want to give you a contract.
Now, I had just been rejected by another comic syndication company, and they said that maybe I should find an actual artist to do the drawing for me.
That's actually the advice I got.
I was trying to become a cartoonist, and the feedback I got from a top professional in the field, and literally from the biggest or second biggest cartoon syndicate in the world, the most important person who makes this sort of decision in the whole world, said to me personally, you know, maybe you should find an actual artist to do the drawing for you.
Ouch. So I thought I had done everything I was going to do, and cartooning wasn't going to work out for me.
But there was one phone call left, and it was the one that came in later.
And when she offered me a contract, I said, well, you know, that's great.
But do you think I should find an actual artist maybe to work with?
Maybe I can find a partner.
I'll do the writing. The actual artist will do the drawing for me.
And my editor, who had just made the offer to be a syndicated cartoonist, said to me, no, your drawing is fine.
She said my drawing was fine, just the way it was.
She didn't say, you're almost there.
She didn't say, we can get you there.
She totally Wizard of Oz'd me.
You know the Wizard of Oz story?
The Wizard just tells them they have the qualities and then they suddenly have them because they've been given the confidence that they're smart or the confidence that they could be brave.
So my editor tells me that I am an artist.
She tells me that I'm not only a cartoon artist, Having never been paid for anything in this realm whatsoever, she tells me that I'm a cartoon artist at a world-class level.
And she said it plainly, that I was a world-class...
She didn't use those words, but the implication is she was hiring me for the highest level of cartooning that you can do, which is a syndicated cartoonist.
It's the highest paid, highest prestige.
And she said there was nothing wrong with the way I drew.
Here's the fun part of the story.
I've been drawing for all my life, so I knew what I was capable of and what I wasn't, and I wasn't really capable of drawing well.
If you've seen my early comics, you know I'm not exaggerated, and I'm not being humble.
I was not good at drawing, period.
But she told me I was.
Within one week, I was good at drawing.
After a lifetime of not being good at drawing, one person who was the right person, who was the expert, who was credible, said, no, you actually are a good artist.
It's fine, just the way it is.
And within one week, I was a good artist.
It was amazing. I watched my own work, and because someone told me that I could do this, Suddenly I could.
It was almost overnight.
And, you know, it kept improving.
And, you know, I stabilized it after a while.
After a number of years, you just sort of lock in a look because you don't want the look to move too much.
But it is very common...
For people to, you know, take a bit of confidence and completely change their game.
I watched a boss of mine years ago, the first time I saw this happen, I watched a boss of mine get promoted.
I'm sorry, I watched a co-worker of mine get promoted to become a boss over the whole department.
And when it happened, I thought to myself, man, that was the wrong decision.
Because this person, this co-worker didn't seem to exhibit Any kind of leadership, charisma, or talent seemed like sort of a nervous, maybe more of a beta personality than an alpha.
And I thought to myself, how is this going to work out?
This is a person who's really good at their job where they are, but doesn't exhibit any of the qualities you'd expect of a leader or a manager.
Two weeks later, look just like a manager.
Look just like a manager.
So in two weeks, this person who got the job and was essentially told, no, you actually have more talent than what it takes to do your current job.
Your talent is up here.
You should be a pretty important leader.
And within two weeks, I watched people become the person that they had been told they were.
It's a very basic element of the human condition that you will become the person that you're told.
Let me give you another example.
I got invited to visit the set of a sci-fi called Babylon 5 years ago, because I'd made some mention about it being my favorite TV show, and I think I'd set it in Reader's Digest in an article or something.
And so they invited me as just a thank you.
They invited me to have a small part on this sci-fi series called Babylon 5.
And during one of the staff get-togethers and breaks, the staff gathered around to sort of thank me and just sort of commemorate the fact that I was visiting because I was a bigger celebrity back then for Dilbert.
And the showrunner, who was the writer and the, I guess, executive producer, What was his name?
Somebody will remind me of his name in the comments here.
But he gave a little speech to the group, just thanking me for coming by, etc.
And he had this quote that came from somebody else, but I don't know what it was.
And it was referring to the fact that I'd called Straczynski, thank you.
His last name is Straczynski.
J. Michael Straczynski.
And I had said, prior to going to visit, I had said in the interview, I think, that it was the most well-written show Of that genre.
So I really liked the writing on Babylon 5.
And I'd said that, and the writer, who was this hugely successful, had his own series, he was the boss, etc., he said that it meant a lot to him that I complimented his writing, and he said this.
He said, quoting somebody else, I can't remember, he said, you're not a writer until another writer says you are.
And I've never forgotten that.
Of course, he's a good writer.
He's a great writer. So that's why he says things that you remember for the rest of your life.
Because he's a great writer.
And I thought about that.
And I thought I was just a fan.
