Aug. 27, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:09:05
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| Gather round, everybody! | |
| You're probably humming and singing the theme song at home. | |
| Sing along now! | |
| The beauty of the theme song for this Periscope is it doesn't have to go any special way. | |
| You can kind of arrange it any way you want. | |
| Could be bum bum bum, but it could also be bum bum bum bum bum. | |
| It all works. But in any case, I think you know you need to be prepared. | |
| Don't come to my periscope unprepared in the morning. | |
| You know what you need? | |
| Yes, you do. You need a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein, a chalice, a tank or a thermos, a flask, a cantina. | |
| Vessel of any kind to hold your liquid. | |
| I like coffee. And if you're prepared, you're ready to join me for a little ceremony called the simultaneous sip. | |
| Is it good? Oh my goodness, it's good. | |
| It's so good. It's legendary. | |
| Let's boost that dopamine, shall we? | |
| get it going here it comes have you noticed some of you have commented that if you don't get your simultaneous sip the whole day feels like there's something wrong | |
| It's not working. Well, that's because you have, through your own efforts in mind, you have rewired your brain to create a new form of pleasure. | |
| And that new form of pleasure is a simultaneous sip. | |
| Because for most of you, if you're drinking coffee, it actually does make you feel better. | |
| And doing it with other people makes you feel connected. | |
| Probably boosts your oxytocin. | |
| I think it boosts your oxytocin. | |
| I would love to test that. | |
| But I'll bet you everybody who does the simultaneous sip gets a little extra dopamine, a little serotonin, a little bit of oxytocin. | |
| It's good stuff. Which makes me wonder. | |
| Here's my speculative question of the day. | |
| I like to throw in one highly speculative thinker. | |
| Do you think that all mental illness is incurable because we can't figure out any drugs that work? | |
| Now, drugs do work on a number of mental illnesses. | |
| But the question is this. | |
| Those of you who are regulars to this Periscope, you have experienced something that should change your frame of reference about everything. | |
| And what you've experienced is me rewiring your brain. | |
| Literally. Your brain is now, I won't say addicted, but you have a preference for and enjoyment of the simultaneous sip. | |
| Not every one of you. | |
| Maybe it's a third of you. | |
| Maybe it's 75%. | |
| I have no idea. But I hear quite a few people almost every day saying how much they enjoy the simultaneous sip. | |
| It's designed to make you create a trigger in your mind to boost your brain chemistry. | |
| It's literally designed to do that. | |
| I intentionally set out, and if there's anybody who doesn't know it, I'm a trained hypnotist, have been studying persuasion in all its forms for decades. | |
| So as a trained hypnotist, I set out intentionally to create a good moment that we would all share each day and then reinforce it. | |
| I am literally rewiring the physical connections in your mind. | |
| Actually, physically, your brain is different because of all of your experiences, but this one is engineered. | |
| Most of your experiences in life are not engineered. | |
| You're just going forth in your life. | |
| Stuff is happening. | |
| It changes your brain. | |
| You hope it's good. Some things you do intentionally, such as take classes or get a massage or something. | |
| But most of your life is, you know, irrational, unpredictable forces coming at you. | |
| There are very few things that you actually program to physically change the structure of your mind, but we know we can do it. | |
| Most of you have actually done it on this periscope. | |
| So, here's the question. | |
| How far could you take that? | |
| And my answer is, a lot farther than anybody thinks. | |
| Let me give you some suggestions. | |
| Ironically, suggestions. | |
| One of the things that hypnotists do is they pair things. | |
| So, if I wanted you to like something, I would make you pair it with something you already liked. | |
| So, for example, if I wanted you to love Watching a certain television show that maybe wasn't your favorite, I could pair that television show with other things that I know you already like. | |
| So let's say you like hugging your loved one. | |
| So if you watched this TV show and every time you did it you were spooning with your loved one, The spooning would cause your chemistry to improve. | |
| You'd probably feel some oxytocin from the touching, maybe some serotonin, a little dopamine perhaps. | |
| And over time, you would start associating the TV show that you weren't in love with before. | |
| You know, you didn't hate it, but you weren't in love with it. | |
| You'd start associating it with those good chemical feelings that you get from the hugging. | |
| Over time, you would be able to turn on the TV show and your chemistry would spike. | |
| It wouldn't be as much as if you were hugging, but associations trigger certain reactions. | |
| So in that way, you can actually rewire your brain. | |
| So that a TV show that you weren't in love with before becomes physically pleasurable. | |
| Actually, physically. | |
| And you would feel it, your brain chemistry would change, your wiring, your brain would change, etc. | |
| So we know that you can... | |
| You can make bad memories trigger you the wrong way, and you can make good experiences program you the right way. | |
| And we know that those will boost your serotonin and dopamine, etc. | |
| So, here's the speculative part. | |
| How many mental illnesses are closely associated with a lack of serotonin and dopamine? | |
| A number of them, right? | |
| A number of them are associated with low chemistry of the feel-good type. | |
| Now, how that expresses itself is different. | |
| You know, you could have anything from anxiety to depression to OCD, you name it. | |
| So, what would happen if you consciously tried to rewire a brain that had bad thoughts? | |
| Could you rewire somebody without drugs simply by association and repetition to be able to boost their own serotonin and dopamine simply mentally? | |
| Well, let me tell you this. | |
| I don't know. Everybody's different. | |
| So the first thing I would assume is that if it worked at all, it would not work for everyone because that's just the way the whole world works, right? | |
| Things don't work for everyone. | |
| But my guess is that if you took a million people and tried to rewire their brains so that they could intentionally create their own dopamine, either by a thought or a trigger or a sound, that you would be able to do it. | |
| Now what I don't know, and here's the part I'm positive of. | |
| I'm positive that part's doable because it's compatible with every bit of science, every bit of experience. | |
