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Aug. 7, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
51:56
Episode 621 Scott Adams: The Mental Illness Crisis Turning Democrats into FAKE NEWS ZOMBIES
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody come on in here I'm broadcasting today from my undisclosed location and I think I got the time difference right this time.
So it should be exactly the right time for Coffee with Scott Adams and that's why you're here.
I know why you're here.
You're here for the simultaneous sip.
That dopamine pleasure that's always the right thing to do.
Sets your day off just perfectly.
And all you need to join me for the simultaneous sip is a cup or a mug or a glass.
Some kind of a chalice, a stein, a tankard.
That would be fine. Could be a canteen.
Maybe a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now.
For the simultaneous sip.
Ah! You know, I have to enjoy my coffee from a tiny little glass or cup.
It's not like being at home where I can just have a big-ass cup.
Alright, so you may have noticed that the mental health of the country is deteriorating, deteriorating at exactly the same time as Most things are going pretty well.
The only thing that isn't going well is that people are becoming mentally ill at the same time things are going well otherwise.
Now, of course, we expect this in the political season.
I just wrote a blog post that I posted this morning.
You can see it on my Twitter feed.
You can see the link. In which I talk about how to figure out if you're in the right reality.
And sort out whether your reality is close to something that's predictive and maybe real, if there is such a thing.
And whether or not your reality is the opposite.
Some kind of hallucination that does not predict what will happen next.
If your reality is no good at predicting what's going to happen next...
Well, you got a problem.
So, you can read the blog post for more on that.
But let's talk about what's new.
Before I talk about all the craziness, before I talk about the craziness, let's talk about guns.
I tweeted a thought experiment yesterday.
That people did not quite take in the manner which I expected.
So here was the thought experiment.
And the idea was, imagine a world in which all of the AR, the scary-looking, assault-looking rifles are pink.
What if they're all pink?
And I said, just think about that.
What would that change?
Now, because people are not good at thought experiments, at least a third of the people said, and I quote, Duh!
Duh, Scott!
Nothing will change.
People will just spray paint their gun black.
Well, that's cheating.
Because the point of the thought experiment was not to suggest a policy or a law.
If I were suggesting a policy or a law, then that would be a fair thing to say, hey, it might not work because people would just spray paint it black.
But that wasn't it.
That's not what I was going for.
I wanted you just to imagine a world and artificially imagine that nobody has spray paint.
It just can't be done.
Now, that's not the real world, but that's why it's a thought experiment.
It's a thought experiment in part because you can't do it in the real world.
So imagine that nobody can spray paint their gun to a scary black color.
It's just always pink.
And the question is, would we have the same amount of mass shootings?
Now, if you can't deal with this As a thought experiment, and you're sort of locked into, but, but, but, Scott, they would just spray paint their gun.
You can't be in this conversation.
You're not qualified to talk about the thought experiment if you're locked into, but, but, but they would just spray paint them.
Just imagine they can't.
I know they can, but just try to imagine they can't for a moment, all right?
Would there be as much shooting?
So there's a point to all this.
And here's the point. Not that it would ever be any practical way to reduce gun violence.
What I'm trying to get at with the thought experiment is to try to figure out what's the base problem.
You know, there are a lot of variables, so it may not be one thing.
But there might be one lever.
There might be one thing that helps you fix it, even if it's not the source of the problem.
Because sometimes the solution and the cause can be somewhat separate, and the solution can be a little bit invisible sometimes.
So here's the idea.
If you were a potential mass shooter and you knew the only way that you could do your crime was with a large pink weapon, would you be as motivated to do it?
Now, if you're saying, but you could still do it, well, again, you're not qualified for thought experiments.
So the people who say, No, people can just shoot anyway.
It doesn't matter if the gun is pink.
You're not quite qualified to be in this conversation.
Because what we're talking about is how the feel of things changes your motivation.
Yes, I know if you're motivated to do it, you can use any color gun.
