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Aug. 8, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:04:40
Episode 622 Scott Adams: CNN Totally Owns Tucker Carlson, Fixing Iran and Urban Blight
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
I just noticed you.
Well, there are plenty of seats in the front, so come on in.
Martin, good to see you.
Drew, Vicki, always a pleasure.
I think I know why you're here.
Probably has something to do with the simultaneous sip.
The best part of your day?
The dopamine hit that makes everything better?
Probably. Grab your cup, your mug, or your glass.
Hurry! Hurry! There's still time!
Is it a tankard? A chalice?
A tankard?
A chalice? There's some other word I keep forgetting.
A vessel of any kind?
How about a thermos? A flask?
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
You might wonder why the sound was so bad.
It could be because I was sitting on my microphone.
That's possible. So hold on.
Let's do the simultaneous sip correctly.
You ready? Here it comes.
Oh. So good.
So just before I went live, I noticed...
On Twitter, I think this is true, but I would wait for a little more verification.
It looks like MSNBC retweeted some Twitter user from Media Matters and added a blue checkmark next to the tweet with Photoshop.
So in other words, it's someone who is not a blue checkmark on Twitter, and MSNP photoshopped them a blue check to make their comment look more important.
Now, if that's true, that's pretty fake news.
I mean, that's sort of a smoking gun, but let's wait and see if that's true first.
All right, my favorite story of the day.
Well, I've got a few favorite stories.
Did you see that we put life on the moon?
Apparently, recently, we meaning people who have spaceships, put these little things called tar dives.
Have you ever seen these? These are microscopic.
We put some of these that were dehydrated and flown to the moon so that we may have actually, well, we did, actually.
We put life on the moon.
But what kind of life did we pick?
We picked the only creature in the world whose mouth and face and ass look exactly the same.
This is a creature so dumb that when it eats, the only way it can tell if it's shoving food in its mouth or its ass is by looking at which way its toenails are pointing.
That's it. Otherwise, its mouth and its ass are the same.
And so I said to myself, huh, I did not know that nature had a creature that can talk about politics on Twitter.
I'll let that sink in a little bit.
All right, so of course all the news is about gun violence and mass shootings and white supremacists.
Let's talk about that. Tucker Carlson got in a little, well, I won't say he's in any trouble, but he caused a little controversy, a little more than usual, and it's because on the show last night he said that white supremacy is all of the hoopla about white supremacy is a hoax.
Now, he also said this, white supremacists exist, there aren't very many of them in the country, And that, in total, their impact is small, and so, therefore, it's a hoax.
And then he announced that he was going on vacation.
So, how did CNN cover this?
Well, they started, so this is the anatomy of how fake news is created.
It's actually very clever, and it's diabolical to the extreme.
And sometimes you can't tell when CNN... Doesn't know what they're doing, meaning that it's somewhat accidental based on just ordinary bias.
Now, when do they know exactly what they're doing?
And this is one of those cases where pretty sure they know exactly what they're doing.
So Tucker, of course, is a huge critic of CNN. So you would expect that their opinion people would come at it pretty hard.
And sure enough, they did.
But the way they did it is very clever and can teach us something, right?
So the first thing they did is they connected two random things and acted as if they have meaning.
So they said that Tucker must be in trouble.
They suggested.
They did not say it's true.
They simply suggested that Fox News has a history of when one of his hosts says something that other people think is racist, those hosts, or just provocative, those hosts go on vacation suspiciously to sort of get him out of the line of fire.
Now, it's summer, and a lot of people go on vacation in the summer, and Tucker said he was going on vacation.
And so, CNN, with no evidence whatsoever, makes it seem as though his vacation is sort of a confession that he'd done something bad.
But there's no evidence of that.
What there is evidence is that it's August, and a lot of people go on vacation.
In fact, if you were going to pick a month to go on vacation and you were in the news business, what month would you pick?
Well, you'd pick December because everybody's on vacation, but you'd also pick August.
That would be the time you go on vacation.
It's the slow news month.
So first they make this connection that's not a real connection.
But by simply putting the two in your mind, you say, oh, even Tucker Carlson, or maybe at least even his bosses, know he's gone too far.
None of this is an evidence.
It's completely invented.
All right. So that's the first dirty trick.
But the next one is the best.
So they're pushing back.
There were two opinion pieces.
I'll talk about Brian Stelter's piece on CNN.com.
They're both pushing back against Tucker's claim that all the noise about danger from white supremacists is a hoax.
Now, here's how they push back on it.
Now, one way to push back on it would be to produce one white supremacist And put them on TV and say, here people, I've now proven that white supremacists exist.
Have you ever seen a white supremacist?
I never have.
I've seen every other kind of racist, because racists come in lots of different flavors.
There's just all kinds of different racists.
So if you ask me, have I seen racists?
Oh yeah. Have I seen white nationalists, people who would prefer the country to stay white?
Oh yeah, I've seen those.
Have I ever seen a white supremacist?
I haven't. I never have.
So how would you...
What is the easiest way to prove that white supremacists exist?
Put one on TV. Where is it?
Where's the white supremacist?
Even Richard Spencer isn't a white supremacist, right?