| It's 100% compatible with everything we know. | |
| What I don't know is how effectively you could keep a trigger working over time. | |
| Because it might fade, so you might have to reintroduce new triggers, you might have to keep it reinforced all the time. | |
| I myself suffered from terrible thoughts most of my early life. | |
| And the thoughts were so terrible, and mostly it was memories of my early childhood, which were a nightmare of epic proportions. | |
| And I would have these thoughts About all that badness in my past, and it would ruin my present. | |
| And it was a very strong feeling. | |
| I mean, it would really just erase any ability to enjoy my life. | |
| Now, over time, I looked for solutions to that. | |
| One of the solutions is to stay really, really busy. | |
| Because your brain only has so much shelf space. | |
| So I would exhaust myself with intellectual challenges and things that were more distracting than the thoughts that would creep out if I didn't distract myself. | |
| So over time I found that I could starve the bad thoughts until they faded in time by simply just Bombarding myself with much stronger, more important, more evocative thoughts. | |
| Now, a lot of those thoughts were of a sexual nature, meaning that if I was trying to avoid a bad thought, I would have to use the strongest possible alternative thought to get the bad one out of my head. | |
| And there's nothing stronger For most people than a sexual thought. | |
| So I would have, you know, I would just put my imagination in that realm and it would just be absorbing. | |
| Now that alone wasn't enough. | |
| I have spent my life trying to find ways to boost my serotonin and dopamine through natural means. | |
| And I've discovered one by one, you know, additional means. | |
| I've discovered, for example, here's a little test. | |
| To run on yourself. | |
| Like most people, I have good days and bad days. | |
| My bad days tend to be not very bad these days. | |
| I mean, even my worst day is better than most people's good day, if I'm being honest. | |
| But mentally, there are days when you're happy and there are days when you're just like, ugh, blah, blah, blah. | |
| Watch this correlation in your own life. | |
| Watch this. On a day when you've exercised, Or, I'll say and or, had sex with somebody you love, or even somebody you just like a lot. | |
| Are those days sad? | |
| What you'll find is an almost perfect correlation between exercise and sexual activity is Meaning that if you do either one of those two things, the quality of the rest of your day is substantially better. | |
| And you might not have any different problems than you had on the day that you were sad. | |
| But just doing those things, one of those two things, will boost your body chemistry. | |
| And the things that used to bother you just won't bother you as much. | |
| Now those are the two biggest correlations that I find. | |
| Obviously the other one is sleep. | |
| If you can't figure out how to get a good night's sleep, make it your mission to figure that out. | |
| There are plenty of articles, plenty of things to try. | |
| There's lots of technique. | |
| Almost everybody who's got a sleeping problem is doing the wrong stuff. | |
| I can't tell you how many people say they have a sleeping problem, and if I say, what do you do at night? | |
| They say, well, read a book or watch TV. They do all the wrong things. | |
| You're not supposed to be reading a book or watching a TV in bed. | |
| Your bed should just be for sleeping and sex and that's it. | |
| That's a basic trick of sleeping. | |
| But there are lots of other ones. This isn't a periscope on sleep. | |
| The point is that I've made it a life's mission to experiment and slowly build up a number of techniques that I can boost my serotonin when I need to. | |
| Somebody in the comments mentioned eating a good steak. | |
| Now, I don't eat red meat, personally, but I can tell you that there are days when I need protein and I need a fish, because I do eat fish, and I can absolutely tell the difference. | |
| My whole body and mind are not quite working, and I realize, oh my god, I haven't had enough protein lately. | |
| So I just go eat the protein, and I feel better. | |
| It works. So, you know, the main levers that you have are, let me just list them. | |
| If you're having a problem with your mental health, no matter what it is, I'm not a mental health professional, so you should not take any kind of medical advice from people who are not medical professionals and are not there in person. | |
| But I can tell you this for sure. | |
| Whatever your situation is, whether you have an actual medically defined problem or you're just a person who'd like to be happier, if you're not rigorously looking for things to boost your body chemistry, you're looking in the wrong place for happiness. | |
| Your happiness is just chemistry. | |
| It's just chemical. | |
| You know how to boost it. | |
| Get more sleep. | |
| Have physical contact, hugging, sex, etc. | |
| Physical contact is 100% necessary for good mental health. | |
| I don't think you can get there without it. | |
| Somebody's saying LSD. I think psychedelics have a legitimate place in good mental health, and we're going to find out a lot more about that in the coming years, because all the trend is in that direction. | |
| So make sure you've got your diet right, you've got to get rid of the carbs, get rid of the simple carbs, exercise, physical touch, and then make sure that you've got something in your life to look forward to. | |
| I like to have at least one project going on that even if my day is full of tedious stuff I just have to get done, that I've always got that thing in my head, it's like, ah, as soon as I'm done with this tedious stuff, You're going to spend a little time doing this cool thing that might change the world. | |
| So I always have at least one change the world thing. | |
| Somebody in the comments is mentioning sunlight. | |
| Absolutely. Sunlight, activities you enjoy, a massage, a little good entertainment. | |
| Now here's what you should avoid. | |
| Avoid toxic people. | |
| Avoid them like the plague. | |
| Cut them out of your life. | |
| Just don't return their phone calls. | |
| That's it. Just don't even return their phone calls. | |
| You don't have time for toxic people. | |
| Likewise, do not consume entertainment that's awful. | |
| Awful meaning violent or scary or upsetting. | |
| Don't even watch comedies that are about something bad happening to somebody. | |
| There's an affair, they get a divorce. | |
| I won't even watch that. | |
| Those things depress your chemistry. | |
| And even if you might, and sad music. | |
| Don't listen to sad music, sad movies, sad TV shows, sad books. | |
| Get them out of your life. Alright, so do more of watching this periscope. | |