And I was just saying what I liked about the show.
But I could tell...
That it was transformative to him, in a small way.
It didn't make him go from bad to good, but I could tell it wasn't a regular compliment.
I thought it was. When I gave him the compliment, I thought it was just ordinary fan gives a compliment.
But when I realized that the importance of it was that I was a famous writer at the time.
I had best-selling books and the Dilbert comic was doing great.
So being complimented by a writer...
It's something that isn't like being complimented by a fan.
There's no comparison.
They turn you into a different person.
So that's what he meant.
It turned him into a writer by being complimented by a writer.
Now, he was already a highly successful writer.
But the point is that other people's opinion of you can shape you fairly quickly.
All right? This is all getting back to Kamala Harris.
I took a...
I'll get to her in a moment.
I took a Dale Carnegie course years ago.
I talk about this all the time, so I'll just give the quick version.
It was a whole bunch of people who were bad at public speaking, very nervous and had no self-confidence, who went there to learn to give a public presentation without looking like a basket case.
Now, I wasn't as bad as they were coming into it.
I had a little natural... Ham in me, so I didn't have as much trouble in front of people, but I also didn't have the full technique.
But I watched an entire class of people go from sweaty messes to confident presenters in a few weeks simply because, and this is the entire technique, is that we only had one rule in the class, compliments only. That was the only rule.
You couldn't criticize anybody's speaking job in front of you, because we spoke in front of each other.
And the instructor would never say anything negative.
That was the only rule. And that alone, just that one rule, Turned an entire room full of sweaty, shaking, unconfident people into some of the best public speakers you'll ever see.
And it's a lifelong skill.
It never goes away. What was the difference?
How much technique did we learn in the class?
A little. But none of it was important.
It was all the stuff you've heard before or you could read in the book.
So the technique we learned was trivial.
What we learned was an experience.
We experienced talking in front of the crowd and then people saying good things about us.
We experienced that every time we talked in front of a crowd, no matter how poorly it went, the instructor would tell us what we did right.
So we learned like dogs that if we spoke in front of a crowd, we'd get a reward.
Until that's who you are.
You become wired that way.
Now, if you said, Scott, there's going to be this thing, we'd like you to come and speak in front of a thousand people on whatever the topic is, that doesn't matter to the point.
When I hear that, my first impression is, well, that would be fun.
I actually think about standing in front of a thousand people on stage and thinking, I think I'd enjoy that.
Now you know that the average person, if they are presented with the possibility of standing in front of a thousand people and presenting, would be the most frightening thing they'd ever done in their life.
That would have been true for the entire class of Dale Carnegie people, but I'll bet you almost everyone in that class could easily stand in front of a thousand people and enjoy it.
Enjoy it!
Not just do well, Enjoy it while they're on the stage and look forward to it even.
So those are the types of incredible transformations that happen almost instantly, but they're situational.
You have to have the situation right so that there's a credible compliment given to the subject you're talking about.
Somebody can go from not believing that they're qualified to suddenly saying, I am qualified.
And the moment that happens, the moment your confidence goes from, I don't know how I look, I'm worried about how I'm being received, the moment that changes to, I'm good at this.
You can see it.
If that happens with Kamala Harris, you're going to see it.
And it's going to be glorious.
It might not happen. I'm predicting it's going to happen if she's solidly in the top three, and maybe she moves into the top two or so.
If there's ever a poll that says she's in the top one, even temporarily, I think she's going to be a good frontrunner.
Because the moment she thinks she belongs in the Oval Office, you're going to see it.
We don't see it right now.
She looks like somebody who's running for president.
She doesn't look like somebody who thinks she belongs there.
Now, I'm not reading her mind.
I'm just saying that the way she presents is as somebody who's not quite sure she belongs there.
Somebody said her voice is horrible, and you're right.
Her voice needs work.
You know what's one of the problems with her voice?
It projects a lack of confidence.
Do you know how you fix that voice?
You get confident.
It's not the tone of her voice.
You think it is.
And the tone does matter.
I'll give you that. But it's not exactly the tonal quality of the voice.
It's the confidence that she projects.
And even the nasally thing, if she took...
She probably would need to take one day of...
Voice coaching?
To learn that way.
I'm going to give you a whole...
I wasn't planning this, but I'm going to give you a class on proper speaking technique.
I had to learn all this when I lost my voice for a few years.
When I was trying to get my voice back, I learned proper speaking technique, which, as it turned out, didn't help me get my voice back, because it was an organic problem.
But I learned these techniques, and now they're helpful.
Here's how you improve your voice.
And you can all do this at home.
I want you to hum Happy Birthday, the tune to Happy Birthday, but hum it in a way that you can feel the vibration in this part of your face.
It's referred to as the mask of your face, sort of the, you know, the front mask area.
