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Sept. 15, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:03:28
Episode 663 Scott Adams: The Simultaneous Sip Waits For No One. Unless you see it on Replay
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Hello everybody!
Come on in!
It's the weekend.
Well, it's been the weekend, but it's still the weekend, and it's a great, great day.
It's a sort of day when you just want to take a deep breath, take stock of all the good stuff, but most importantly, you want to enjoy the simultaneous sip.
Because when you do that, it nearly guarantees that the rest of your day will be better than it would have been.
Does it take much to enjoy it?
No, it does not. Thanks for asking.
It doesn't take much at all.
Thanks for the super heart, Virus Joe.
Here's what you need to enjoy this simultaneous sip.
I think you know. It's a cup or a mug or a glass of stein, a chalice, a tanker, a thermos, a flash, a canteen, a grail, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I'm partial to coffee.
And join me now for the simultaneous sip, the best sip of the day.
Dopamine, go! Sublime.
All right. Let's talk about Joe Biden.
Here's an interesting angle.
That I don't believe I've seen anywhere.
So I should be the first person to introduce this idea, but it might catch on.
Here's the idea.
Imagine, if you will, Joe Biden gets the nomination.
That's not crazy.
Now, I've predicted it won't happen because I predicted that he'll fail before the Before it gets time to nominate.
And probably for some health or mental stability reason.
Stability is the wrong word.
He's obviously lost his step.
All the Democrats can see it.
It's no longer a question of opinion.
It's now passed from opinion into, yeah, we see it too.
But it's hard to talk him out of it.
Because apparently there's nobody who has any influence who can...
Apparently there's nobody who can talk to Biden and say, you know, you've been good for the country.
Maybe take a step back.
So what happens if Biden gets a nomination?
Here's the fun part. He's going to have to pick a vice president.
Let's do a little thought experiment.
Let's say he picks a vice president from among the other contenders for president, which would be quite reasonable, quite normal.
He's not limited to that, of course, but let's say he does.
Who would he pick?
Wait for it. Wait for it.
Who would he pick who would have the most chance of invoking the 25th Amendment in conjunction with the regular processes for that?
Who would support it, maybe even promote it, and take the job of president?
Think about it.
If you voted for a Biden-Kamala Harris ticket, I see most of you are getting ahead of me.
If you voted for that ticket, let's say the variables just lined up and against all odds, Biden gets the nomination.
Largely because, let's say, the country isn't paying attention.
Anybody who's watched him in a debate is going to have a real problem with thinking that that's a safe thing to do for the country.
But if there's any doubt in people's minds about whether Biden will be capable, and they still want the benefit of thinking, incorrectly, but thinking that Biden could beat Trump, They might have this tough question, which is, it's obvious he's not capable, but what if there's a hot backup?
And here's the thing about Harris.
Imagine a vice presidential pick that you could more easily imagine invoking a fairly Radical solution, the 25th Amendment.
Now, I don't think it'd be radical in this case, just because it would be quite called for, I think.
But I feel like Harris, because she's a hard ass by reputation, and because she's obviously ambitious, I guess they're all ambitious, but she's also a prosecutor.
If I were to pick one personality type...
Who would be willing to, let's say, overlook, not overlook, but let's say, who would be intellectually capable of sidelining loyalty.
I'm trying to say this in a more positive way, not to make it negative.
Someone who has the critical thinking and experience and mental mindset of a prosecutor can put aside feelings for some, you know, greater process You know, legal purposes.
I mean, it's sort of what she does.
So I would think that a prosecutor would be the best choice to be expected to be aggressive in acting quickly if there was a competence problem with the president.
So we might see that happen and it would be a not impossible way for Harris to become president.
There's an interesting example of loser think in the news I like to call out.
Now, let me define loserthink for you.
It's the title of my new book coming out November 5th.
I'll give you a little preview of what the theme is.
The theme is that people who have experience across various different fields of study Be they history, psychology, economics, business, technology, engineering, whatever the fields are.