If you look into it, he would not espouse white supremacy.
He's more of a white nationalist, I think, would be a better way to put it.
So you have to ask yourself, well, you don't ask yourself this.
Look for the dog that isn't barking.
If white supremacy is a really big problem, It shouldn't be hard to find a few and put them on TV so that we can see, number one, they exist.
David Duke actually is not a white supremacist as I understand it.
He's a racist, and I think he's a white nationalist.
That might explain him.
So I'm not going to try to explain David Duke because I condemn him totally.
I don't believe anybody's ever gone on CNN in my memory and said that one race was superior and should be treated that way.
I don't think I've seen it.
Anyway, so that's the first thing.
But here's the clever sleight of hand.
When I tell you this, you're going to be shaking your head so hard and knocking your heads on the counter so hard that this might be dangerous.
So you might want to put it on the helmet before I read this next part.
I swear to God, Brian Stelter wrote this in CNN. All right?
You ready for this? He says, on white supremacy, facts first.
Okay, so now Brian's going to give us some facts about white supremacy, and those facts will debunk Conker Carlson's view that the whole white supremacy thing is a hoax.
So here are his facts to debunk it.
An audit by the Anti-Defamation League.
Okay, now this is good stuff.
He's right on point, talking about the right topic.
Has referred to an organization that studies these things?
Okay, this is good. And what's he say?
What has the Anti-Defamation League found?
The white supremacist murders in the US, quote, more than doubled in 2017.
Okay, that's serious.
More than doubled. Now, when you say something more than doubled, and the point of saying it more than doubled is to say it's a problem, what's the next thing you say after that?
Right after you say it more than doubled, You say from this number to this number, right?
So I'll read that part.
Oh, that's not there.
He said it doubled, and he didn't say from what to what.
So I looked at the source.
It doesn't say from what to what either.
He says it doubled without giving us a number.
Did it go from two to four?
One to two? And why are the numbers only from 2017?
In 2017, two years ago, if we're worried about a sudden increase of something, is 2017 What we want?
No, it is not. So first of all, his numbers are old.
2017 would not tell you that there is a recent spike in anything.
Because that leaves out the most recent two years.
If you talk about a recent spike, you've got to include the last two years.
Secondly, he says it doubled without saying what the number is.
And even the source doesn't say what the number is.
But it gets creepier.
Here's the rest of the sentence.
With far-right extremist groups and white supremacists, quote, responsible for 59% of all extremist-related fatalities in the U.S. in 2017.
Okay, so if you add together far-right extremists plus white supremacists, they're responsible for the majority of the extremist fatalities.
Okay, that's good to know.
Now, next he'll tell us what percentage of that was the white supremacists, because that's the topic, right?
The topic is not right-wing deaths.
Tucker was talking about white supremacists.
So the next thing he'll say is how many of those were the white supremacists.
Let me read that. It's not there.
So you see what he did? He took the white supremacist for which he had no numbers that were current and even no numbers that were not current.
He added it with another group for which we do have numbers and said if you add those two together, it's 59% of all the extremist-related fatalities.
Let me read you another sentence that's equally true.
If you were to add together All of the murders caused by cartoonists plus extremists, it would account for 59% of all the extremist fatalities in 2017.
That's true, right?
If you were to add together all of the people who were murdered by dogs, dogs with guns, actual dogs, like physically a dog, I'm not talking about people, I'm talking about actual dogs.
If you add the number of people who were killed by dogs with guns to right-wing extremists, they would account for almost all of the extremist murders.
So this is a clever trick by CNN. As they start talking about white supremacists to debunk that Tucker says white supremacy is a hoax, they show you no example of even one white supremacist.
No picture of one, no writing from one, no video of one who makes that claim, by the way.
And I know what you're going to say.
What about the Charlottesville people marching with Tiki's?
We got lots of video of that.
They're white supremacists, right?
Are they? Are you a white supremacist if you want to remove the Jews from your country because the Jews are doing too well?
Is wanting to remove the people who are doing too well a statement that you are supreme?
It's kind of the opposite.
I would say that if you were to look what the people marching in Charlottesville were saying out loud, Is that they were saying that the group that they did not like, the Jews, in their words, were taking their blood and treasure.
In other words, they were being very successful.
They were actually criticizing the success of a group.
That's literally the opposite of saying you're awesome and the other group is bad.
They're actually saying the other group is doing better than them and they would like them out of the country because they're taking all their stuff.
Now, they're racists.
They're white nationalists.
Those are all true.
But it's the supremacy part that gets weird.
Now, so what you see is that...
Oh, and then CNN likes to make lots of references to the El Paso killer's manifesto.
A couple of problems with that.
Number one, it is not in evidence that the shooter wrote that manifesto.
Did you know that? Did you know it's not an evidence that the shooter wrote the manifesto?
What is an evidence is that it was uploaded to 8chan from someone who was not the shooter.
So we have an evidence that the source of it, the only source we can trace, was a Facebook post that was someone else.
Now, there's some possibility that the shooter put it on somebody else's Facebook or somehow it got on Facebook from the shooter and then went to 8chan.