| Here's my point. Wherever you are on the mental health spectrum, most of it is at least influenced and affected by your serotonin level. | |
| We know how to influence those things. | |
| Yeah, get rid of alcohol too. | |
| We know how to influence those things. | |
| If you're having any problems with your happiness, And you're not looking to methodically create systems in which you can get those things you know will boost your serotonin and your dopamine. | |
| If that's not your life process, looking for those opportunities and systemizing them, what are you doing? | |
| What's the alternative to that? | |
| Let me tell you what the alternative is. | |
| Magical thinking. Most of you are trapped in magical thinking. | |
| And by that I mean you're having a bad day. | |
| What do you say when you have a bad day? | |
| What do 99% of you say to yourself when you're having a bad day and you're unhappy and you're sad? | |
| What you usually say is, there's something going wrong today. | |
| Right? You blame your situation. | |
| Something went wrong. | |
| I don't have the job I want. | |
| Somebody insulted me. | |
| Something went wrong. | |
| I've got a stomach ache or something. | |
| Now, some of those things are real, of course. | |
| Real problems can really influence you. | |
| But pay attention to how often you can be happy anyway while all of your problems are exactly the same as they were. | |
| Get some exercise. | |
| Get some sleep. Eat some clean protein. | |
| Stay away from the carbs. Get a little sun. | |
| Get a massage. Get a little physical touch if you can work it out legally. | |
| Do those things. | |
| Yeah, go for a walk. | |
| Spend some time with your dog. | |
| And then see if you feel better, even though your problems are exactly the same. | |
| Now, you also need to work on your problems. | |
| That's good. That's why I recommend having a system that's going to work on your problems over time so you feel like you have progress. | |
| You do your system every day. | |
| So that is my advice to you. | |
| Don't use magical thinking and don't imagine that your happiness on any particular day is because of stuff that's happening. | |
| It's only because you didn't get the big five or six things that boost your dopamine. | |
| And as a hypnotist, I can tell you that you can develop triggers and mental tricks to avoid the bad stuff and take yourself to thoughts, thoughts, actual just mental processes that will directly boost your Your body chemistry. | |
| Totally practical. | |
| There's nothing magical about it. | |
| All supported by science. | |
| You don't have to worry that it's anything. | |
| It's all science-based. | |
| All right, let's talk about some other stuff. | |
| If you have not seen Dave Chappelle's brand new Netflix stand-up comedy, clear your calendar. | |
| It's brand new. There's a lot of Chappelle stand-up, but I think this one's called Sticks and Stones. | |
| I believe it went live yesterday. | |
| Now, I would not say this about many entertainers, but let me tell you, if you don't mind that there's a lot of F-bombs and very, very challenging content, meaning that if you watch Chappelle, Your brain's going to go in a lot of different places and you're going to feel uncomfortable until he pulls you back. | |
| I watched his special and watching, you know, some people would say the best stand-up comedian of our current day. | |
| I think a lot of people would say Chappelle would be the best. | |
| But he's also at the top of his form. | |
| You know, he's had the most practice and experience. | |
| He's at that age where... | |
| Oh my God. It was so good. | |
| So first of all, I laughed all the way through it. | |
| Like I laughed until I felt like I was having a stroke. | |
| You know, where you laugh so hard. | |
| Have you ever laughed so hard that all of your muscles turn to rock? | |
| Like everything... | |
| And your body like completely turns to stone for a moment and you don't know if you can breathe. | |
| And then you're like... And then you laugh. | |
| That's how funny he is. | |
| Now, first of all, let me say, you know, humor is subjective, but he's really funny. | |
| Okay. Let me give you just a sample. | |
| I don't want to ruin his show because you're going to see clips from it because there's so many good parts, you know, it could end up ruined for you by seeing all the good parts. | |
| But one of the things he says... | |
| Is that if you want to fix the problem with too many guns, what Chappelle suggests is that all black people go get a permit and buy a gun. | |
| Just think about it. | |
| Chappelle's solution to the gun problem is that all black people, 100%, every black person in the United States goes out and gets a gun. | |
| Now, it's funny, But think about it. | |
| Just think about it. | |
| Now, the joke part is that he's suggesting that if all black people went and got guns, that all the white people would say, hey, maybe we should make this illegal. | |
| This is looking a little scary. | |
| And so the joke is that white people would say, oh, that's enough guns. | |
| Let's put some restrictions on these guns. | |
| Now, that's hilarious. | |
| But... It's also interesting. | |
| It makes you actually think, would that actually work? | |
| Because first of all, if every black person had a gun, a legal gun, you know, legal permit, even the places where there's a lot of murder, what would happen? | |
| What would happen if every time anybody pulled out a gun, everybody else pulled out a gun? | |
| Well, I suppose there would be some situations where everybody would just shoot each other. | |
| So I suppose that could be bad. | |
| But it feels like nobody would pull out a gun if everybody else had a gun. | |
| I don't know. There's some evidence to suggest that the more armed the population is, the fewer people will pull out a gun in public and try to shoot people. | |
| So I know I have an opinion on the gun laws, so I'm not trying to give you an opinion. | |
| I'm just telling you that watching Chappelle is a whole bunch of nuggets like that that really will challenge your political opinion while you're laughing. | |
| It's probably the smartest stand-up you're going to see. | |
| Probably the smartest and also funniest. | |
| All right, let's talk about Greenland. | |
| So there's still chatter about buying Greenland, which I think is a tremendous idea if only Denmark would be willing to sell it to us. | |
| But I wonder, what do we charge Denmark for defending Greenland? | |
| What do we charge them? | |
| Because before long, Greenland will be in play, you know, if you assume that the Arctic continues melting. | |
| For climate change reasons or just because the earth is getting warmer, pick your explanation. | |
| But Greenland is just going to get more important. | |
| I think they might have some minerals and some things that are good. | |
| Why don't we just charge Denmark for military protection? | |
| Because it might get expensive for Denmark. | |