The people who have broader experience, at least in the thinking styles, not all the details, not all the skills of those different disciplines, but if you've been exposed to the way they think, You're way ahead in understanding your world and communicating well.
I'll give you a trivial example.
If you had never heard of science, would it ever occur to you that you should do controlled experiments and double blinds and stuff like that?
Probably not. Because those things were not obvious until, who was it, Newton?
Isaac Newton, I think, was sort of the thought founder of a lot of science.
You can help me with the details.
But the point is, throughout much of human history, it wasn't obvious that you needed a controlled experiment and that you could rigorously test your way to something good.
Now think how handicapped you'd be If you were a modern, you know, person in the modern world, and you've never heard of science.
Now, you don't have to be a scientist to know that controlled experiments make sense.
Those are easy to explain. All right, so I'm going to take that concept, and I'm going to apply it to a conversation between, sort of a public conversation, I guess.
Bill Maher, who did some, who did a monologue in favor of fat shaming.
In other words, his point was, we should shame people to lose weight because of the health benefits, economic benefits, societal benefits.
So, James Corden, who I think you know him from whichever late-night show he's on, he's got a very impressive body of work in the entertainment industry.
So the first thing I'm going to say about James Corden is very successful.
I'm guessing very smart.
Because if you look at the body of his work, it's pretty broad in the entertainment industry.
It's very impressive. But I checked to see what his educational background is.
And it's not science.
It's not engineering.
It's not economics.
It's not business.
Now, if somebody did not have an educational background in those things, one should expect that they don't maybe have a full grasp, if they haven't been exposed to those things, of what to do exactly in every situation, because those are pretty useful fields.
So let me give you an example of what James Corden said.
Now, apparently James Corden has been struggling with his own weight for years.
I had to look at a picture of him To see what he was talking about.
And I don't know, maybe it's because he works in LA, but he doesn't look fat to me.
I don't know what he's talking about.
Now, I get that James Corden seems to have some genes that make him a little rounder.
Maybe he holds fat more strongly than other people.
So anyway, the point is, James Corden believes he's overweight.
So that's his self-assessment.
I don't really see it in the pictures in any way that would be, in any way I would call fat in America.
You know, by American standards, certainly not.
But he probably lives and works in L.A., so it probably feels like that to him.
And I imagine it's gone up and down over time.
But here's what he said.
So James Gordon said this quote, If making fun of fat people made them lose weight, there'd be no fat kids in school, and I'd have a six-pack right now.
Now, in this mode, he was trying to make a serious point.
He wasn't making jokes.
Now, if it were a joke, I wouldn't say, well, let's look at it factually and, you know, pull it apart and see if it makes sense.
But it wasn't a joke.
He said it in, you know, sort of an interesting way, but it's a serious, it's obviously a serious point in which he's saying that fat shaming doesn't work.
Because if it did, obviously every single kid gets fat shamed if they're fat.
So, how many of you think that's a good point?
In the comments, we'll do a fun little thing.
Is James Corden making a good point?
That given that every kid who's overweight gets fat shamed, you can guarantee that.
Zero, zero kids who are overweight do not get fat shamed.
So we wouldn't see any fat people if it worked, right?
Is that you? So I'm looking at your comments and look at the mix.
A lot of you say yes.
A lot of you say no.
Why is it that...
It looks like about half of you are on yes, half of you are on no.
Why is it that you disagree on such a simple question?
And here's my hypothesis.
Now, this won't be true for every one of you.
I'm going to make a general statement.
My hypothesis is the people who say this makes sense...
On average, not every single person, you could be the exception, but on average, the people who think that James Corden is making sense probably have a similar educational background.
This is my speculation.
Secondly, the people who say he does not make sense probably have backgrounds that are more like economics.
Probably more like business, maybe more like engineering, maybe more like science, or at least have been exposed to enough of those things that they know how those fields think.
Here's what's wrong with James Corden's sentence, and I'll read it again and then tell you why it's completely irrational.