But the evidence suggests he didn't write it.
Have you seen that on CNN? Probably not.
We heard this from the founder of 8chan, and he would know where it came from.
Secondly, how many people have read the manifesto?
I read it. And I've got to tell you.
Hold on. Be right back.
So I read the manifesto, and I was looking for the part where Trump inspired him to be a white supremacist.
It's not really there.
What it is is, and I tweeted a link from Byron York, who's talking about this.
I had exactly the same reaction as Byron York did.
If you actually read the manifesto, You'd walk away saying, what's this got to do with Trump?
The manifesto literally says, in direct words, this is not about Trump.
I had these feelings before Trump.
In direct words, he says it wasn't Trump.
But if it wasn't Trump, who is it most evocative of?
Who is the person that is most referenced in the manifesto?
Well, not by name, but the person most directly connected with what he's talking about in the manifesto is Andrew Yang.
Because the shooter in El Paso was talking about universal basic income and how it will be necessary because the robots are coming.
Who says that? Trump?
He may have said it, but it's basically Andrew Yang's whole thesis.
And if the robots come and take away our jobs, we'll need some kind of universal basic income.
Andrew Yang's primary platform.
And the only way that works is if you secure the border.
Because if you're giving away free money to anybody who shows up, it doesn't work.
Everybody understands that.
Now, Andrew Yang doesn't make that case, but I think that's a question it needs to be asked, doesn't it?
It needs to be asked of Andrew Yang, how can you do UBI unless you're controlling the border?
That doesn't make sense. Those two are opposites.
They can't exist at the same time.
So... So what CNN can do, and the anti-Trumpers are doing, is that they're suggesting that the manifesto is Trump-inspired because they know nobody's going to read it.
And if they did, they would find maybe one sentence that they could pull out and say, yeah, this sounds like Trump.
But there are just as many sentences that sound like Elizabeth Warren or Andrew Yang.
They'll just ignore those, and they know you're not going to read it, so they can characterize it any way they want.
So it's complexity. It's long and rambled, and it's obviously just a crazy person.
Its complexity allows them to claim that it supports their point of view.
It just doesn't. It just doesn't.
It's fake news. All right, so here's the basic sleight of hand that the anti-Trumpers, and really anti-Americans, I would say, because the people who are moving hard against Trump are really moving hard against 60 million people in this country.
So I would say anti-American people.
If people were criticizing thousands of people in America, I'd say, well, thousands, that's barely anything compared to 300 million.
So those people are just criticizing some people with bad ideas.
But if you're criticizing 60 million citizens of this country, you're anti-American by definition, right?
Criticizing 60 million, that's...
It's a good chunk of the whole country right there.
All right. So here's the sleight of hand they use.
So it starts out with, President Trump says, I'm a nationalist.
He doesn't use those words necessarily, but his supporters say, we're nationalists.
We care about our country first.
So CNN will say, you're nationalists, and I'm noticing that a lot of people at the rallies are white.
So would it be fair to say that you're nationalists and that most of you are white?
And people would say, well, that's true, but I don't like where this is going.
So if you're nationalists, and many of you are white, basically there's not much difference between that and saying you're white nationalists.
Well, of course, there is a big difference, because white nationalists don't want other people to come unless they're white.
But a nationalist is open to everybody.
You know, as long as the rules are followed and the borders are controlled.
So they say nationalist equals white nationalist.
That's the first lady hand.
And then from white nationalist, they just throw into the sentence white supremacist, as if there's no difference.
So, you know, white supremacist, white nationalist, nationalist who happens to be white, all kind of the same thing.
So they use this, you know, a sleight of hand to get you all the way to nationalist equals white nationalist.
White nationalist, basically the same as white supremacist.
White supremacist is Hitler.
Obviously, there's a Holocaust coming.
Now, when you hear that, it should make you angry.
It should make you think, my God, what kind of a country do I live in where news networks can push ridiculousness not like that?
Well, where did they learn it?
Where did CNN learn to turn nationalists into white nationalists, to turn white nationalists into white supremacists, and turn white supremacists into, obviously, the President as Hitler?
Here's how they learned it.
They learned it from the right.
They learned it from Fox News.
How many times on Fox News have you seen Democrats say they want health care?
Which Fox News turns into healthcare, so I guess you're a socialist.
And if you're a socialist, you're a communist.
And if you're a communist, you're Stalin.
And if you're Stalin, you want to kill tens of millions of people.
You're Venezuela, right?
Same thing.
A person who wants to keep the United States largely the same, but have better healthcare, is not a socialist.
They're democratic socialists at best, and they're certainly not communists.
So first of all, they're not socialists.
Socialists would make everybody share everything, and it would be completely incompatible with capitalism.
So they're pushing some socialist policies within a larger capitalist setting.
Fox News calls all that socialism, and then they just sort of, without making a break, call it communism.
Then it turns into Venezuela, and then it turns into Stalin, and then it turns into tens of millions of people killed.
You should disregard both sides.
When they do that. If they're taking your definition and working it through this word machine until it turns into either Stalin or Hitler, you're not listening to people you should pay attention to.
And so I would like to offer this challenge.