| They might say to themselves, you know what would work even better? | |
| Why don't we lease you some bases? | |
| Let you do some mining if you want to. | |
| You can have a presence in Greenland that's protective, but we'll keep Greenland. | |
| Greenland will still belong to Denmark, but we're going to optimize Greenland by allowing some American bases. | |
| And also some leases so that American companies can get some minerals, share it with Greenland. | |
| You know, everybody wins. Greenland gets the money from the leases. | |
| The world gets the minerals. | |
| Do we have to buy Greenland? | |
| If it's insulting, I say don't bother. | |
| One of the things that people who do not have experience in business don't understand is that there are a lot of ways to buy things. | |
| One way to buy things is to give money and then somebody gives you something. | |
| That's the standard way. Another way to buy something is with a long-term lease. | |
| Effectively buying it without actually buying it. | |
| Another way to buy something is to buy the good parts of it Without buying the whole thing. | |
| Yeah, you could rent it. | |
| You could lease it. You could have long-term agreements about minerals in return for defense. | |
| So you could have a contract that gets you everything you want. | |
| You don't have to own it. | |
| You know, it might be different if Denmark were an enemy or something, but given that Denmark and the United States are quite friendly and are likely to remain that way, There's probably another way to approach this that gets both countries what they want. | |
| And if Denmark wants to maintain leadership or ownership of Greenland and the Greenland population wants it, good for them. | |
| No problem there at all. | |
| All right. Did you see the... | |
| I tweeted that Breitbart has once again done the work of the Angels, specifically Joel Pollack, who went to a Beto O'Rourke event and asked him in the little interviews that the reporters gather around the candidate afterwards. | |
| And Breitbart's Joel Pollack asked Beto, Exactly as he asked Joe Biden, that also made news, if he understood that the way he was describing the, quote, fine people quote was not true, and that he was buying into the fine people hoax. | |
| Now, Joel didn't use that term, but he stated that Beto's interpretation of what the president said is just not what he said. | |
| It's actually the opposite. | |
| Now, what did Beto do? | |
| When all of the news cameras were on him, and he was accurately challenged on a main premise of his campaign, and Joel just said the actual quote was he condemned totally neo-Nazis and white nationalists. | |
| That was the actual quote. | |
| Now what do you do? | |
| You've just been called out as a liar or wrong, either lying or just wrong, In public, while you're running for president, on not just a minor topic, but the most important element of his entire campaign, which is Trump called neo-Nazis fine people, which never happened. | |
| What did he do? Well, I gotta say, he did really well. | |
| Beto kinda nailed it. | |
| His main campaign theme is inaccurate or a lie, depending on whether he understands that it's not true or not. | |
| We don't know. But in terms of how to weasel and of a damning question, it was really good. | |
| So here's what he did. | |
| He ran out the clock. | |
| So the first thing you do if you're being asked questions in public and you get a question you don't like, you want to filibuster Throw in the laundry list of unrelated things that are sort of related to the topic but not specifically to the question. | |
| And then go to the next question. | |
| And that's what he did. | |
| But he did it really well. | |
| If you want to see an example of a lying politician lying very successfully, watch Beto's move. | |
| So instead of going directly at the question and saying, no, he actually did say that, which would be fact check the next day, because that, you know, if a question, if a reporter says, This is not true. | |
| And Beto says directly, it is true. | |
| It's exactly what he said. | |
| Now you get to fact check it, right? | |
| You're basically begging the fact checkers to fact check it, and that's not going to work out for him. | |
| So what does he do? | |
| He just starts talking about a laundry list of all the other things the president has done that supports his case, even though his facts are wrong. | |
| And next question. | |
| Pretty good job. | |
| I do love the fact that Joel is forcing them all to go on the record on this, even though he avoided doing it. | |
| It's a great process to watch as a voter, as a citizen. | |
| It's fun to watch them have to explain their lies. | |
| All right. Joe Biden. | |
| Said, and I quote, I want to be clear, I'm not going nuts. | |
| Now this is when asked about his many gaffes. | |
| If you want to be president, here's something you should never say in public. | |
| I want to be clear, I'm not going nuts. | |
| Compare that to President Trump's... | |
| His usual way of responding is... | |
| More indirect. Which is a better way? | |
| Because you don't want people quoting you saying you're not going nuts. | |
| That is so incompetent. | |
| Compare that to Beto. Beto quite ably changed the subject to get out of an embarrassing situation. | |
| Biden just made his embarrassing situation worse by going directly at it. | |
| You can learn something from this. | |
| He goes directly at it. | |
| I'm not going nuts. What's that make everybody think? | |
| Oh, you're going nuts. | |
| You can't read, I'm not going nuts, and have any thought other than, I think he's going nuts. | |
| So, that's bad. | |
| Now, there's a Monmouth poll They showed a three-way tie, basically, with Sanders, Warren, and Biden, which would indicate that Biden had dropped quite a bit from the last major poll. | |
| But the Monmouth poll is not a major poll. | |
| It's a small sample, and it may not be representative. | |
| But is it important? | |
| Yep, it is. | |
| Because the Monmouth poll is the one that's suggesting that That there could be a change coming. | |
| So the Monmouth is sort of like the canary in the coal mine that's saying, uh-oh, there could be a poll that shows that Biden is no longer the most electable. | |
| Because remember, Biden's entire benefit, you know, the reason he's running is that he's the most electable. | |
| That's his story. | |
| But as soon as one poll shows you're in a three-way tie, your story is badly wounded. | |
| All it's going to take is one more poll to agree with the Monmouth poll, and you got yourself a problem. | |
| It'll only take one more. | |
| And what would cause the next poll to agree with the Monmouth poll? | |
| What would cause it? | |
| The Monmouth poll I don't want to say Monmouth even one more time because I can't pronounce it. | |
| Monmouth? The Monmouth poll. | |
| Just say it like you have a lot of cotton in your mouth. | |