Okay? If making fun of fat people made them lose weight, there'd be no fat kids in school.
Here's what's wrong with this, and half of you already know it.
The other half are going to learn it for the first time.
We don't know what would have happened if this were a controlled experiment.
See? You see where this is going?
If this were a controlled experiment, we might learn that 90% of people who are fat-shamed go ahead and lose weight.
We might find that 10% do.
But the thing we don't know is what would happen if we did the experiment.
And let me say, I should throw my opinion in here just so I don't get lumped in with one of the two opinions I'm talking about.
My opinion is closer to James Corden's opinion that the fat shaming is not good for society.
I just have different reasons for it.
So I'm anti-fat shaming.
But his reason he gave is that if fast-shaming worked, there wouldn't be any fat kids in school.
And that is a very...
That's sort of an artist's opinion.
If all of your education was in the arts, you wouldn't know that there was anything wrong with that opinion.
If you were a scientist, I'll bet everyone here who had a scientific background said, oh, no controlled experiment.
No controlled experiment.
Your statement is...
Absolutely just a guess.
And half of you Took that statement, which is nothing more than a speculative guess, and said, oh yeah, that's true.
There would be no faciants. If fat shaming worked, I guess I would take care of it all.
So here's the big picture.
The big picture is if you'd been exposed to some of the other more productive fields, the way they think.
You don't have to be expert in any of them, but if you just knew how they think, you would have picked this up immediately.
Enough on that. There's a funny...
Funny tweet by President Trump.
I forget who he was tweeting at, but there was somebody on Twitter who was slightly notable who said, in effect, that she wouldn't want to be friends with President Trump But, you know, would vote for him, for president, as opposed to Andrew Yang, who she thinks she could be friends with, but wouldn't vote for him for president.
And President Trump wisely and entertainingly tweeted back to her, I'm good with that!
In other words, he was accepting that he would rather be an effective president Than to be the president everybody likes for his personality.
And I thought it was sort of a brilliantly persuasive tweet in terms of framing the public's opinion of the situation.
Because the most productive frame that this president could put out there, imagine this.
Imagine if President Trump could sell What I'm going to say next.
And this is the first time I've seen him hint it.
And here's the sale. I'm not asking you to like me personally.
I get it. I don't want you to ask to like me personally.
Sometimes I'm kind of a dick.
But I'm going to be a dick for you.
Sometimes I'm kind of a bully.
But I work for you now.
I'm your bully. I'm bullying Iran.
I'm going to bully some other countries.
I'm going to bully the Democrats.
I'm your bully.
That message is super appealing because people want to...
You see that most of President Trump's critics have this problem that they can't get past who he is.
And they don't want to validate that, and they don't want to normalize it.
By the president giving this framework, which is, yeah, I'm not going to be your best friend.
I can see why you wouldn't like me.
My personality isn't for everybody.
I get it, and I'm fine with that.
At the same time, let me do this effective job.
Look at my statistics. Look at unemployment rates, etc.
I'm doing a good job. That is a really, really productive framework.
Because it gives a fake because to the people who are on the fence about him.
The fake because, it's a term I made up, and it has to do with the fact that we know scientifically people often need excuses A public excuse to do the thing in their mind they want to do.
So there are people who might want to support him, but they know that associating their vote and their reputation with him would make them feel like his, whatever they feel about his personality, and that could be bad.
So if you allow Democrats to say, God, I just can't stand the guy, but I like a good economy, then it gives them a fake because.
A reason to do the thing in public is That they wanted to do privately.
Because privately, they might be thinking to themselves, I would actually vote for that guy if it weren't so embarrassing because of the way he acts, and I don't want to promote that and normalize it.
So it was a small tweet that you probably thought was just a joke, just a nothing that went by.
But everything he does on Twitter, whether he's thinking of it this way or it just works out that way, is A-B testing.
He puts out a lot of stuff, and then he sees how people respond.
And that message, I thought, was an excellent test, an excellent A-B test, just to see if that idea could be maybe pushed a little further.