I would like somebody to produce a white supremacist who I could deprogram.
So I'm going to offer to deprogram a white supremacist.
I'll do it on here.
I'd have to know it's a real white supremacist.
So here's the first part of the challenge.
Number one, I don't think any exist who are not actually observably insane.
So if somebody could put a sentence together, you know, Went to college, maybe.
Well, no, don't even need to college.
Just somebody who can make a coherent statement and also refers to themselves, or at least by their policies, are clearly white supremacists.
I'm offering to deprogram that person away from their destructive ideology, but you have to find me one.
I've never met one, and I don't know that they exist.
Because those Tiki Torch people were white inferiorities.
Is there a word? What's the opposite of supremacy?
Yeah, the Tiki Torch guys were worried that white people can't compete.
That's what they were chanting, literally.
That's what they were saying out loud in a chant, that white people can't compete.
So, they don't qualify, but if there's any in that group who thinks they're supreme, I will deprogram them.
I will offer to do that. Watch how no white supremacists can be identified.
Now, I would say that Tucker Carlson would be accurate in calling the whole white supremacy a hoax if nobody can produce one.
At all. You can't produce one.
Put them on TV. Let's see what they have to say.
If you can produce one, I'm offering to deprogram that person.
I'll solve it for you.
I'll do it right in front of the world.
And it won't be hard.
Now let's put things in perspective.
If Tucker Carlson is wrong about white supremacy, you know, at least the hoopla about it being a hoax, then it would also be true that the numbers are Big.
Or climbing.
So they're either big already or they're climbing.
Because remember, Islamic terrorists in this country is very small, but we worry that it could climb or that the rate would increase.
So let me give you some numbers, which you don't see in most of these periscopes.
Or you don't see in the news.
Alright, so how many people...
We're killed by extremists.
So according to the ADL, the same source that Brian Stilter was using, 387 people have been killed in the last decade.
So in 10 years, 387 people were killed by extremists.
Of those extremists in the United States, of those, 71%, We're right wing.
So that's 275 over 10 years.
Let's round it off to 28 people per year.
So is it a national story that there's something that you could put a name on that's killing 28 people a year?
Well, let's see how big related numbers are so we can see if that's a big number or a small number.
All right, so right-wing extremists, according to the ADL, kill about 28 people per year over the past 10 years.
Total gun deaths in the United States per year are 40,000.
And of course opioids are like 70,000 a year.
I think automobiles are 35,000 a year or something like that.
So just 28 people.
But remember, if that number is climbing quickly, then we should worry about it because the rate of change is as important as where it starts from.
How many homicides per year?
Because these are total gun deaths.
But how many of the gun deaths are not suicide or accidents?
Turns out that there are about 12,000 of them.
So 12,000 murders with gun weapons compared to 28 done by extremists.
So 28 is what percentage of the total gun deaths in the United States per year?
It's.0017 of all the gun deaths.
.0017 of all the gun deaths.
Two thirds of all gun homicides have black victims.
Two thirds. So that's around 8,000 murders per year of black people.
By both white and black people, but I think black people kill more of black people just because that's who's around.
Obviously you're going to kill more of the type of people who are near you than people who live distantly.
And so it's a tiny, tiny number.
And so the real question is, if we all agree it's a small number, Then what matters is how quickly it's growing.
Do you know who has the statistics, good statistics, of how quickly the white supremacy murder rate is growing?
Nobody. It doesn't exist.
Yeah, if you look for that source, you'll find lots of people say, well, it's hard to count because People count it differently and there were new agencies that came online recently that started counting.
So you can't really look at the current numbers and compare them directly to the past because they're counting differently now.
So basically, we don't really know.
So it's a tiny number.
We don't know if it's going up or not.
But the most visible sign of it is this El Paso thing, which if you actually read his manifesto, you would say, does it look like white supremacy to me?
And that's it. That's the whole argument.
So, given all that, who's right?
Well, let me give you some more numbers.
85% of, well, two-thirds of gun deaths are suicide.
Two-thirds. Two-thirds of gun deaths are suicide.
And 85% of the gun suicides are male.
What would you say is the big problem?
When 85% of gun deaths are suicide, wouldn't it be more useful to speak of these mass shootings as fancy suicides?
Am I wrong? If you came from outer space and you didn't care about politics and you were just examining the planet with complete, unbiased, dispassionate logic, you're just looking at it.
And you said to yourself, okay, it looks like there's a massive problem with gun suicide, which is really a problem with suicide.
They're just using guns.
So if you have this massive suicide problem, and this suicide comes in many forms, one of these forms is people like to dress up their suicide as having some meaning so that they can find meaning for the first time in their life.
And so their warped minds come up with some political justification.
If you happen to be a hypnotist or you study persuasion as I do, you know that the human mind does not operate on reasons.
I'll tell you what did not happen in any of these shootings.
Here's what we know scientifically and historically and commonsensically.
We know with complete certainty what did not happen with any of these shootings.
What did not happen is that a reasonable person looked at the facts and the logic and then decided to kill a bunch of people.
That never happened.
What did happen, because it's the only way that brains work, brains don't have two ways of working in the sense that I'm talking about here.