| The Monmouth poll. So the Monmouth poll should be seen as persuasion. | |
| Persuasion. Because everybody who saw that poll and had been a supporter of Biden just went, uh-oh, Now, they might also say, well, I don't trust that poll. | |
| I'm going to wait and see. A lot of people will do that and it won't influence them at all. | |
| And if the next poll is different, if the next poll differs with this one and Biden's still got a commanding lead, well, the Monmouth poll will have no importance. | |
| But I suspect the Monmouth poll It gives people both a reason and a fake because to change their mind on Biden. | |
| For the professionals, it gives them some cover. | |
| Because if the professionals say, hey, you know, we gave it our best shot. | |
| We put him out there. | |
| We worked as hard as we could. | |
| The people have spoken. He dropped in the polls. | |
| He's no longer the electable candidate we thought he was, and now we can change to another horse. | |
| So I think the Monmouth poll is really important because it might influence the next poll and the poll after that, and then it becomes self-reinforcing. | |
| So I believe that the media... | |
| Trump is taking a soft stand on this because the media doesn't want to take Biden out directly. | |
| They could. CNN could take Biden out tomorrow. | |
| You know that, right? MSNBC, either one of them. | |
| New York Times, they could do it. | |
| Washington Post. Any one of the big media companies that normally back the Democrats, any one of them could take Biden out of the race with one story. | |
| And that story simply has to suggest he's not electable. | |
| That's it. Just say it once in some big story, in a big publication, everybody else will refer to the story, and that gives them cover. | |
| It's like, well, it's not me saying this. | |
| I would never insult Biden, but man, look what that publication said. | |
| That's all it would take. But I don't think the press wants to be the Godzilla that's stomping on Bambi. | |
| Because whatever's going on with Biden, I just have empathy for him. | |
| He's a certain age. | |
| He's trying to help. I think he really is trying to do what he thinks is best for the country. | |
| I don't have bad feelings about Biden whatsoever. | |
| I just don't think he's got the game anymore to be in that kind of a job. | |
| All right. So, one of the funny things happening is that the media is trying to now build a new narrative around the question of, is Trump losing it? | |
| Now, this would be a good defense against, is Biden gaffing too much and is Biden losing it? | |
| So there, you know, the hoax is, on the anti-Trump side, the hoax is sort of cycle. | |
| And it's all about Russia. | |
| Okay, it's not about Russia, but he's definitely a racist. | |
| All right, he's not a racist. But look at that instability and his mental instability. | |
| Okay, well, the mental instability doesn't seem to be hurting us in any important way. | |
| It's just hyperbole. But what about Russia? | |
| So they just sort of cycle through the big hoaxes one at a time. | |
| But they're definitely getting more purchase on the Trump is unstable than they would have normally just because they have some fodder to work with. | |
| So here are some of the things That they're referring to, to suggest that Trump is losing it. | |
| So Trump, I guess Trump referred to, he said that Melania was also, you know, liked Kim Jong-un. | |
| But it turns out that Melania has never met Kim. | |
| And there was a great reaction shot of Melania in the audience. | |
| When President Trump said, yeah, she likes Kim too. | |
| And Melania is like, what do I do now? | |
| I've never met him. | |
| Now, is that evidence that Trump is crazy? | |
| Because he suggested that Melania met Kim? | |
| No. Any more than it's crazy that... | |
| That Biden forgot what state he was in when he was in New Hampshire. | |
| He said he was in Vermont. None of it is really terribly surprising. | |
| If you imagine the complexity of being president or even the complexity of running for president, All the people you're meeting, all the places you are. | |
| Is it likely that you will remember even basic facts, like what state you're in or did Melania meet Kim? | |
| What are the odds that you would forget even basic facts? | |
| Pretty good. Pretty good. | |
| How many people have told me in person that their best friend went to school with me in some state where I've never gone to school? | |
| A lot. Ordinary people have false memories all the time. | |
| Now, what makes any of it look bothersome is that you have too many of them. | |
| So what the anti-Biden people are collecting up all of his gaffes to make it look like a trend. | |
| I don't know if it is or not, because he's always been gaff-prone. | |
| Likewise, they're doing the same thing with President Trump to say, hey, the number of things you say which do not pass the fact-checking seems to be increasing. | |
| Is it? They've got 11,000 things he said that didn't pass the fact-checking, but lately there's more of it? | |
| Really? Do we really know that lately there's more of it? | |
| I doubt it. | |
| My take on Trump is that he's got... | |
| Some go-to things he says in every situation. | |
| One of the go-to things he says is that other people agree with him. | |
| Right? The most common go-to thing that Trump does is say, lots of people are saying, lots of people are agreeing with me. | |
| Somebody came up to me and said, Mr. | |
| President, you're so right, sir. | |
| Right? It's the most common thing he does. | |
| Somebody came up and agreed with me. | |
| Lots of times it didn't happen. | |
| Does it matter? | |
| Not really. Because we've been watching him for years, and he always says, somebody agrees with me. | |
| And then you check it out, and that person wasn't there, didn't agree. | |
| Doesn't matter. He just uses it as part of his persuasion, and it doesn't seem to make any difference. | |
| I don't know. You know, it didn't lower my income, didn't make the world the worst place. | |
| It was just persuasion in a direction that he wants you to be persuaded. | |
| Which is different from just being crazy. | |
| If we saw that Trump was missing facts in the wrong direction, I'd be pretty worried. | |
| But if every time Trump is caught in what the fact checkers say is, let's say, inaccuracy, if every time he does it, it's in the service of persuading you in a way that you say, well, actually, I would want to be persuaded that way. | |
| I would like to think That President Trump and Kim Jong-un can get along. | |
| I would also like Kim Jong-un to think that. | |
| Remember, when the President's talking to the public, he's also talking to Putin. | |
| He's also talking to President Xi, and he's also talking to Kim Jong-un. | |
| He's not talking to us alone. | |
| He's talking to them. | |
| And so when he's telling us in public, not only do I like Kim Jong-un personally, but my wife likes him too. | |