I'm not sure what kind of response he got.
There's another story about a Swiss company that built a very impressive high-end house entirely by robots.
Now, when you hear that, you say, oh no, the robots are taking over.
And ultimately, they will, of course.
New home construction will be robots.
It's just when.
Certainly, if you're looking at 20 years, totally, most new construction will be mostly robots.
I would say that's a safe, very safe prediction in 20 years.
Now, if you say, in five years, I think you might see your first permitted robot-built house, maybe.
In 10 years, it's probably going to be competing with humans, and in 20, humans won't be competitive anymore, except for, what do you call it, reconstruction or upgrades.
Upgrades will still be human for a long time because there's too many decisions being made.
Unless it just becomes cheaper to tear everything down.
So, here's the thing.
One of the biggest trends that the public doesn't see coming is new home building systems And technologies.
So I'm saying systems to include all the planning, organizing, coordinating stuff, and just the order in which you do things and how you iterate things and all that.
Those are systems. Then the technology is robots or 3D printing or homes that you can put together like a kit.
Or somebody mentioned something called hempcrete today.
Have you ever heard of that? It's Hemp and crete like concrete, but with hemp.
Apparently, if you use hemp and some kind of lime or limestone mixture, you get this lightweight brick for a building.
It's not strong enough for foundations, but it's strong enough for walls.
And it has the advantage that the hemp absorbed a bunch of CO2. So you have buildings that instead of concrete, so concrete will produce CO2. But hempcrete, because you're growing plants and then turning that into concrete, you're actually absorbing CO2 and you're locking it into the construction material and you're putting it in your freaking wall.
And apparently it has great qualities for moisture control and insulation.
So it's light, which makes it easier.
It insulates, has some good moisture control qualities, and it actually absorbs CO2. I mean, when the substance is growing, not when you put it in your house.
So, now I'm not saying that hempcrete will ever be a big thing.
Because, you know, who knows?
There might be other variables I don't know about.
But if you look collectively at all the things that are happening in the construction world, it's a revolution of a thousand droplets of water that are this giant tsunami.
And this giant tsunami of, you know, just a whole bunch of different little things that are being tested and tried all over the world.
If the world of Constructing things fundamentally changes.
It will lower the cost of living.
It will make living in some places economical.
When it wasn't, you could build entire communities just for people with drug addiction, take them out of a place where they can get drugs, put them where they just can't get them, and have a whole nice city there that you can live in.
It's just a drug-free city.
So suddenly, a whole bunch of societal problems can be more easily dealt with Simply by changing your construction.
Now, what about the robots taking all the jobs?
Let's say a mixed bag, because there are two trends, and we don't know how they'll net out.
One trend is that if a robot takes your job, you've got to go get another job, and maybe you don't make as much money.
So that's bad. We can assume that there's some of that coming toward us.
Robots taking construction jobs, guarantee there's some of that coming.
But what if the net effect of these new technologies for building homes takes the cost of a really good quality home down to, wait for it, $75,000.
Let's say you could buy a really livable, I'll say livable because it's designed to be really nice, just low cost.
So you could have a really livable, affordable $75,000 house, even if you're paying rent, The rent on a $75,000 house is going to be pretty low.
So if you could get to that point, suddenly you can have a lower-end job and have a real high-quality life because you'd go home to a beautiful, albeit inexpensive home.
All right. And when I say the home is beautiful, I mean you have to design the entire community so that it's the community that makes the living experience good.
Similar to how college is awesome.
If you go to college, your physical room is just this crappy little space you share with a roommate usually.
But the lifestyle is amazing because you walk out of your room and it's all students and activities and there's central places you can go to have sports and all kinds of things.
All right. I had a realization the other day about why the fine people hoax is so sticky.
And this would be a good, just as a lesson in persuasion and how the brain works, I want to add this.
I know most of you have heard too much about it, so I won't give you the whole background of the fine people hoax, but it has to do with the fact that some large percentage of the country still believes that President Trump called the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, quote, fine people.