They have one way of working.
First they decide what they're going to do, and then they work backwards to the reasons.
Always. Not sometimes.
If you think that sometimes happens, then you don't understand your reality in any useful way.
Science has determined, completely conclusively, That we decide first on the big stuff like this, the big emotional stuff.
And a mass murderer is the biggest emotional thing you can imagine.
It has more emotional content than anything else.
Because it's death and there's lots of it, etc.
So these murders, I can tell you with absolute confidence, zero percent chance of being wrong, that they make the decision first, and then they go through some tortured logic to describe why they did it.
And that's why when you read the manifesto, it looks like somebody with tortured logic.
It looks like somebody who is desperately trying to come up with a reason For the thing they'd already decided to do.
Now, my take on it is that you have a suicide problem.
Some of the people who kill themselves want to do it in a certain way that gives them meaning and ties into who they think they are, etc.
But mostly it's just a suicide problem.
You have to deal with all elements of it, but to call it a white supremacy problem, I think, misses the mark by as far as you can miss it.
So I'm going to score this argument in favor of Tucker.
Meaning, when he says there's a white supremacy hoax, I don't know that there are no white supremacists who want to kill people.
I do know, I've never seen one, and I don't think I'll see one on television, and I don't think I'll see a picture of one, and I don't think I'll see a video of one, and I don't think I'll see maybe even a manifesto from one.
Because even this El Paso's manifesto wasn't about white supremacy.
It was just about numbers and math and economics.
So there you go. Alright, let's talk about something a little more uplifting.
Maybe a lot more uplifting.
I saw one of the smartest, most insightful quotes you'll ever see, and it came from actor Danny Trejo.
T-R-E-J-O. Now, if you're into movies and TV, you might know this name.
So Danny Trio is Hispanic, I assume.
I think he's Hispanic. I'm not going to guess, but I'm just guessing that he's Hispanic.
His last name gives it away.
Anyway, which is only important because of the times we're in.
It's not important in any other way.
It's only important because of our political climate.
So apparently he was driving along and he saw an accident in which there was a car flipped over and there was a baby in the baby seat who was still in the car and he stopped immediately and tried to get the baby out and with somebody else's help he got the baby out.
Now of course because he was the celebrity there he gets all of the It's pronounced Trejo, somebody's telling me.
Danny Trejo. He gets all the attention because he was a celebrity.
Obviously the unknown person who helped him get the baby out of the car is also a hero, but nobody knows that person's name.
But here's the best part of the story.
So actor Danny Trejo gets interviewed afterwards and he said this quote, I swear if you never remembered anything else in your whole life, And you just said, alright, I'm going to ignore everything I've learned in my entire life, and then I'm just going to build my life around this one quote from Danny Trejo.
You would actually have a pretty good life.
This quote sums up almost everything.
Here it is. Quote from actor Danny Trejo.
Hero. Everything good that has happened to me has happened as a direct result of helping someone else.
Everything. So he adds everything at the end.
I'm going to read that again. It's probably the best quote you'll ever see in your life in terms of how useful it is.
Everything good that has happened to me has happened as a direct result of helping someone else.
Everything. Everything. That's it.
Secret of life. Right there.
The secret of life.
Right there. Because if you help other people, they say, well, there's somebody I want to associate with.
If you help other people, you feel good about yourself.
You feel important. You feel like you have a place.
Do you think the people who are helping other people commit suicide?
Sometimes. Because mental illness is a thing.
But how many of these mass shooters were working at soup kitchens?
How many mass murderers are helping other people?
None. None.
If you want meaning in your life, help other people.
If you want financial security, learn how to be valuable to other people.
It's the only way.
The only way I'm rich is because I helped other people.
I made them laugh.
I made them think.
I entertained them.
I helped them. I helped them somehow.
Now, how many times have I been offered promotions back in my corporate world?
And why would I be offered the promotion and maybe someone else?
Well, in many cases, it's because I did extra work and I helped other people.
With no direct thought of some direct reward.
And if you are in your corporate situation and people look around and they say, hey, this person keeps helping the other people.
As long as you're getting your own work done, what are people going to think when they want to promote somebody?
You just killed everybody else, you know, economically or career-wise.
You just eliminated everybody else's Appearance of value.
If you do your work and you're consistently helping other people in whatever way you can, you're the boss.
Or you can be, if you want to be.
Somebody's going to offer you the next promotion.
So Danny Trejo's quote is everything.
He actually uses the word everything in his quote twice.
Everything good that has happened to me has happened as a direct result of helping someone else.
Everything. It's perfect.
It's just perfect. All right.
Here's a thought that I want to put into the mix of ideas in the world.
So we've got these urban blighted areas and parts of the country where things aren't working out.
There's bad economic distress, etc.
And then we're watching Bill Pulte go into these areas in some cases and make a difference.
You saw the cleanup crew make a difference as well.
But Bill Pulte He goes in and he can clean up the urban blight.
I saw an article recently that Pontiac, Michigan, the value of real estate just started zooming.
Now Pontiac, if you don't know this, was I think the first one or two places that Bill Pulte removed the blight.