| Wasn't true. But don't you think it's good that Kim Jong-un is hearing good things about him personally and his personal relationship? | |
| Yeah, it's good. Of course it's good. | |
| Because Kim Jong-un would like to have a good personal relationship. | |
| Makes everything work better. | |
| All right. The other things the president's being questioned on is, well, there's the hurricane thing. | |
| Let's talk about the hurricane thing. | |
| So the report was that Trump... | |
| He's asked supposedly repeatedly on different days or different events. | |
| He's asked the question, why can't you nuke a hurricane? | |
| And of course, what do all the smart people say? | |
| Well, let me call him Dale to give you the reaction from all the smart people. | |
| Can you nuke a hurricane? | |
| Oh, you can't nuke a hurricane! | |
| It's so dumb! | |
| Oh, don't you know? | |
| Don't you know? You can nuke a hurricane. | |
| Insane. But here's my question. | |
| Can you nuke a hurricane? | |
| Do you know the answer to that? | |
| So here's the question. | |
| If President Trump had ever said, can you nuke a hurricane, and if his staff member said, I've never even thought about that. | |
| Let me find out. And they went out and they found some information, maybe, or they didn't. | |
| And then the next time the president thinks of it, nobody's gotten back to him. | |
| What would you say if you had said, can you nuke a hurricane? | |
| And your staff said, I don't know, we'll look into it. | |
| And then the next time you think of it, you say it again. | |
| So, can you nuke a hurricane? | |
| And what does his staff say? | |
| We'll look into it. Because they probably don't know. | |
| Or they've checked with one person and they say no. | |
| Do you find it crazy that he would ask the question, can you nuke a hurricane? | |
| I don't. It may... | |
| I'm certainly willing to believe it's not a workable idea. | |
| But it's not crazy to ask the question. | |
| Here's why. How many nuclear explosions have there been above ground? | |
| In the comments... | |
| Tell me how many you think have happened. | |
| How many nuclear explosions have already happened in our history above ground? | |
| Give me a guess. | |
| How many nuclear explosions have happened above ground? | |
| Well, you know we've tested some nukes. | |
| We know other countries have tested some nukes. | |
| You know we've used nukes in World War II against Japan. | |
| But how many nuclear explosions have happened above ground? | |
| Hundreds. Somebody's saying four. | |
| That's what I would have guessed. I would have guessed like 20, something like that. | |
| The answer is hundreds. | |
| Hundreds of nuclear explosions above ground. | |
| Are you radioactive? | |
| I'm not. Is there a place in the world that you can't go to? | |
| Maybe. I don't know of any. | |
| I mean, you don't want to go to Chernobyl. | |
| But that wasn't a nuclear bomb, it was a different kind of nuclear accident. | |
| So, I ask you, if we can explode, we meaning the entire planet, hundreds of nuclear weapons above ground, what does that tell you about the risk of nuclear fallout? | |
| Well, it tells me I don't really understand it, because the experts are saying, You know, it's a bad idea, nuclear fallout, blah, blah, blah. | |
| And I don't disagree. | |
| I just wonder why all those other nuclear disasters are not bothering us at the moment. | |
| Why not? So here's the question I asked. | |
| First of all, there's the physics question of would it work? | |
| And I have to think That a bomb would maybe change something, I don't know, change an air pressure, mess up something. | |
| So I don't know if it'd work. | |
| That's a separate question. | |
| But I can tell you that scientists have asked the question too. | |
| It's a serious enough question that legitimate scientists have looked into it. | |
| Now the issue is that there would be, you know, fallout. | |
| But here's the question. Where exactly would you be nuking it? | |
| If you nuked it close to land, well, that sounds like a terrible idea. | |
| If you nuked it further into the middle of the ocean, but still where it's kind of new, before it picks up steam, where would the radiation go? | |
| Would the hurricane winds make the radiation much worse, because it would spread it worse, or Would it make it less worse because it would dilute it by spreading it over such a large distance quickly? | |
| Which way would that go? | |
| I don't know. So, to say that it was a dumb question, I believe is uneducated. | |
| It was a smart question that had an answer he probably didn't get the first time he asked it. | |
| Now, Trump is denying that he asked the question. | |
| Which might be a perfectly legitimate political thing to do. | |
| And my guess is that maybe it just came up. | |
| He may have just tossed it out as something to say, curiosity, etc. | |
| So he may never have been serious about it. | |
| We don't know. But it's not a terrible thing to bring up. | |
| Now, a lot of people don't know that there are serious people, scientists, who say you probably could reduce the Atlantic hurricanes by reforesting the deserts in Northern Africa. | |
| And the way you would do that is actually known. | |
| We know how to do that. | |
| All you do is you take livestock, And you put them on the border of where there is vegetation and where there's desert. | |
| And those borders are pretty easy to find. | |
| So you bring your livestock out there, they eat the vegetation that's on the vegetated side, and then they wander into the deserty side and they poop. | |
| And that brings some seeds and some things into the desert side. | |
| And you check back next year, and the vegetation portion begins to creep into the desert. | |
| And you can just repeat this, and you can fairly quickly, meaning over a few number of years, you can reforest deserts. | |
| It's a known thing. | |
| We've tested it and it works. | |
| And if you were to reforest the deserts, you would lower the temperature over the northern Africa where hurricanes form. | |
| And so they might still form, but they would form smaller because it would be less of a difference in temperature. | |
| That's real. So it looks like, yeah, and then somebody else mentioned if you use nuclear power to power your desalinization, then you've also got water for getting rid of your deserts. | |
| So yes, we could actually use science to decrease hurricanes. | |
| That's the real thing. Now, whether a nuke ever makes sense, I'm no expert, seems dangerous to me, but I don't think it's crazy. | |
| It's not crazy. Speaking of nuclear, Andrew Yang became the only credible voice on climate change yesterday. | |
| Let me say that again. | |
| Andrew Yang became the only, only credible voice running for president On the topic of climate change, because he is pointedly putting nuclear energy as a main part of the solution, not the only solution, but one of the primary parts. | |