Now, that never happened.
And since It never happened, and clearly it never happened on the transcript.
Clearly it never happened when you look at the original video without it being selectively edited, which is a problem.
So why is it that people are so spring-loaded to believe this thing that is so easily debunked?
And now, one reason is, of course, that the fake news shows the misleading edit, so the country's been lied to, right?
So somebody says, my own ears.
I'm talking to you. So whoever said, whichever ones of you who are saying right now, Scott, it's not a hoax.
I heard it, me personally, with my own ears.
I watched it, Scott.
I don't know what's wrong with you, Scott.
I literally watched it myself.
I saw it. So I'm talking to you, the people who are saying that right now, and I know there are a number of you on this Periscope.
Here's the thing that I realized as to why you think that thing.
Because you're wrong.
It didn't happen.
And you can prove it.
Just look at the transcript.
Just look at the full video that goes all the way to the part where he says, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists.
So you have to get to that sentence in the clip to know that he was explicitly, and without being prompted, and without asking, he said, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis, right?
So why do people believe it?
Here's my insight.
I think people are conflating two events.
The first event is a real event.
So the next thing I'm going to say actually did happen.
That when the event first happened, and the woman was killed by the neo-Nazi in the car, and Trump was talking about it after, he did say, so this part's true, there are bad people on both sides.
Now here's the realization.
Back when Trump first said that, what did the public say when he said there are bad people on both sides?
If you remember, everybody said, what the hell are you talking about?
One side was literally neo-Nazis.
Like, that's not our opinion.
They were literally neo-Nazis who organized with torches and one of them killed somebody.
So, how in the world can you say that the people who are protesting them are the bad people as the people who are the bad people?
You know, the actual racists.
How in the world can President Trump say that?
So that was the first controversy.
Now remember, he said that at a time when the public didn't know much about Antifa.
What they knew about Antifa is that they were protesting the racists.
So you say to yourself, there's no way this is a moral equivalent, President Trump.
You're totally wrong. Protesting racists is not morally equivalent to being a racist.
Duh. Right?
Time goes by. What do we find out about Antifa, meaning we, the public at large, what do we learn about Antifa in the time that has passed since Charlottesville?
What we learned is that the president was 100% right.
There were bad people on both sides.
Antifa has, of course, like any large organization, a lot of different personalities, and I'm sure there are good people who joined Antifa for all the right reasons.
In their mind, at least.
They think it's some greater good.
But we do know now, and it's unambiguous, it's something that both sides of the political world would accept, that Antifa wears costumes and brings weapons and looks for violence, and that they've attacked people from behind.
Now again, not every Antifa member is violent.
We all acknowledge that.
But as an organization, They have some bad people.
Now, that wasn't obvious.
To the public at large when President Trump first said there were bad people on both sides.
So the very first thing that happened was people said, wait, you're acting like both sides are somehow morally equivalent.
This is the new insight I had.
That the first incident in which we now know President Trump was 100% correct.
I mean, they're actually considering designating Antifa as domestic terrorists.
If you're even in that conversation, you've got some bad people in your group, right?
So, that part's true.
And I think that gets conflated in people's minds when at a separate time and a separate event, but soon after, President Trump said there were, quote, fine people on both sides.
Now, when he said there were fine people on both sides, the context was different.
In that case, he defined his terms, and that's the part that gets edited out of the videos.
So, if you haven't seen the full video, you were intentionally being hoaxed, basically, by the media, because they'd left out the context, intentionally.
Now, the context is, the President very clearly and explicitly said, He said this actual sentence.
This is his actual sentence.
I'm not talking about the white nationalists and the neo-Nazis.
They should be condemned totally.
As clear as you could possibly be.
And then he explained that who he was talking about was people who had showed up on both sides of the question of whether the statue should stay or whether it's offensive and should leave.
And his argument is that there were fine people Who could disagree on a statue, who have nothing to do with the people who are marching with the tiki torches.