I know. I get that.
But would people be as equally motivated if the look and feel of the action was no longer cool?
I told you before that anybody gets a big scary rifle is gonna go stand in front of a mirror every single time.
Nobody in the history of gun buying ever bought a scary large weapon, an actual rifle, and failed to walk directly to a mirror and look at how they look.
Every single person.
Would you agree? At least once, people have looked at themselves in the mirror holding their gun or taken a picture to do the same thing.
There is something about the lifestyle of it.
There's something about the coolness of it, if I can use that word in the context of horrible motives.
And if people, if young men Did not feel that there's something about the lifestyle of it, the coolness of it, the look and the feel of it.
If this were not all compatible with who they thought they were as people, I believe, they would be far less motivated to do it.
The people say, wrong!
People say, disagree!
Okay, if you're saying, for the people who are saying that I'm wrong and disagreeing, if you're saying, but they would just spray paint their gun, you're not qualified to be in the conversation.
Because the thought experiment says they can't do that.
Just magically, they're not allowed to do that.
So here's the point.
Forget about pink guns.
Forget about pink guns.
Nobody's going to require pink guns.
It's not going to happen.
It was only a thought experiment.
Let it go. Did you learn anything?
Maybe. Maybe you did.
Oh, here's somebody who's critical, but they just disappeared.
If what you learned is that there's something about the lifestyle feel of it, the coolness of it, if I can use that, that appeals to a certain demographic, they tend to be white males within a certain age range, what could you do to change that?
And if you did, would they simply choose different methods to kill?
Well, some would. Some would.
Absolutely some would just find different ways to kill.
But do you think it's a coincidence?
That the Islamic terrorists seem to be limited to certain types of attacks.
Have you ever noticed that?
If you're an Islamic terrorist, there are certain types of violence that are the right kind.
And yet there are all these other ways that you could do terrible things in this country.
I'm not going to mention them.
You know them all. There are all these other ways that jihadists could just make terrible trouble for this country, and they don't.
For years, years have gone by, and there are all these ways that the Islamic terrorists could do terrible things to this country beyond the things that they tried to do, but they don't.
There's something about the lifestyle of it that appeals to certain groups, and if you could change that, you might change at least the motivation of people to do it.
Somebody says, I just learned that Scott doesn't understand guns.
All right, well, we'll delete you for stupidity, because if you heard me say anything about guns, you're hallucinating.
It's funny, we're getting more trolls in here than usual.
Let's see. Do movies and video games make them cool?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Yeah, so it's not just video games, it's movies, it's TV, it's everything.
Alright, so that was the experiment.
If you ask me, the real problem with these mass shootings is that they fit a lifestyle of a certain individual.
And if you could change the lifestyle appeal, Then the gun shooting would go away.
It might be moved into some other category.
Let's talk about how crazy people are.
Here are some tells for people who have lost, they've just lost the thread to any logic or credibility.
It's the people who say, Trump's a racist and it's just a fact.
Do you have any evidence?
What are you talking about in particular?
Or Trump's racist? It just is.
So watch for the people who are explicitly given up on offering reasons because the reasons apparently aren't good enough.
They're not working. And they don't know why their reasons aren't working.
And of course it's because their reasons are fake news for the most part.
You're a tyrant.
Somebody's calling me a tyrant.
That's new. So if you see that, the people who are no longer willing to debate, they're just saying, it's just true.
It's just, it is.
It's just the truth.
It's reality. Moving on.
Those people typically are having a tough time holding on to reality.
So look for that. So here are the things that we've seen in the last day or so.
We've seen Joe Scarborough...
At Morning Joe and MSNBC. He says that any business that donates to Trump is complicit and endorses the white supremacy he espoused in Charlottesville, which of course didn't happen.
That's fake news, but apparently Joe doesn't know that.
With his quote, send her back chance, which of course also taken a little bit out of context, and by laughing at shouts the Hispanic immigrants should be shot.