| Now he focuses on thorium reactors, and I think experts, you know, would have different opinions about whether that's specific technology. | |
| It is where you want to go versus generation four in general, which would be a number of technologies that would have some advantages. | |
| So if we can ignore the specific suggestion about thorium and generalize it a little bit to new technologies for nuclear, Yang is the only one who suggested something that could work. | |
| And on top of that, if you don't think that climate change is a problem, it's still a good idea. | |
| Because nuclear energy is cheaper, safer, better. | |
| It's just a better deal. | |
| So Yang is the only candidate who has a suggestion for what the Democrats consider the biggest problem in the world, climate change. | |
| He's the only one who has And even potentially effective solution. | |
| How did the other candidates respond to that? | |
| And by the way, even if you think climate change is not a problem, like I said, you still want nuclear, because it's cheaper, better, cleaner energy than anything else. | |
| Now, you know, you can still do all the solar you want, but you're going to need the nuclear to fill in the gaps. | |
| All right. | |
| So I invited Andrew Yang to drop into my Periscope today, and I told him just to text me if you wanted to. | |
| Obviously, he's busy or not interested. | |
| But he just became the most interesting candidate on the Democrat side. | |
| Now, that doesn't mean he'll necessarily make it into the top three, because he's got a lot of competition. | |
| But he's the only interesting one. | |
| He also made a statement about nutrition. | |
| And he mentioned that if we're talking about health care, we should talk about nutrition. | |
| And make a bigger play to improve nutrition in this country. | |
| What do most Republicans say? | |
| Most Republicans say, stay away from my food. | |
| Don't tell me what to eat. | |
| I like my food. No government's going to tell me what to eat. | |
| And that's fine. Freedom is good. | |
| The government does not need to tell you what to eat. | |
| Other pundits, I think Stefan Molyneux made this comment. | |
| It's like, oh great, here comes the food pyramid. | |
| That worked out great. | |
| You remember the food pyramid for years was completely opposite of good nutrition because the food industry was sort of behind it. | |
| Not sort of behind it, they were behind it. | |
| So the government was telling us what to eat and they were telling us to eat a bunch of carbs, which basically were killing us. | |
| So you can't really trust the government to tell you what to eat. | |
| But Andrew Yang is not the government. | |
| Unlike almost everybody else in government, he would actually know the difference between what a good diet looked like, per science, and what a bad diet looked like, per science. | |
| In fact, he might be the only candidate who's willing to consider science as important. | |
| That feels like an overstatement. | |
| But where are the other candidates talking about nuclear energy? | |
| If they're not talking about nuclear energy to solve climate change, they can't make any claim to be scientifically compatible. | |
| Because science is pretty pro-nuclear. | |
| Likewise, science has a pretty good idea of what you should eat and what you shouldn't, we think. | |
| I hope they're better at it now. | |
| So yes, Andrew Yang is right on food, completely misunderstood and under, let's say, we don't have enough energy in that direction. | |
| The government could be a good, let's say, a good role model and a good influence, but you don't want the government telling you what to eat. | |
| I know you don't. Let's talk about the Amazon fire hoax. | |
| So, Mike Cernovich, again, proving why everybody in the world should be following him on Twitter and reading his books. | |
| Mike Cernovich, I believe, was the first person of note Who looked into this claim that the Amazon is burning and it's some kind of a bigger problem than we've seen in the past. | |
| It turns out the Amazon is burning, sort of like it always does, every year, about normal. | |
| And some portion of it is farmers burning at places they burned in the past, etc. | |
| So there was no Crisis in the Amazon. | |
| On top of that, people were saying, yeah, the lung thing. | |
| A lot of people who love the Earth have referred to the Amazon as the lungs of the planet. | |
| As in, if you lose the Amazon, we won't be able to absorb enough CO2, so you'd lose your lungs and then the planet ends up destroying itself. | |
| But it turns out nothing like that is true. | |
| Apparently, the Amazon basin creates about as much CO2 as it uses. | |
| I think I'm saying that right. | |
| But the point is that the idea that the Amazon is special, meaning that it is uniquely the lungs of the planet, there's no evidence of anything like that. | |
| It probably has no more effect than, you know, anything else. | |
| So this was like a major story everywhere. | |
| Apparently, all of the photographs and videos of the Amazon basin fire, all of the ones that went viral, all of them were fake. | |
| Think about that. All of the images that went viral, there were some real ones too, but they didn't go viral, but all of the ones that went viral were all fake. | |
| They were different years or different places. | |
| Think about that. They were all fake. | |
| Amazing. Somebody's saying that I should have said that the lungs of the world, the Amazon basis, I should have been talking about oxygen, not CO2. Either way, and you might be right about that, but either way, the point is that it's not a special place. | |
| It's not the world's lungs. | |
| All right. Apparently, when Israel attacked some Iranian operatives in Syria and said they were getting ready for a drone strike, it was much worse than we were led to believe. | |
| I mean, the potential strike was much worse. | |
| Apparently, the drone attack that was being planned was going to be a swarm. | |
| And it would have been the first time we've seen it, had it succeeded. | |
| A swarm, meaning a whole bunch of drones, we don't know how many, but a bunch of them programmed with the GPS coordinates of one place so that they could all just take off en masse and they would have a bomb on them and they would end up in the same place and blow things up and it would be too hard to shoot them all down because there would be a lot of them. | |
| So Israel took them out, but there are continued stories of testing this stuff. | |
| And apparently it's going to be fairly trivial to send a swarm of small drones to a destination within a few feet, And make it blow up. | |
| Could we ever stop that? | |
| Probably not. So I've been predicting for some time an end of large outdoor gatherings. | |
| I think we'll just see one of these attacks and that will be the end. | |