So go like this and feel it up here.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
When you do that, somewhat by coincidence, it activates the perfect parts of your throat and vocal area.
And then you take that into speaking.
So you do the humming, and then you say a sentence, and that sentence that you speak will be as close as you can get to your perfect speaking voice.
By the way, this is a common, well-known technique.
So watch me do it for you.
And now, when I speak, my voice is automatically better because I'm matching the tone that I hummed into my mask.
If you do this at home, you'll notice that you sound more confident, more energetic, and you notice that all of my speaking equipment is now loosened up.
It's more resonant.
It's more deeper. It's more impressive.
And if I wanted to, I could reproduce the sound all the time.
If I wanted to talk to you like I was a news producer, I would do that right before I spoke.
And look how good my voice is.
It seems like there's an entirely big difference.
And all I did was and moved my vocal production up to the top of my equipment.
The problem is When you speak down here, you speak down in your lower throat, this is when you get a little bit of constriction.
And if you're a little bit nervous, these little muscles down here, they're very sensitive.
So a little bit nervous, and it's going to really come across my voice.
I'm trying really hard to speak, but because I'm using the wrong part of my equipment, it's too sensitive to nervousness.
Now, and the victory posed.
Open yourself up. Take a deep breath.
And now when I talk, you can really tell the difference.
Look at that. You can feel the energy.
It's filling the room.
My God, there's nothing that could happen now that would make me sound like anything, like a leader.
I'm a king. I run the world.
Yay for me.
Now, I could have just as much nervousness in my head the second way I talked, but I was using proper technique, and it completely obliterates any chance for that little bit of nervousness to creep into my equipment.
The equipment is unaffected, and you can see me sinking back to the other way I was talking.
Like, you could feel it going right down my throat, so right now it's back down there.
Now, Because of the way I do these periscopes, I like to keep them personal.
So it's a decision.
It's a decision not to talk like this.
I could easily talk like this every single day, and boy, would you say my voice is great.
Some of you might say, Scott, you have a voice for radio.
Why don't you do more radio, Scott?
Perhaps you could be working in voiceovers.
Now, I can do that voice.
But it wouldn't sound personal.
So I prefer just because it's just more fun.
You can connect with me better.
I'd rather talk to you like a human being, like you were just sitting across the table from me.
So, now having heard this, the two things.
One, you're Your confidence can change on a dime if you have the right inputs.
And if Kamala Harris gets the right confidence, maybe Obama visits her.
Imagine this. I'm not saying this will happen, but just imagine this to make the point.
Imagine Kamala Harris gets a phone call from Barack Obama.
And remember, Barack Obama has not endorsed anybody.
And this is hypothetical.
I'm not suggesting this will happen.
So imagine Kamala Harris gets a phone call, and she picks it up, and it's literally Barack Obama.
And Obama says, I've been watching you.
You totally have this.
I want to meet with you tomorrow.
And she'd be like, seriously? Barack Obama just called me on the phone.
I mean, she probably knows him, but he called me on the phone and he wants to talk to me tomorrow.
So Barack Obama shows up at her, wherever she is, and says, you know, can I talk to you personally?
And he takes her in the back and he says, you know, I've been watching politicians for years and you've got this.
You're definitely the person who belongs in the White House.
Kamala Harris, I'm going to endorse you tomorrow.
Don't embarrass me.
I know you have this.
You have all the tools.
Own it. What would Kamala Harris sound like the day after that?
She'd sound like a president.
I'll bet you in 24 hours she would sound like a president, whereas right now she's struggling to do that.
That's the sort of thing, and again, I'm not suggesting that Obama will do that.
I'm just saying that there can be an event that completely changes how you see yourself, and that will be projected, and we can all hear that.
And then on top of that, if she gets a little voice coaching, you saw how easily I coached you into a better voice.
It took, what, two minutes?
Two minutes and suddenly you could all reproduce it at home.
You probably all tried it at home and it worked.
So that's how close she is.
So when you're looking at, you know, that she's third or fourth in the polls and you're looking at Biden and I guess his lead went up again.
Biden only has to have one bad day and he's going to look too old.
Just one bad day.
And if he goes away, will his votes go to Warren?
Will they go to Bernie?
Probably not so much.
The top person who's closest to the center is Kamala Harris.
And I think she has probably more flexibility in flip-flopping even closer to the center as time goes on.
So look for her.
Now, so let me make my prediction as clear as possible.
I had been picking Kamala to get the nomination but losing the general for over a year.
The important part is that she gets her confidence.
If that doesn't happen, well then she'll just sort of fade away.
If something happens to give her confidence...
I think she goes all the way to the nomination and then loses in the general.
Let's talk about, did you see racist Don Lemon's video interview with Reverend Bill Owens?
This is one of the best things ever.