So he removed the blight, and there's not one reason that real estate goes up in value, but I've got to think it's a big one.
Real estate values went up.
So Pontiac is heading in the right direction.
Who made that happen?
Bill Pulte. You know, other people work on it too.
The mayor had to be part of that, etc.
But I was reading this book I was just telling you about, about the founding of the nation.
I'll show it to you again. I'm only a little ways into it, but it's already so interesting that I'm getting all these tidbits out of it that really change how you think.
It's called the American Nations.
I'm only a little bit into it, and it's already...
Having a big impact on me.
And one of the things it talked about is something I don't think I knew.
I'm pretty sure I didn't know it.
And, yeah, I didn't know it.
Let me say that for sure.
If you don't know if you knew it, you didn't know it.
I always wondered why the United States was so successful.
Now, you could give a number of reasons.
You could say, okay, the United States was successful.
Because we had all these natural resources, and maybe because of the ocean barriers, you know, we didn't get the direct brunt of a couple of world wars, but we had our own wars, you know, lots of wars internally and with the Native Americans and the Mexicans, etc., and the French, the Brits.
We had a lot of wars, but what was it that made America So successful.
Now, one thing you'd say is, okay, it was about this Western culture they brought over.
But this book is all about the fact that they weren't all the same culture.
I talked about this yesterday, I think.
Some of them were Puritans, and they wanted everybody to be treated equally, but they had to be religious, or else you were in big trouble.
And then there were ones that landed in the more southern part of the country who were slavers.
They started out putting white people in slavery and they literally ran out of white people to enslave.
That's why the African slave trade happened.
Now the white people they enslaved were What do you call it?
Indentured servants. And the problem was that after the indentured servants served their time, they could go get their own land.
So the indentured servants were moving through the system too quickly, and there weren't enough new ones.
So they had to do a different source of labor, and that's where the African slavery came from.
So you can't really compare the Puritan culture to the Southern culture.
Completely different. I mean, the Puritans never would have enslaved anybody.
So you can't really say there's something about the culture that worked.
So what was it?
And this book I just mentioned suggests an answer which also suggests how to fix the inner cities and other parts of the country.
Are you ready for it?
Part of the reason that people came to the United States is that the king in Great Britain Would say, if you go there, we'll give you a land grant, which if you do things right, will make you very rich.
You'll be like a king in your own large piece of territory that I grant you.
Now, who would the king in England, somebody says it's not Great Britain, let's just call it England.
So the king of England, This is prior to the Great Britain word, so thank you for that correction.
So the King of England, who is he going to grant land to in America?
Well, it's not going to be to a peasant.
The King granted land to highly educated people because they also happen to be the well-connected people in England.
So what happened was, because of a coincidence of how land was granted, The United States became hugely educated instantly, meaning that the percentage of people with advanced degrees in the early colonial days was sort of through the roof by the standards of those times.
There were simply more educated people as a percentage than maybe anywhere in the world.
Now, I don't know if that's true, but I think it's close to true that we may have ended up totally by coincidence with more highly educated people than have ever been in one place at the same time.
Except for maybe Microsoft, right?
And then Silicon Valley later.
Now, what happened when you put a whole bunch of smart people into a wilderness?
They do well. Smart people tend to do well.
Am I wrong? Have you ever seen an example?
Name a country where they're highly educated and the economy is doing poorly.
Can you? Can you name me a country that's among the top ten of education that's, you know, doing poorly in economics?
Well, maybe temporarily if something's going wrong, but in general, if you put a bunch of smart people in an area, They do well.
Now, here's the question.
Did all of the colonists need to be smart?
Absolutely not. The vast majority of the colonists were dumb, just like the rest of the world, right?
Most of the world is not smart people.
So most of the colonists were dumb.
So it wasn't just the percentage of smart people.
It was that there were a lot of them in numbers.
So you need numbers.
So here's the question.
Where in the United States do we have big concentrations of smart people and things are not heading in the right direction?
Nowhere. Pretty much nowhere.
Now somebody says I'm being a bigot, but I have not mentioned race whatsoever because it doesn't have anything to do with this.
So race has nothing to do with this.
I'm just saying that if you put a bunch of people who went to college into a place that needs help, It's going to do better.
So, what do we normally do in this country when we're trying to fix an urban area?
The thing we do when we're trying to fix an urban area is we give them money and resources, mostly.
Money and resources.
And it doesn't seem to work for a variety of reasons.
What happened when you took Bill Pulte, smart and capable, well-educated, and put him into Pontiac?
Good stuff, right?
Now, money was also involved, but money, it turns out, is the easy part.
Do you know what was the hard part?
Finding a Bill Pulte.
That was the hard part.
So, I would suggest this.
If we could find something similar to the King of England giving land grants to smart people, Of every race.
So ethnicity has nothing to do with any of this, right?
Just smart people of any kind.
Could we do the same thing with our blighted areas?
Now, it doesn't necessarily have to be an urban area.
It could be Baltimore, but it could also be somewhere else.
So suppose you cleared an area of blight, and then you said, okay, all this area that's cleared has almost no economic value, but we're going to grant it We're good to go.