Now, whenever I point this out to people, and so here's the insight.
The insight is that the original statement of bad people on both sides seemed untrue when he said it, but over time we now know it was true, completely true.
Bad people on both sides, just not all of them bad.
There were bad people there.
And now we also, and then that gets conflated with the fine people on both sides and then people forget that that context was about the non-racist protesters and that he defined his terms very clearly.
So that's my insight.
I think that what makes this special is not just the fake news, not just the fact that the people primed to believe it are primed to believe it, Those would be enough.
But when you add those two events that are similar enough that your brain conflates them automatically...
I mean, even when I described it to you, you probably had a thought of, all right, I've got to pay attention because it's a little hard to follow.
And that's what makes it so sticky, that bad people on both sides and fine people on both sides got conflated in your mind.
So... Those of you who are on this Periscope who said when I started that I was wrong, how do you feel right now, now that you've actually heard the explanation?
And I would invite you to look at the hashtag, hashtag findpeoplehoax, and you can see some stuff on Twitter that will lead you to the actual transcript and the actual videos, and it's going to blow your mind.
It's going to blow your mind to learn how badly you were wrong about one of the most basic stories of our reality.
All right. So enough on that.
I saw S.E. Kopp Who's, what would you call her?
I don't know, analyst, pundit, host.
I don't know what title she has on CNN. I think she was allegedly Republican-ish, but sort of is anti-Trump-ish, so she's more of a...
She's sort of leaning left at the moment for CNN. I don't know her whole story.
Commentator, somebody says.
Let's call her a commentator.
She did a very good piece about how the Democrats are...
Almost not even trying to win.
And I thought it was really well done, even with her facial gestures.
So if you get a chance to see that, S.E. Cup, little video clip, it's pretty short, in which she goes through how the Democrats are so incompetent, the group of them, that it's almost as if, not almost as if, it looks like, Not literally, but just on the surface, it looks like they're trying to lose.
It's so bad, but it's a really good piece.
All right. Let's see what else we've got going on.
Kyle Bass, investor Kyle Bass, who seems to be one of the strongest voices against doing business with China at all, tweeted today that apparently...
And he seems credible enough that I believe this is true, but like everything that I hear, I always go at it with a little bit of skepticism.
The claim is that the Chinese telecom company has some nodes in America.
In other words, some American companies have at some point bought Chinese technology for switches or routers or whatever and put it in the network in the United States proper and But that has allowed China to look at our traffic.
Now, I don't know, is that true?
Apparently some of the traffic is being routed from the United States to China, so they can look at it if they want to.
If that's true, and Kyle Bass is saying that we have to, like, kick that equipment out of the country...
If it's even a little bit true that the Chinese equipment might be sending our private traffic over to China so they can take a look at it, we have to change that tomorrow.
That's not even a next week kind of thing, is it?
Isn't that sort of, you've got to go to those telecom companies.
The president of the United States or whatever agency needs to say, you've got to tell your customers that their traffic is not private from China.
And you've got to get rid of that.
So yesterday I was talking to an international business person.
So I'll tell this story without the details because the international business person that is listening to this is going to be having the simultaneous sip on his commute.
So without naming names, somebody told me that he recently went to China.
And the result of a short business trip to China is that his laptop was so infected with presumably hacks from official or unofficial Chinese sources that His tech people are telling him to grind it up.
It's so infected and so dangerous to even go into China and use their Wi-Fi at a hotel that his laptop is almost unfixably corrupted by spyware.
So he's actually going to have to take it out and run it through a shredder or something.
So just think about that.
Think about China as so unreliable as a business partner, you can't even visit.
Think about the fact that you can't even visit the country unless you have either no technology or you've got some kind of VPN or something.
I think if you have a VPN, you're in good shape.
All right. Andrew Yang is making news.
A little public dust-up with...
A comedian whose last name is Gillis, who apparently is going to be a new member of Saturday Night Live starting this season.