I tweeted this so you can see it in my tweet storm.
So Reverend Bill Owens was part of, I guess, a group of African-American pastors who were invited to the White House recently.
And racist Don Lemon, or RDL, had him on and asked him, basically was trying to drive a wedge between this black pastor and President Trump, who apparently they've been working together.
And the pastor refused to say that he thinks the president is racist.
He just said he wouldn't do it, and that he wants to work toward making the world a better place, etc.
Here's the best part of this.
So you see Don Lemon trying to make it look like this reverend was pulled into the White House as sort of a stunt, just to put a black face on the camera.
That was sort of where RDL was going.
And And then the pastor, Reverend Bill Owens, he says this line.
I think I'll be laughing for a month.
He says to R.D. Alley, he goes, that he's been to the White House four times in five months, which we didn't even know about, right?
You didn't know that? So this black pastor who RDL is trying to make look like he's just a stunt casting, you know, where you bring in a celebrity just to make people interested.
So he's trying to act like that Trump just brought him in to, you know, pretend he was being open-minded.
And then the guy drops, yeah, I've been to the White House four times in the last five months.
Nobody heard about that.
So that just made me laugh.
So, as you know, Don Lemon has said a couple times now in hosting or moderating the debates, he stated as a fact that President Trump is a racist.
Now, most of you would say, well, I would think that would be more of an opinion, and half the country thinks yes, and, I don't know, 30% of the country thinks no, and the rest don't answer questions.
And so... Is that a fact?
Like, is it news?
Or is it just an opinion?
And I guess Don Lemon's opinion is that if he's convinced by what he's seen, that that's the same as a fact.
That that's as good as, you know, a true fact.
Now if that's how it works, I'm willing to embrace that as standard.
And so I've embraced that standard by renaming him RDL, or for racist Don Lemon, because it seems to me he wouldn't be complaining so much if he weren't a racist.
Now, I'm not a mind reader, so I can't see his inner thoughts.
But Don Lemon's standard is, if you see people acting a certain way, and your interpretation of that is that they're racist, that that's not an opinion.
If you've looked at evidence, and you're a reasonable person, and looking at the evidence tells you that that person is a racist, then they're a racist.
I think that's the standard he's supporting.
So let's go with that.
All right. Here's the thing that bothers me more than anything in the news.
How many times have you heard smart people say...
How many times have smart people said, nobody wins a trade war?
All the time, right?
Have you even heard anybody say the opposite?
You know, other people, there's nobody who says trade wars are good in general.
We're not talking about China in particular, but the general statement.
Have you seen even one expert ever, a historian, an economist, a politician, has any, even one expert ever said, Trade wars, sometimes they're good.
No. Not one person.
And so, with this trade war with China, people are saying, well, trade wars are bad.
Therefore, the president's messing up.
Because he started a trade war.
Trade wars are bad. Everybody loses.
Right? Isn't there a question missing?
Yeah, there's a question missing.
Here's the question that's missing.
What's the alternative?
What are you suggesting?
Because one way to avoid a trade war is to do anything the other party wants.
So let's say that the other party decided to charge us 100% tariffs, and we charge them no tariffs.
How should we respond to that?
Well, trade wars don't work.
So you should just start shoveling money in their direction, right?
I don't even know what to say when people suggest that trade wars don't work.
Because what's the alternative?
The only alternative is to give the other side literally everything they ask for.
And they're not going to ask for something that's right down the middle.
Hey, this sounds fair. What do you think, buddy?
You think this is fair? Not even close.
That's how we're in this situation.
We let China...
Take advantage of us trade-wise, because originally, my understanding is, by the way, somebody has to fact check me on the history of this, but my understanding is that many of our historical trade arrangements were intentionally one-sided for the other countries.
And the reason was our economy was so strong and they were so weak that we wanted some one-sided agreements so those other countries could become stronger.
And then they would become better trading partners.
It's good for the world.
The more money there is in the world, everybody wins.
And so it was actually a conscious decision to give them an uneven deal.
But time goes by.
China did pretty well.
South Korea, doing pretty well.
Canada, looks like it's okay.
I don't know if Canada might not be an example of this.
And now the president's saying, hey, okay, those agreements made sense back then.
He doesn't say that, but in essence.
But at the moment, they don't, because China's doing so well.
What are you supposed to do?
What do you suggest we do?
Simply take whatever China hands us?
China is killing tens of thousands of Americans a year with fentanyl that they promised to criminalize and make it a capital offense and then just didn't.
Just didn't. China promised that they would sign a trade deal and then just didn't.
They didn't. Just decided not to.
China said they would buy a whole bunch more of our agricultural products, and then they didn't.
They just didn't.
What do you do with that?
Somebody tell me, what's the alternative to a trade war?
So what I've suggested is that we don't have any trade agreement at all.