Donors' names are in an FEC report that they are newsworthy.
So the idea that he and, I guess, who is the politician, the brother of Julian Castro?
Julian Castro's brother, also a politician, is printing It's printing the names of donors, companies that are donors, so that people can boycott those companies.
Now, let me ask you this.
Would you want to have a government that has lots of supporters who think that we should determine our commerce based on political affiliation?
It might be the worst idea anybody's had in the realm of economics.
So remember, every time you see one of the anti-Trumpers target any companies or people for economic destruction, that's who wants to run your economy.
Think about what's the...
If you wanted to destroy the American economy with just, say, one move, there are probably a few ways to do it, but one way to do it Would be to say, get everybody whipped up so that they'll only buy things from people who agree with them politically.
Can you think of a more effective way to destroy the country?
Now, I don't think it's their intention to destroy the country, but wow!
Oh, did I say...
Joaquin Castro. Okay, so it was Joaquin Castro who's the brother.
So he's the one who's printing the names, doxing as they call it, doxing people who are Trump supporters.
Now, I don't think...
We should just criticize that on the small.
So, you know, if you were just looking at one person doxing some people, it's a smallish problem.
But think about, this is the group of people who wants to run your economy.
These are the people who want to put their person in charge of the economy, and they're suggesting, literally, the most destructive thing that could ever happen to any nation's economy.
They're... I hate to say this, but I'm going to anyway.
Democrats have actually started a trade war within the United States.
The same people who think that it's a bad idea to have a trade war with China and other countries are expressly starting a trade war In the United States, by doxing people by their political views, saying, if you agree with President Trump, we can't do business with you.
That's sort of a trade war, isn't it?
So starting a trade war in your own country is literally the worst economic idea of all time.
Of all time. I don't know.
Has anybody ever done a dumber thing than that in terms of the economy?
Let's talk about some other people who are going a little bit crazy.
Some guy on MSNBC who is suggesting that because the president is flying the flags at half-mast until August 8th, And August 8th would be expressed as the 8th month and the 8th day, and the letter 8 is known by white supremacists as the 8th letter of the alphabet.
This stands for H, and two number 8s, therefore, would be HH, and therefore, would be Heil Hitler.
This pundit from MSNBC is suggesting that either the president has bad advice or he's sending secret codes to white supremacists.
To which I say, okay, but you know, eight is one of the numbers.
Within the numbers under ten, Well, let's say the numbers of the month, there are only 31 at tops.
So of all the numbers in a month, you only have 31 to work with.
Should we get rid of 8, 18, and 28?
28 sounds pretty bad, right?
28 is 2 times 8.
That's Heil Hitler. Why aren't we talking about 28?
28 sounds like the bad one, don't you think?
So that strikes me, honestly, that just strikes me as some form of mental illness.
That doesn't strike me as news.
What's interesting is that I think the election will be won by whichever side has the lowest opinion of their own voters' intelligence, which is a heck of a situation.
Think about it.
The election will probably be won by whichever side has the lowest opinion of their own voters.
Because smart, accurate opinions don't really work in politics.
You want to dumb things down to the dumbest level.
So the Democrats are imagining that their people will believe absolutely anything about Racism and the president being a racist.
Nicole Wallace, also of MSNBC. She apologized because she...
And here's her apology on Twitter.
So Nicole Wallace of MSNBC says, I misspoke about Trump calling for an extermination of Latinos.
What? What? What? What? What? What?
Let me go on.
What? Did this actually happen?
I swear this happened.
She's apologizing and saying she misspoke about Trump calling for the extermination of Latinos?
What? And then she goes on and she says, my mistake was unintentional and I'm sorry.
Trump's constant assault on people of color and his use of the word invasion to describe the flow of immigrants is intentional and constant.
So she says she's sorry but not sorry, I guess.
So I tweeted back and I said, Apology accepted.
Likewise, I said in my tweet, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to anyone I have accidentally accused in public of ethnic genocide.