That your degree says whether you're smart or not.
I'm just saying it's an easy way to know that you're at least that smart.
So suppose the city said, we're going to grant this land, but instead of doing it the way that you would normally think, which is to give it to the community, you say, no, I'm going to create some kings.
They could be, you know, black kings, they could be any kind of king, but they're going to be the people who have advanced degrees, and they're going to get their own little patch of land, And they're going to use their intelligence.
If they need money, they can figure out how to get it, because that's what smart people do.
And either they have it or they know how to get it.
You put the smart people there and you say, here it is.
If you can make this work, you get an amazing advantage out of it.
So, I'm going to put this idea into the world, which is that putting physical resources into communities that have trouble It might help a little.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, but putting smart people in there, especially smart people who can work with the community, etc., probably would be a bigger deal.
Probably. Now, I don't know if there's any way to do this in the way our society is functioning, but what do I always say?
What I always say is that if you can A-B test it, That's good enough.
If you have a plan that could be tested small and find out whether or not it worked, you don't have to ask if it's good.
I mean, you want to do a basic filter to see if it's crazy.
But if you think it might be good, but you're not sure, as long as you can test it small, go ahead.
So take a little place that you think has a problem, that has land values that approach zero, Have your political leaders say, alright, here's what we're going to do.
If you've got an advanced degree in the relevant stuff, let's say an engineer.
Let's say we limit it to that.
What if you say, if you're a certain type of engineer and you have a degree, we'll give you land as long as you promise to live there and develop it.
What would happen if you came back in 20 years?
I'm pretty sure people would do okay because smart people tend to succeed no matter where they are.
Somebody said you're a moron and spelled you-r-y-o-u-r.
I'll tell you, there should be one rule as I block that person.
There should be a rule that if you insult somebody's intelligence and you spell a word wrong, While you're insulting them, it doesn't count.
That should just be the rule.
It doesn't count if you spell the word wrong.
Somebody says it's called gentrification.
Nope. Nope.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Gentrification is when anybody who is doing well sort of creeps into the neighborhood.
I am not talking about that.
I'm talking about picking people who are smarter than than those yuppies who just happened to have a four-year degree.
I'm talking about real smart people.
I'm talking about somebody who went to MIT. Because remember, the people who settled America were Oxford-trained.
They weren't just people who knew how to read.
We're talking about Jefferson.
Jefferson wasn't just a guy who could read.
He was a genius. I'm talking about geniuses.
I'm not talking about the yuppie who works in the cubicle and can afford to pay his car payment.
That is not who you need to fix the inner cities.
So when you saw recently that Jack Dorsey and Bill Pulte were clearing some blight, they had partnered to clear some blight in St.
Louis, and I saw those pictures, and I see Jack And, you know, Bill Pulte's standing there, I think to myself, I'm glad there's money, I'm glad there's equipment to do that, but what you really need is people of, you know, that level of smart and, you know, well-meaning to just live there for a while and try to build something.
Now, not those two guys in particular, but it just made me think that maybe bringing in some geniuses, and again, Geniuses of every type.
None of this is ethnic.
None of this is gender. We're not talking about any of that.
It doesn't matter who they are. They just have to have a certain skill set.
And that's it. Somebody says, where did Scott get his degrees?
I got my undergraduate at a small private college called Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York.
And I got my MBA at Berkeley here in California.
To answer your question, but let me say that I would not consider myself qualified for what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about people who have more than an MBA. I'm talking about Harvard.
I'm talking about MIT. I'm talking about top of the top.
If you don't pick top of the top, this idea falls apart quickly.
I'm not talking about putting a bunch of B-plus students into Baltimore and seeing what happens.
That's not going to get you there.
Alright, let's talk about Iran quickly.
So Iran apparently has some technology, it must be Russian technology, for spoofing GPS to make you think you're off track and apparently they can spoof communications and they're fooling ships in the area and causing mischief.
100% of the people who talk about Iran say, hey, war looks like, you know, it might be a risk.
But every single person says the same thing.
Iran does not want war.
U.S. doesn't want war.
Nobody wants war. So I'm pretty sure we're not going to get war.
I'm not going to say there isn't, you know, some bullets fired at some point.
But the odds of war with Iran, I think we should just call it zero.
Because that's what it is.
That's what it is. So let's stop worrying about that in terms of some kind of slippery slope toward war because something very different would have to happen, something we don't see coming that would turn this into an even possible war situation.
And here's part of the reason why.
Iran doesn't want a war because they would be destroyed.
So that's easy to understand.
You might ask yourself, well, why doesn't the US want war?
Because we might win it fairly easily, and it would remove this risk.
And even though people would die, maybe it's worth it.
But here's the thing. You have to compare war to the alternative.
And the alternative is just wait.
Because it turns out that Iran, in terms of the Iranian population, are fairly pro-American, American people, American culture.
They're not pro-American government.
But, you know, half of the country, the United States, you know, the majority of the United States is not in favor of our own government.
It probably never will be.
That's how we roll. So the fact that, you know, there are some Iranians who don't like our government isn't terribly important because they like us and they like the American culture and people.