We just tariff the living crap out of them.
And if they want to change that situation, we entertain an offer.
But we shouldn't deal with somebody who's not negotiating.
Why would you negotiate with somebody who's not negotiating?
They're not negotiating. They are not negotiating.
So we don't have a trade war, because even a trade war would look like a little bit of negotiating, but I haven't seen anything that looks like it.
It looks like just Stalin.
They are literally running out the clock, hoping that Trump doesn't get elected.
Now, if he does, I think they'll just stall four more years, wouldn't you?
Because remember, China has a thousand-year plan.
They don't have a four-year plan.
I think China's just looking to run out the clock.
So, somebody, please, in the media, please, just ask one of these experts who say trade wars never work, what is the alternative?
And if that person says, well, I know what they're going to say.
Do you know what they're going to say?
Let me give you...
Dale, Dale, could you come over here?
I'm going to bring in Dale to explain what the experts will say after that if there's a question on it.
So, Dale, trade wars never work.
Nobody wins. It's just attacks on people.
Trade wars never work.
Okay, I hear you.
But what's the alternative to a trade war?
Do we just take whatever the other side offers, no matter how one-sided it is?
No. You negotiate with them.
Well, that's exactly what we're doing.
We're negotiating with them.
So you're saying we should do exactly what President Trump is doing?
No. No.
You negotiate successfully.
He's not being successful.
He's trying. I'm pretty sure he's trying to be successful.
So how do we know when he's done?
It looks like maybe China's the problem here.
Trade wars never worked.
Seen. So that's that.
So it looks like the Democrats have decided as their 2020 primary line of attack, it looked like in 2016 they were saying that President Trump was a racist.
They have now clearly changed that message to Voters for Trump are racists.
Have you seen the change? So the change seems to be, instead of saying, hey, the guy you're voting for is a racist, they're saying, no, you're a racist.
You're a racist if you vote for him.
That's probably a stronger persuasion.
And it's not bad.
And it kind of makes you wonder if there needs to be some kind of linguistic response to Because once you've called somebody a racist, they sort of have the advantage.
Right? Because you're a racist is always going to be ten times stronger than...
No, I'm not. If you're arguing that you're not a racist, you're not winning.
You're not winning in that situation.
So I think that will be the attack coming from...
coming from the left.
Now... Somebody says, who cares if they call you a racist?
Well, many people won't care.
But you only have to move 1% of the public who thinks that they don't want their personal brand to be impacted by this.
Takes one to know one.
Yeah. Well, I think everybody's a bigot at this point.
So I'll have to work on that.
What is the solution to that?
I want to try another topic here.
I have a, let's say, a theory, hypothesis perhaps is a better word, that most of the big problems in life have been solved.
We just have design problems now.
Design problems.
Here's what I mean. I believe that just with the current amount of money and inventions and people and stuff, we have all the stuff we need to solve a lot of problems, but they're not organized right.
And so that's a design problem.
Take, for example, the inner city blight situations.
Your problem with the inner cities...
It's a system problem, which is if the government says, hey, here's a bunch of money, inner city, go spend this and fix your problem.
The problem is there's likely to be some corruption and the money doesn't get spent in any good way.
So you don't have a problem of no money and you don't have a problem of not knowing how to spend it productively.
You have all the stuff you need, but you have a design in your system that can't work.
There's just a built-in obstacle, which is it's too tempting to just steal the money and give the bids to your contractor friends and that sort of thing.
So you might not have the right people involved.
Maybe the local cities are just not qualified.
But it's not like we don't have qualified people in the world.
It's not like we don't have money enough.
We have all the things we need, but it's not organized right.
That's why somebody like Bill Pulte is especially effective because what he does is he brings a system to the problem.
So he brings a known, functional, designed, already the tires have been kicked.
He knows how to coordinate it so that you can do it in the right way in a system that's reproducible and works.
So you see why he gets so much attention.
Is that he's not just adding money that didn't exist before, although a lot of his own money is going into this stuff, but he's designing it better.
It's a design solution.
Likewise, I was realizing that I can redesign my kitchen.
So if I were to build a home tomorrow and I wanted to make it the least expensive home I could possibly build, just the home part, One way I could do it is I would make this my kitchen, my phone.
This is already my kitchen two or three days a week.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that I use a food delivery service, something like DoorDash or one of the others.
And I go to my phone and I say, what food do I want to eat?
And I go, and that food shows up on my doorstep in an hour.
And then I eat it and then I'm happy.
Now, unfortunately, ordering food this way is expensive because it's being prepared in a restaurant, it's put in these, you know, containers, and then somebody has to be paid to pick it up and take it to your house.
So it's expensive. But imagine if you designed a low-cost housing area around a central cafeteria, Where you could always just walk across the street to the cafeteria, or you could pick up your phone and have somebody, you know, just walking across to you to your house and knock on the door.