So if I've ever misspoken and seem to be in favor of ethnic genocide, I probably didn't mean it.
Just like Nicole Wallace.
Now, what's wrong with Nicole Wallace that she could hear the President's language and even get anywhere close to extermination of Latinos?
Like, is that even in the same universe with whatever the President's saying that they don't like?
Think how crazy that is.
Does that sound like just politics?
It doesn't really, does it?
It doesn't sound like politics.
Does it sound like an intentional lie?
Not really, because it would be such a bad intentional lie that you wouldn't expect a professional news person to think that that would turn out well.
My best assumption Is that she actually believed it when she said it.
I'm not reading her mind, but how else can we interpret that kind of a mistake?
In her mind, she actually was thinking the president was in favor of extermination of Latinos.
And worse, where do we use the term extermination?
Well, with vermin and insects.
So, Nicole Wallace has a second apology to make because she paired Latinos with the word extermination, which was only her own word.
It wasn't a quote of anybody else's word.
Nobody suggested or used those words together at all.
The president did and nobody did.
Only one person that I've Ever?
I think ever. Probably in my life.
Only one person I've ever known to put in one sentence, extermination of Latinos.
And it was Nicole Wallace.
I think she has some explaining to do.
That's the worst combination of words you could ever see.
And she's not the only crazy one out there.
The whole world is going crazy.
Now, it's a weird world because...
The mainstream media has this power that normally is reserved for dictators.
One of the things a dictator can do is commit a crime and then blame somebody else for it and then punish them.
That's part of the great thing about being a dictator, right?
I mean, it's great for the dictator.
It's not good for any of the people living under the dictator.
But a dictator can actually do a crime And then when the crime is discovered, the dictator can say, ah, that was Bob.
Bob is quite the criminal.
I think I'll execute Bob.
And, you know, all taken care of.
I'm going to execute Bob.
The media is doing that.
So the media is creating the crime by framing everything the president does as clearly and obviously Nazi-Hiller racism.
And then, after they've committed the crime, Of tearing the country apart racially, which we observe right in front of us, after they commit the crime, what's step two?
Frame the president.
They're actually framing the president for the crime they're committing right in front of us every day.
They're using this crime every day.
Oh yeah, and then Reza Aslan, good suggestion.
He said in a tweet that he wants to eradicate Trump supporters.
Eradicate. How do you interpret that?
Well, when Trump talks about infestations, he's specifically talking about the actual, you know, rats and bugs.
It's very clear language.
It's obvious what he means.
When Rezla Aslan says we must eradicate Trump supporters, what's that mean?
He's not talking about insects and mice.
I don't think so.
All right. Let's see what else we got going on here.
Yeah, on MSNBC they had the Chiron.
It's called the Chiron. It's the little label at the bottom of the screen.
And it just had these three words, Trump-inspired terrorism.
Trump-inspired terrorism?
I don't think that's an evidence.
That's sort of opinion-y, wouldn't you say?
Because I don't know that anybody has done a terrorist act because of the president.
There are people who do bad things and they look for excuses for it and stuff.
You know, a few crazy people.
It's not Aslan?
How do you pronounce it if it's not Aslan?
All right. Yeah, so Reza said that MAGA hat is basically a KKK hat and whoever wears it should be eradicated.
And he's still on Twitter.
Apparently that's okay.
It's okay to suggest eradicating, what is it, 47% of the country at this point who support the president.
Now, Here's my first question.
Everything that you see on the news and all the emotions and stuff, as high as they are now, they're going to get higher because the election's coming.
Somebody says, Trump calls Mexicans rapists.
Yeah, that's a hallucination too.
So let me speak to you.
I've got a blog post on that.
If you'd like to see why you're hallucinating in particular, go to my Twitter feed and read it.
Now, let's just talk about that.
Somebody in the comments says, Trump says Mexicans are rapists.