And likewise, if you haven't spent time around a lot of people who had been born in Iran, they're pretty awesome people.
They're pretty awesome.
I see a lot of them around here, and to a person, they're just pretty awesome people.
So here's what I would...
Suggest, but not in a serious way.
When people suggest what the president should say or do, I always say, don't suggest what a president should do.
I don't know. It always feels wrong on several levels to say, here's what the president should do.
So instead, I'm going to put this as a thought experiment.
So the thought experiment is, Suppose the president does this.
What if the president did this?
Because it'll help you understand what's going on here, the thought experiment.
So this is not a suggestion.
It's a thought experiment.
It goes like this. What if President Trump started saying, Hey Iran, what would you gain by being our enemy?
What do you have to gain That's it.
That's the powerful part. Can you tell us what you want to gain?
Because we might be able to help.
That's the second part.
Tell us what you want, because if you work with us, you might be able to get it.
Now they might say, we would like to spread Islam around the world.
To which we say, okay, we don't think that's the best idea, but we'll still help you.
Here's how. We'll give you full access to the internet.
We'll make sure that every person in your country has freedom of speech.
Because if you want to spread an idea, killing isn't really an efficient way to do it in 2019.
We saw that ISIS tried to do that.
It didn't work out. It did not work out for ISIS. But the Internet is really good at spreading ideas.
So if Iran wants to spread their idea, we will help them take their idea into the marketplace of ideas, which is the Internet.
We will help you build out your Internet.
We'll do what we can to be supportive of every citizen in Iran getting on the Internet and having full access.
So we can help you. If you would like to spread your beliefs, we'll give you the tool, the only tool, the only tool that's effective to do that.
And we are confident that in the marketplace of ideas, it might find a place, as will others, and we'll work it out.
So then what else does Iran want?
They want to survive.
And we'll say, that's fine.
We don't care if you survive.
I mean, we'd like you to survive.
You could even keep your form of government, because we don't care about that.
That's between you and the citizens.
So we're not going to fight them on who's in charge, so long as they're not a problem to us.
What if they say we want to overthrow Israel?
Well, they don't really say that publicly.
And I don't believe that they think it could really happen.
Do you think there's anybody in Iran who in a private conversation that nobody will ever hear, do you think that anybody at any level in Iran says, you know, I think we've got a real good shot of taking Israel back for Islam?
I'll bet no.
I'll bet there are zero people who actually think that's going to happen.
And I don't think they say it out loud.
Currently what they say out loud is that they would like Israel as a As a government entity to go away.
They can want that all they want.
And in fact, the best way to do that would be to make peace with Israel.
Can you think of a faster way to destroy, in quotes, the nation of Israel than by making peace in the Middle East?
It would effectively force Israel in the long run to have a more diverse population.
And if they have a more diverse population, eventually it's going to have to become not exactly the Jewish state in the long run.
But the only way you get there is through peace.
Israel would just have pressure to be more inclusive and eventually you would get that way.
Suppose Iran wants a better economy.
Of course we can help. Suppose they want more energy and nuclear power, not nuclear weapons, nuclear power.
Well, Lindsey Graham has already offered to help.
We just want some control on the weaponized part, and if they get those parts, I guess the fuel rods, if they get that from China and Russia, the United States would say, oh, okay.
China and Russia can keep them from getting the nuclear weapon parts as long as Iran wants to get their source from those two countries.
So almost everything that Iran, at least publicly, would ask for, we would be willing to help.
We're not only not their obstacle, we're begging them to help with everything they want.
Now, we don't think of it that way because we're just sort of locked into the news coverage of us against them and will there be war, and you just think of two teams against each other.
I think the President could, and again, this is just a thought experiment.
I don't expect him to do this in any way.
I think the President could say, here's the deal.
Iran, we don't understand what you want.
Because everything that we know you want, we want too.
And we would actively help you.
We want you to communicate better.
We want you to have a better economy.
We don't want any risk of war.
We want you to have nuclear energy.
Israel has already offered to help with desalinization.
We probably have a mutual interest in controlling Al-Qaeda.
We kind of have so much in common, it's crazy that we're even talking as some kind of nemesis when it's so clear that we would work better together for everything.
Now, you might say to yourself, I don't know, there must be something we disagree with and that's worth having a war over, but I don't know what it is.
If you and I don't know what that is, I don't think anybody knows what it is.
Yeah, I think the giving them tons of cash idea was probably not your best one.
I think you have to do what Trump has successfully done with North Korea, which is paint a picture of cooperation and a picture of the future that is clearly a good one and it involves us being helpful instead of us being on the other side.
We started that a little bit with Iran, but I think that picture could be completed.
It could be that the president is constrained by the members of the administration who want to see some missiles fly.
So that may be part of the constraint.
I don't know. Somebody says that Kim Jong-un is different because he's not religious and therefore you can work a deal with him.
I would say that that would be a problem.
That would be a problem.
Except that everything Iran wants, we would be willing to help it with.
Because they can spread their ideology anywhere they want.
It's just that the internet is how you spread the ideology.
Spreading it with weapons absolutely doesn't work.
Alright. I think I've said it all for today.
I'm going to go do something else.
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