| But if you see one of these attacks succeed, you may not see stadium events again. | |
| It may be the end of it. I don't know how you defend against it. | |
| Maybe you can. Apparently, President Trump did not attend some climate meetings while claiming that he had some, I don't know, conflict or something. | |
| And people are fact-checking it as they always do. | |
| Here's my take. It's sort of a bad look. | |
| So the optics of being the only country that doesn't go to the climate meetings, it's not a good look. | |
| But it wouldn't be much of a good look for him to go. | |
| He had two ways to lose. | |
| Going would have been a problem because everybody would beat him up. | |
| And he doesn't believe that it's a real problem. | |
| And not going would be a problem. | |
| So let me remind you of some bottom line on climate. | |
| And I want you to fact check me on this because I don't think anybody says... | |
| It feels like nobody says anything accurate about the climate. | |
| It's almost like it can't be done. | |
| It doesn't matter which side you're on. | |
| I've read just enough about the climate that when the skeptics or the scientists talk, I say to myself, yeah, but it feels like you're leaving out an important thing here. | |
| So here are some of the things I know. | |
| There are, let's say, two major ways to check temperature, to know if things have warmed recently. | |
| One way, broadly speaking, is measurements on the surface. | |
| So there would be thermometers on the land and various ways that you've got buoys and picking up water and stuff on the ocean. | |
| So there are a number of ways to measure the temperature on the Earth's surface. | |
| And when they do that, they say, uh-oh, it's getting unprecedentedly... | |
| Is that even a word? | |
| The warming is unprecedented. | |
| But if you take satellite measurements since the dawn of satellites, 70s I think, they don't show the warming. | |
| What's the difference between the satellites that don't show the global warming, at least the CO2 caused warming, and the terrestrial ones? | |
| Well, here's something that everybody agrees. | |
| The satellites are accurate. | |
| The terrestrial measurements are not. | |
| So we have two major ways of measuring the warmth. | |
| The accurate one says it's not happening. | |
| The inaccurate one says it is. | |
| But it's better. It's better than that. | |
| Among the inaccurate or lesser accurate measurements, the terrestrial ones, the ones on the ground and in the ocean, There are ones that are better than other ones on the ground. | |
| For example, the measurements taken in the United States are higher quality than the measurements taken in some third-world countries and other places. | |
| Now, why are the US measurements better quality? | |
| Well, for one thing, if there's an urban island that grows up around them, they'll relocate it because they know that being near a parking lot, for example, will heat up your thermometer. | |
| Another way that the US thermometers are better is that the casing needs to be painted white. | |
| So in the United States, if they see that the paint is starting to, you know, brown or whatever color it turns, they'll repaint it. | |
| So you'll always have a white-painted Enclosure for your thermometers in the United States. | |
| But in some third world countries, they're not as good at repainting them and their thermometer casing is browned, which should make the temperature look higher. | |
| Now, of those two, the ones that are more accurate in the United States versus the ones around the world that are relatively less accurate, which ones show the warming? | |
| Well, not the ones in the United States. | |
| So the ones on the ground that are the most accurate apparently don't show the warming. | |
| Now, the climate experts will say, but that doesn't mean anything because it's a global problem, and it could easily be true that there are major places on the Earth where you don't see the warming, but there are other places you do. | |
| It's the average you have to worry about. | |
| So here's the thing. The following, everything that I just said might not be true. | |
| So if there's one thing I could teach you about climate change, is that everything you think you know, no matter which side you're on, or even if you haven't taken the side, every fact you think you know about climate change. | |
| It's highly subject to being wrong. | |
| I've put a lot of time into studying this as an amateur, right? | |
| Just as a consumer, as a citizen who wants to understand it. | |
| And I can tell you, you can't. | |
| You can't get there. | |
| You can fool yourself and think you did. | |
| But you can't. It's just too complicated. | |
| There are too many inconsistencies. | |
| You'd have to really be a scientist and live in that world and have access to every part of it at a detailed level to really have an opinion I would trust. | |
| So the problem is that our best measurements don't show the warming that's alarming. | |
| Our worst measurements do. | |
| Does that mean there's no warming? | |
| No, it doesn't mean that. | |
| It's entirely possible that all the warming is happening. | |
| Satellites are not picking it up. | |
| U.S. is different from the rest. | |
| It's entirely possible. | |
| You can't make a conclusion from the few facts that I just laid out there. | |
| Now here's another thing. | |
| Don't most people tell you That it's the end of the world, climate change. | |
| But yet their own figures show a 10.5% reduction in GDP in 80 years, which any economist will tell you, you wouldn't even notice. | |
| You wouldn't notice. | |
| So the worst economic disaster scenarios are that you probably won't notice, no matter what it does. | |
| So fact check me on all of that. | |
| Feel free to tweet me and tell me what I got wrong. | |
| Because I'm sure I did get some of it wrong. | |
| All right. Let's talk about... | |
| Here's one of my favorite tweets. | |
| James Taranto. | |
| Taranto? I hope I'm pronouncing it right. | |
| James Taranto of Wall Street Journal. | |
| Talking about George Conway. | |
| You know Kellyanne Conway's husband? | |
| He keeps tweeting that Trump is crazy. | |
| And so every day George Conway is tweeting that Trump is crazy, Trump is crazy, he must be removed. | |
| But Trump is not removed. | |
| Every day is the same as the day before. | |
| And so James Taranto cleverly noted in his tweet, quote, George Conway's definition of sanity is tweeting the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. | |
| That's right. George Conway tweets the same thing over and over, but he expects he'll get a different result. | |
| Now, that's more clever than, you know, scientifically true, but it's pretty clever. | |
| All right. Brian Stelter says, we must talk about Trump's fitness for office. | |
| Sure, let's do that. | |
| We'll do that in 2020. | |
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