Now, when he says that, do you believe that he means that they're genetically rapists?
As in the women and the children, they're just born rapists.
Do you think that's what he means?
Or do you think a more reasonable interpretation would be that the people coming across the border include racists, not racists, rapists, and that we have solid evidence that they're raping the immigrants themselves and that there's a whole lot of rape going on.
Now, if you're concerned about the president saying that there are Criminals and rapists among the immigrants, I would like to hear the counterpoint, which tells me what level of rape and crime is acceptable to you.
Because if you can say that, then I'd say, okay, you're part of the adult conversation.
If what you're saying is we should...
I'll just pick an example.
Let's say you say we should let in a million immigrants a year, whatever the number is that you support.
If we let in a million, we could probably calculate how much crime comes with an average of a million people.
We could probably calculate how much extra rape that means, how much extra child trafficking, how many extra murders.
Now, some of those categories might be lower than average.
For example, the immigrants coming across the border might commit fewer crimes than the people who live here on average, in part because they have more to lose because they also could get deported.
So we might find that the number is less than we have here.
But the question that then would have to be asked is, what level is acceptable?
If a million people brings with it 20,000 rapes, Just tell us your opinion.
If your opinion is, I want to allow a million people in, knowing full well that that will cause the rape of 20,000 extra people, but people are kind of bad people and people are people, so we should not discriminate against one class of people because every class of people has some criminals in it.
Therefore, the people who would want to let a million people in At the price of 20,000 extra rapes, just say your opinion.
If you can't state your opinion Are you part of the adult conversation?
If you can't say, here's the benefit and here are also the costs, but I still prefer this package, you're not part of the adult conversation.
So whoever it is who said Trump called Mexican rapists, if you're an adult, you understand he means that there's too much crime coming across the border.
If you're a child, you think that he means that even the women, the children and every single Mexican is a rapist by nature.
Do you really believe he's thought that?
Do you believe he wanted us to believe that?
Do you believe anybody thinks that?
Is there anybody in the country? Have you ever met even one person in your entire life who holds that opinion?
Nobody. So, let's see your counter view.
How many people do you think should be led in a year?
And then how many rapes and murders do you find acceptable?
For the benefits of immigration.
And by the way, I'm pro-immigration.
I think most people are.
The vast majority of people are pro-immigration.
Now, if you said to me, Scott, you're pro-immigration?
Oh, are you? So answer your own question.
How many rapes and murders are you willing to put up with to have immigration?
And I would say, I don't know, what's the normal amount that a million people cause today?
Let's say if you could normalize it by socioeconomic group or whatever.
So you're not talking about ethnicity, you're just talking about socioeconomic group.
For every million people, how many crimes do they commit?
If it's similar or less, I'd say, okay, it's 20,000.
But that's the same number that a million American citizens would cause if they were in low socioeconomic group.
I'd say people are people.
Nobody wants extra crime, but if you want extra people, they come with crime.
So yes, I'm an adult.
I like immigration.
And I know it comes with these costs, and I've looked at the costs, and they look acceptable, all things being considered.
Nobody likes crime, but a million people are going to bring some crime, so you've got to take the good with the bad.
Now, I can say that.
If you're opposed to that opinion, I don't know what the reasonable opposition to that would be.
Now, one of the questions that I saw that used to be asked that I don't see enough of is, I'd like to see the Democrats give us a number, especially the candidates for president.
And I don't know if Trump has given a number, but I think he's somewhere in the neighborhood of keeping immigration sort of similar to what it's been in the past, but not getting worse.
I don't know what the number of the president suggests.
But there are people who are saying it's wrong.
So if you're saying that the number of immigrants today is wrong, meaning that you believe there should be more of them, what's the number?
What would be too much?
I have seen some Democrats, I don't know if any of the candidates have said this, but to say there's no upward limit, it's like, whatever, many as you want.
And maybe that's the right number, but I'd like people to say that.
So you should be able to say about 30 million.