You would never need a kitchen.
If it was a 24-hour, you know, kind of cafeteria situation.
Now, somebody says that's too expensive.
It's not too expensive if you build it around that concept.
In other words, if you design it right, you have one place that's creating food, and then you've got a lot of housing around it that's having that food delivered, or they go pick it up.
Now, it's exactly like a college dorm, right?
So people are saying in the comments, it's exactly like a college cafeteria.
Now, I went to Hartwick College in upstate New York.
And one of the amazing things about that little college is that it was used as the demonstration kitchen for the food services company that operated the cafeteria.
So there's usually one big food services management company that runs a cafeteria for the college, because the college doesn't know about food services.
They just contract it out.
And we happened to be at the one that they used as their sales tool.
So they would bring other colleges there and say, hey, look how good we do here at this college.
You should hire us for your college.
So we got all the best stuff.
Everything was well designed and clean and our choices were good.
And I have to tell you, I ate like a king.
The food that I ate in college was...
Completely acceptable. And it was lots of variety.
It was reasonably healthy.
It could have been even more healthy, etc.
And it probably is the least expensive way it could have been provided.
And I think you could take that to a whole other level of less expensive if you tried.
So if you started from the ground up and said, you know, I'm not trying to just fix the way houses look today.
I'm just going to start over.
And I'm going to say, how do we design a way to live that we can afford on, let's say something you can afford on Andrew Yang's $1,000 a month.
The minimum that you need for a home is a bedroom, some storage, you know, closet plus some storage, and your own bathroom.
That's a whole house.
If you had a really good view, let's say an open glass, you know, total view, the whole wall is just glass and you're looking at something interesting, and you can close the curtain if you want, but that's your view and that's your bedroom, and then it's attached to a really solid, good bathroom with a shower and everything, and then you've got your own little storage, and then you've got your phone to get your food or walk across the street and pick it up and take it with you, you'd have a house.
What would it cost for that little house if you put it with other little houses and surrounded it with services?
Let's say you provided Wi-Fi for everybody.
Transportation is easy because you're right next to mass transportation.
If you were to design a place like that from the ground up, what would it cost to live there?
To have a pretty good lifestyle that's like way better than a college student, but the same level of cost.
Probably you could really make a difference.
Now, if you could lower people's costs that much, well, suddenly it's easier to pay for everything else because the cost of a good life has gone down so much that people have money left over.
So if you have to spend a little extra for your health care, you have to spend a little extra for other stuff you haven't.
So here's my point. Everything from urban light to the cost of housing, clearly our entire healthcare system, you can see that the government's trying to make more free market stuff happening there.
They're changing the design of healthcare by trying to get drugs in from Canada so that we get them at lower costs.
That's a design change.
Those drugs were already just sitting there, and they were available at a lower price, apparently.
I'm not sure exactly how that works, why that's a lower price, but it is.
So you see the government fixing the design of how we get our healthcare, and that's the fix.
We didn't have to print more money.
We didn't have to invent more stuff.
We just had to design it better.
And I would say that almost everything that's a problem right now is design.
Let's take even international relations.
Let's take North Korea's nuclear program.
And let's take our relationship with China and Russia and all that.
It seems to me that we have a design problem.
Because we don't have a physical problem.
All the countries that I mentioned don't want to be at war with each other.
We have a common interest.
We all don't want to be at war.
There may be some small little things we disagree about, Taiwan, etc.
But mostly, we're on the same page about most stuff.
And somebody's telling me to wear a blue shirt.
I just realized that I'm matching my background.
Good point. It's laundry day.
I'll have a blue shirt next time.
It literally is laundry day.
That's why I'm wearing the shirt. So anyway, that's my point.
We could design all these things.
Take Venezuela.
Venezuela is a system problem.
It's a design problem.
It fell apart. Now we've got a dictator in place.
How come we don't hear much from Venezuela?
What happened there? I just realized that all the news stopped.
Did the protesters just stop protesting?
What happened down there?
Are we just waiting for the economy to continue crashing?
Is there some kind of negotiation going on behind the scenes?
I don't know. But my point being that there may be a design issue with Venezuela.
There might be something we could do that would fix that situation and it wouldn't require inventing something.
We just have to arrange assets better.
I'm not sure exactly how to do it, but it's the general point that we're in the golden age where we don't have to invent stuff.
That doesn't exist. We just have to rearrange it.
It's a design problem.
All right. That's probably all I need to talk about.
Is there anybody who wants to argue with me about whether the president is a racist or whether you have TDS? I'm going to put on my headphones and take some questions.
Hold on. I apologize for that audio disruption.
Alright, I'm going to take some questions.