Is 30 million too many?
We'll say 30 million over five years.
Is that too many? I'd like to hear a Democrat answer that question directly.
Can you imagine the Democrats lined up on stage and a host saying, I'm going to ask each of you to say whether you'd be okay with this amount of immigration per year.
You go to the first one and you say, are you okay with a million a year?
They'd probably say yes. Five million might say yes.
Ten million, maybe they start hedging.
Thirty million. Are you okay with thirty million a year?
If you're a Democrat, what do you say?
Do you say, yes, I'm okay with 30 million a year?
Because that gets kind of pricey for the people who are already here.
So if you can't put a number on it, you're not part of the adult conversation.
So I would welcome all of the Democrat candidates to join the adults.
Tell us what they want to get out of immigration, but also talk honestly about the costs that they're willing to accept to get those benefits.
The dumbest way that we could argue this stuff is all of the Republicans talking about the crime and the expense, the costs, never talking about the benefits, and all of the Democrats only talking about the benefits and just pretending as though the cost and the crime, etc., just don't exist.
So both sides are taking the child's view on this for the most part.
Not every person. There are individuals who are talking about it right now.
All right. How could they say any number is too high?
That's right. They can't say any number is too high, but the public needs to know that.
I feel like all the Democrats are getting off easy, and maybe the Republicans in many cases as well, because you can't predict forward what's going to happen.
So I'd like to hear, for example, somebody say, Democrat A, running for president, you're in favor of something like open borders.
You don't have to use the word open borders, but you're okay with large numbers of immigrants.
Tell us what that looks like in 10 years.
What's the country look like in your world?
How many people come?
Because the Democrat might say, look, I'm in favor of as many want to come as possible.
I just think that given the difficulty of getting here, it's probably never going to be more than $3 million a year.
And although that's a stretch, I'd be okay with that.
If a Democrat said that, I'd say, I could agree with that or I could disagree with that.
But okay, you gave me your pluses, you gave me your minuses, and then you told me your priorities.
I respect that. Tell me your number.
Here's a question for you.
By the way, did Yang make the next set of debates?
I saw a headline that said that we know who's in the next group.
I don't know if Yang made it.
But if he did, let me put out a thought to you.
Has Yang...
I haven't told a lie yet.
Because I can't think of one.
Can you? He said things that I didn't like.
He suggested policies I didn't fully understand, etc.
But can you think of an example among all of the candidates?
Somebody said that they read he did.
I'd like to see an example of that.
Now, there may be situations in which he had a fact wrong.
But can you think of a case where Yang said a direct lie?
I'm not sure we have.
If somebody says, yes, the Russia hoax, I don't know about that.
I don't remember any Yang comments About the Russia hoax that would be outside of just what we're observing on the news.
In other words, sort of describing it and worrying about things.
I mean, it's okay to worry about Russian interference.
And if Yang thought that there was too much in the last election, that would be sort of mainstream thinking.
But has he lied?
Now, here's why this is interesting.
I don't think it's in him to lie.
Because we would have seen it by now, right?
You would have seen them just lying like crazy by now, because all the rest of them are doing it.
You know, what was the...
Well, you know, all the other politicians are bending the truth, but I just haven't seen them do it.
Now, that doesn't mean I support him for president.
Here's where I'm going with this.
Wouldn't you like to see Yang ask those questions?
How many immigrants is the right number?
How much crime...
Per year, you know, in terms of rapes and murders and whatever, how much is acceptable to get X number of immigrants, which we agree are useful sort of in general?
Good for the economy, good people, good for everybody.
So, yeah, Buttigieg, he's another one.
He's sort of a rational, intellectual person.
Ask him the direct question.
What would you like it to look like?
Like how many per year?
All right.
Bernie Sanders interviewed on Joe Rogan.
I don't know what that's all about.
He called Trump a racist.
That's an opinion.
So, I'm not saying Yang doesn't have opinions you disagree with.
I just don't know that he's told a direct lie yet, which would be unique.
So that's why he's interesting, because perhaps you could ask him a direct question and have some anticipation of getting an actual coherent direct answer, and I'd like to hear it.
He might actually have a pretty good view on this.
I worry that he hasn't thought through all of the issues.
He's focusing on his UBI thing to good effect.
I think Yang has taken that $1,000 a month UBI idea And he's taking it from, that's crazy, to, let's listen to this a little bit more.
One of the most consistent opinions I hear is people say, when I first heard about this, UBI, $1,000 a month, it was crazy.
And then I heard Yang explain it, and now I'm sort of a little bit flexible about it.
It's not crazy.
It's not crazy. It's simply not crazy.
You could disagree with it, and it might not work, might be a bad idea, but it's not crazy.
It's well within the rational realm, and that makes it actually unusual in politics.
Somebody says UBI could be a stimulus.
Yeah, I do agree.
That we're going to have a mass group of citizens who just are not capable of surviving in the world as it's organized.
I'm going to say this again because probably it's the most important thing In the future.
If I had to pick one most important thing.
Now, here I'm assuming that we've got war under control.
We know how to manage the economy.
There'll be some ups and downs.
I think we'll get a handle on the environment, etc.
So I'm sort of discounting those, not because they aren't huge, but because we seem to have a pretty good handle on them.
Here's something we have no handle on.
It's growing like crazy and no idea what to do about it.
Mental health, addiction, and one that's sort of tied to those two.
So there's mental health and addiction, but there's a third category.
There are people who are sort of normal-ish, but they are incapable of functioning in modern society because they don't have the mental or emotional capability.
It's just too complicated and too stressful, and they just can't handle it.
There are more and more people in that category every day.
You saw the story of this woman who had a half a million dollars in college debt for some college major that didn't have much of a financial future.
Now, if somebody is operating in the modern world and runs up a half a million dollars of personal debt, To get a degree that doesn't have financial potential, much anyway, that person is, by my description, incapable of functioning in modern society.
She's probably not crazy.
She's probably not addicted to any kind of drug that's causing her to make bad decisions.
I mean, possibly, but I don't think so.
I think that the normal complexity of the world Has increased and increased, but our intelligence and our ability to cope has not changed.
We haven't evolved as quickly as complexity is increasing.
So I think that we're approaching a point where something like one-third to two-thirds of all citizens are unqualified to operate in the modern world.
Probably something like one-third of adult humans have the basic mental, physical, and emotional capability to succeed.
If you went back 200 years, almost everybody could succeed.
You could have an IQ of 80, and you could have an addictive personality.
But there was nothing to get addicted to.
I mean, you're lucky if you get some moonshine.
And you always had a job because it was manual labor.
And somebody would say, well, you've got an IQ of 80, but your job is to pick this up and put it over here.
And the person with an IQ of 80 says, that's it.
Just pick this stuff up and put it on the truck.
Yeah, that's it. All right, I can do that.
I'll do that all day. And I get paid.
But we've left that world.
So what do you do in a world where two-thirds of the public is not qualified to live in this world?
Yeah, you have to reorganize society to account for that.
Or, I mean, the other options are you let them all starve, the country falls apart, you know, we become cannibals.
I mean, there's no real alternative except to reconfigure society so that people with low capability or lower than the top third can still have a quality life.
So I think the UBI thing gets directly at that in a very simple way.
There's a complicated way to describe it, but I appreciate and value Andrew Yang's approach to simplify it all into $1,000 a month, because that at least introduces you to a pretty complicated topic.
And it introduces you in an easy to understand way.
And then once you get immersed in it, you can kind of see that it's a pretty, it's a deep topic.
It goes to everything from, you know, addiction and IQ to robots to capitalism to income inequality.
It's like all in there.
It's a real complicated topic.
So here's my take.
I believe that we will fail if we say there are people of all types and they're going to live in the same place.