If you see a little icon on the bottom of your screen, it only works on a mobile device, so this won't work on your laptop.
But if you have an iPad or a phone, there's two little happy faces at the bottom of your screen.
If you click that, it puts you in line to speak live with me on this Periscope.
So I'm going to... It looks like three people have already jumped in.
I'm going to take Omer.
Omer... Come at me.
Omar, can you hear me?
Omar, can you hear me?
Hey. Are you here to make your case that either President Trump is a racist or you have TDS? Oh, okay.
I thought we were doing general question and answer period.
I will take your general question now that you're here.
Okay, great. So it actually goes towards the nuclear generation four topic.
Okay. Okay, so a few months ago you had an expert on, I forgot his name, but he was talking about mainly Generation 3 and you guys kind of had a little bit of a disagreement where he was skeptical about Generation 4 because he thought there's already been so much investment into Generation 3 and why pursue something else when their infrastructure is already there?
Well, I would modify that by saying that he's saying that Generation 3 is ready to go today, but he's not anti-Generation 4.
He just knows that there's a little more testing that we need there.
Right, but ultimately it would delay, if you followed his strategy, it would delay Generation 4's entering the market if you really put more resources to Generation 4.
Probably not, because Generation 3 is something that we can already do, and at the same time, separately, there are different companies who are only working on Generation 4.
So both of those things seem to be funded and going forward.
I don't think one detracts from the other at all.
It seems like a path from 3 to 4 that we just have to get the steps right.
What was the question?
So ultimately the question was, do you think that Generation 4, the pursuit of Generation 4, might limit the research into fusion technologies?
And that maybe it's worth just skippering the R&D into Generation 4 and just put all our resources into developing fusion as fast as possible?
Well, so yeah, does Generation 4 detract resources that could have gone into fusion?
To speak in a purely theoretical sense, maybe, because there are only so many people in the world, and if you could get all the best of them and they were all working on fusion, maybe something would happen faster.
But it's pretty different technology and pretty different processes, and my guess is that we have enough people to do all of that.
So what I'm not hearing is that nuclear projects can't give funding.
Now, maybe that's true, but I keep hearing of nuclear projects that are getting funded, and I've got a feeling that the try-everything approach might be statistically the best way to go.
And keep in mind that Generation 4 is an umbrella category for just a safer technology that doesn't have the same risks of technology.
Of meltdown doesn't have the problems with the waste.
Now there are a whole bunch of ways to do that and we don't have a decided one way to do that, but it's sort of the family of better nuclear reactors.
We don't have one best way yet.
So I think we have to just push on everything.
If I were the king, I would say we probably have enough resources to push on all of these at the same time and And we'll be glad we did.
But your question is theoretically appropriate because we'll never know if Fusion got slowed down because the handful of people who could have made that happen were busy doing something else.
Maybe. But my instinct and experience says probably you want to push on all of them because we have enough resources to do that.
But thank you for the question.
Thanks a lot. Alright, let's see if I can get somebody on here to argue.
Just looking at your names, I'm going to try to find somebody who looks like they're lively.
Alright, we're going to have this guest.
And, is it James?
James, can you hear me? I'm good, how are you?
I'm here to argue with you about Trump derangement syndrome unfortunately.
I will take your question then.
Alright, so a couple weeks ago you were talking about incentives and it kind of got me thinking about how maybe you could incentivize illegal immigrants to turn themselves in and if maybe there's some kind of deal that To deport these people who voluntarily go to a preferential city,
maybe a tourist city, or a city that has jobs waiting for them, and then give them a kind of accelerated track back into the United States the right way of doing it, legally.
You know, that's similar to an idea that I floated not too long ago, to have an app.
For illegal immigrants and let's say, for example, that if you agree to use the app and you can find a job through the app because it would be people who are looking for this exact type of workforce, mostly farms, etc. So as long as you could make a connection and the app showed that you had made an employment connection We know where you are because you always have your phone with you.
There might be some way to have some kind of middle ground area where the illegals are essentially licensed, approved guest workers the moment that the app tells them that they've got a job lined up.
So you could walk across the border with the app and somebody says, hey, you stay there.
But you show them the app and say, look, I got the job lined up.
Plus, you can track me on the phone because it's a special phone or app or whatever, and you'll know where I am at all times.
And then we say, well, that's not the kind of people we want to keep out because we've got American companies that want to hire you.
Apparently, they can't find Americans to do these jobs.
So I like the general point of what you're saying, which is if you create attractive options...
You might be able to get people to the right place and everybody wins.
So I like that idea. I just don't know how to get there.
So thanks for the question.
Have a lovely day. All right, you too.
Let's take one more. It's funny how I can't get anybody to argue with me on these guest calls.
Hello, guests. Can you hear me?
Good morning. What's your name?
Joe, do you have a question and or do you want to argue with me about the president?