Because the people who can't make it are going to make it impossible for the people who can to even live there.
They will create a city, for example, that's Baltimore.
So everything becomes Baltimore in the future because the number of people who aren't trained or equipped or maybe they have addiction or whatever, mental health, who knows?
There'll just be too many people who can't handle the complexity of modern society and then even if there are people who can, they're surrounded by too many who can't and the whole thing falls apart.
I think we're going to have to have entire new communities just for people who can't handle the complicated ones.
I don't see an alternative.
I don't see us curing addiction while keeping people with addictive personalities in the same place as all the people who don't have addictions.
Because the people who don't have addictions, they're going to be recreationally drinking and doing drugs and everything and it's going to be impossible for an addict to really stay straight in that environment.
They have to go somewhere where they just can't get any.
They have to go somewhere where there are jobs that are lifting things and putting them on trucks because they can't do anything else.
They don't have much more capability.
So unless we build entirely separate places for people of all races, ages, genders, and everything, but the only thing they have in common is that they're not capable of functioning in the modern society for whatever reason.
Addiction, mental health, you name it.
They need to be somewhere else where that somewhere else can be optimized for the people who are there and it doesn't drag down everything.
It will be Pleasantons and Baltimores.
Well, in theory, so here's the part which I'm assuming, but since I don't say, it sounds wrong.
I've been saying for years, and I'm 100% convinced of this, that if you used design instead of just cash, but you well-designed a small community, you would have a perfect situation.
I'm going to show you a picture.
I don't know if you'll be able to see it on my phone.
Well, of exactly what I'm talking about.
Let's see. Bear with me.
I've got a good picture coming up.
I swear to God I do.
All right. Well, you might be able to see it a little bit.
Can you see that at all?
So these are...
These are units that are like little squares that have big glass walls.
This is actually a hotel.
But the nature of the hotel is exactly how I imagine future cities should look.
So it's a smallish living space with a bathroom.
That's sort of all it is.
Now imagine that you add some storage so people can keep their stuff, but basically what you need is a little living space and a bathroom, and the entire wall on one side is a sliding glass opening thing.
Now as long as you have something to look at, out your big glass wall, you don't feel like you're, you know, that you're in a small, too small of a place.
You feel like you're part of the outdoors because your whole wall opens up the outdoors.
I like here. So, if you were to design small living spaces, you probably could get the cost of one person to live in one place down to $50,000, and it would be kind of awesome.
And if you didn't put a kitchen in it, because there's a common cafeteria, for example, you didn't need a garage, Because there's mass transportation, you can walk or bike everywhere.
So if you designed a new city so that everybody could live there inexpensively, and it wasn't just the second choice, it would actually be better than the other city.
Where the rich people live is going to be complicated and messy, and it's just always a big problem.
The best lifestyle I ever experienced was college.
Somebody's saying dorms.
So it's basically taking the college dorm concept, but instead of these dinky little concrete rooms that you don't want to be in with a roommate, you have at least your own space A giant glass wall to the outdoors so your small space seems large and you can interact with people outdoors.
And you'd have a good space.
Now, you would also want to be able to move from your smaller space to better spaces.
So you'd want some kind of a path to get to a bigger, better space or whatever.
Somebody says, Scott Adams invents the studio apartment.
No. No, that's not what happened.
What happened was, I just said that existing studio apartments are poorly designed.
Because they're not really places that you want to spend too much time.
I'm saying that for the same space and the same cost, better design gets you to a place where I'm literally on vacation in something that's the size of...
Let me look around.
This entire living space I'm in right now is roughly the size of my bathroom at home.
True story. So my entire living space where I am on vacation, where I paid a lot, I paid a lot to come here.
And I'm in a space that's about the size of my bathroom at home.
Completely happy. Because they've designed it right.
Anyway, that's enough on that.
And I will talk to you all tomorrow.
Read my blog post. You can see the link in my Twitter feed.
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