Unfortunately, I'd like to hear an argument, but it's not going to be from me.
Question about TDS. Okay.
So you talked about President Trump ripping a hole in the fabric of reality.
Yes. So as it relates to TDS, how much of TDS... Or how much will TDS be responsible for that rip of the fabric?
And I'll couch that by adding, the reason I bring this up is I do not have TDS, but so many of my friends do, and these are people that I am somewhat alienated from.
And I know that's kind of a trope, but I don't think about it too much.
But whenever anybody brings up TDS, I'm reminded of, oh, there's these people that have TDS and they're not in my life so much anymore.
So maybe that ripped the fabric of my reality, but I wonder how much it would rip the fabric of the nation and reality in itself.
Well, here's the thing.
If you rip a hole in reality and you've created a little hole in reality and some people can look through, some people are going to look through and they're going to be ready.
And they're going to say, whoa, I didn't expect this, and that this changes how I see the world, but I was ready for it.
Other people are going to find it threatening and scary, and it's going to threaten their sense of who they were, how smart they were before, or what they understood about the world, and they're going to reject it violently.
You know, violently, not necessarily physically violently, but mentally violently.
And so I think that's what you're saying.
I think you're seeing half of the world moving to a higher level of awareness about the importance of fact-checking.
Apparently it didn't matter at all.
And the power of persuasion, and people are saying, whoa.
And other people are also seeing that the TDS is a manufactured feeling.
I've often thought, here's a good thought experiment.
I've said this before.
I'm considering writing an article on this topic, but imagine if the news for the past three years about President Trump had been presented as just facts, the stuff we knew to be true, instead of opinion.
I suppose no opinion had ever been added on top of it by the media, which is very persuasive.
It's one of the biggest things.
Yeah, I don't know that people would have looked at the raw facts Let me give you an example.
When he said S-hole countries in that meeting, if that had been reported factually, they would have said the president used the swear word in a meeting and he was talking about some countries being behind economically and educationally and wondered about what would be the impact of bringing in more people from the The countries with low economy and low educational standards.
Now, that would have been pretty close to just saying the facts.
Right. But then people say, well, he wouldn't use that word unless he's a racist.
And that becomes... And we're fooled into thinking that's the news.
That's not the news.
That's somebody's opinion.
So here's... Yeah, go ahead.
If I ask a follow-up then, because I've been listening for two years, so I've heard...
You know what I mean? This is...
I get it, right? So take me 10 years down the line.
How does this all pan out?
Because TDS is serious, Scott.
And I'm just wondering if you have a prediction.
I don't know what's going to happen from here.
It's getting more and more pronounced in terms of the manufactured TDS in the news.
Over two years, it hasn't gotten any better.
It's gotten worse.
People aren't coming to a realization at all on the TDS side, or at least not in any type of wave yet.
Does that happen? Does the TDS crowd that had their reality torn apart I've got a feeling this is going to be a situation where time and history can correct.
I think when historians are looking at the Trump administration from, let's say, 20 years from now, they'll have some negatives, but they're going to say, wow, she got a lot done, and probably things that other presidents couldn't have gotten done.
So I think at some point it'll just fade.
But I would think the most likely thing to happen is that after Trump, a Democrat would get elected.
And so for the people who are suffering from TDS, they would say, thank God we've gotten through this and now everything is wonderful and we'll live in happiness.
It's too bad about the economy.
But... And that war we're having.
But... I think we get through it just by changing presidents someday.
I don't think it's going to happen in 2020.
So you're right.
We likely have four more years of this.
Now, it's also possible that it will decrease just at the point where they know that their horror will time out.
So they're going to say to themselves, all right, it's only four years, three years, it's only two years, and it should decrease on its own just because it's one of those problems in their mind that time solves.
If you just wait a little bit, he won't be president anymore.
Now, of course, they'll start the whole crazy stuff about he's never going to leave office, but I remind you, That I won a $500 bet with a Republican who said that Obama would never leave office and that he's really just a dictator.
And that was crazy when I heard it.
I won $500 on it.
If anybody can get a Democrat to bet with them actual money, that President Trump won't leave office after whenever his term ends.
If you can get somebody to make that bet with you, take it.
You've put it out there. Nobody took you up yet?
I think you put that out there that you're waiting for it.
Yeah, nobody's taken me up on that yet.
Oh, you know what would be interesting?
I haven't seen that question on predicted.
I haven't seen it as an actual question.
I would think that would be the most interesting question you could put up there.
Will he leave office after the end of his term?
God, looking forward to loser think, man.
Thank you. Yes, I think that's going to leave a mark.
So that's out November 5th, and I'll be promoting that in the coming months.
So thank you, Joe.
Thanks, Scott. Take care, buddy.
All right. And that's all for today.
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