And, of course, the moment he was announced to get the job, somebody dug into his past and found some racially offensive things he said, allegedly, in the service of humor.
That's the debatable part.
And so what he said...
What Gillis said was, it looked like some kind of a podcast-y situation.
He was talking with another person.
And he used the Asian N-word.
It starts with a C. I'm not even going to use the word.
So if you're Asian American and somebody uses a slur of U that starts with the letter C, you probably know what I'm talking about.
CH. Let's make it easier.
It starts with the words CH. The third word is I. The third letter is I, just in case you're not getting there quickly enough.
So I'm not going to say the word because I find that quite offensive.
I mean, offensive on behalf of other people.
But Nothing offends me personally, but I would be supportive of other people being offended when they heard that word.
So he uses that word, and of course it becomes, you know, social media starts spreading around.
And then Andrew Yang weighs in, and he said...
Oh, he basically...
He gave a soft rebuke.
Andrew Yang, basically, because he said something soft, but sort of pushing back a little bit, doesn't matter the exact words, and he said he'd be happy to talk to him about it.
So he said he'd be happy to sit down and talk to Gillis about it.
And then, of course, there were calls for Gillis to be fired for being a racist.
And then Yang weighed in again.
Here's the interesting part of the story.
Yang weighs in with a second tweet, and he said, quote, we would benefit from being more forgiving rather than punitive, meaning that punitive, punitive, punitive as an word, punitive, let's say.
So here's the summary.
Gillis says something that's offensive to Asian Americans, anybody from, has an Asian background, and Yang pushes back, but softly.
There's a call for Gillis to lose his job, and then Yang comes in and says, yeah, maybe we'd benefit from being more forgiving rather than punitive.
I love that. Honestly, that makes him, in my mind, the front-runner on the Democrat side.
He's like the only person who seems to understand.
Consistently, he seems the only one who understands how incentives work.
Have you noticed that?
Now, you could argue that with the UBI, he's getting incentives wrong because, hey, why would you pay people to not work?
But I think he's just ahead of the curve on that, meaning that we're not going to have an option About paying people directly once the robots take the job.
So it's not so much that Yang doesn't understand that paying people to not work can have effect on their incentives.
Of course he understands that.
But that we might not have a choice, which is actually a pretty forward-thinking thing to say.
So, my view on Yang, of course, is forming over time.
And, you know, at this point, I still don't see him as a threat to get the nomination.
But based on this one interaction alone, for Yang to say publicly, I think maybe we should ease up on some of this stuff.
From a Democrat. Now, any Republican would have said this, right?
Don't you imagine it would have been easy for a Republican to say, hey, let's ease off on the political correctness.
But this wasn't even a case of political correctness per se.
It looked like it was the real deal.
And for Yang to go soft on that and to recommend that maybe we should think in those terms is a real game changer, I think.
And I think it's like an important...
It's an important addition to the public conversation.
So I would like to thank Andrew Yang for doing the public service.
So without even being elected, I would say this is a valuable, literally, a valuable public service, that he would introduce this more productive way of thinking, I would call it.
So this is productive thinking.
Now, I can't tell this story without giving my complaints About Yang being a little racist himself.
Now, when I say Yang is racist, I'm using the term to talk about the impact of someone's actions, not their inner thoughts.
I do not believe Yang is a racist in his inner mind.
I don't think Biden is.
I don't think Trump is. I don't think people at that level are actual racists internally.
But it is certainly true that the impact of your decisions can, you know, the impact of your statements, that your choice of words can make people feel bad, can have racial consequences, etc.
So that part's all true.
But I don't think Yang's inner thoughts are racist.
So, two problems I have with that.
One, you saw the debates he joked, Yang did.
He said, quote, I'm Asian, so I know a lot of doctors.
It's kind of racist, isn't it?
Now again, I'm not saying in his mind he's racist.
He's just making a joke.
And I would follow his own advice that maybe we should benefit from being more forgiving than punitive.
So I don't think that Yang should be punished for a joke.
But here's the thing he should be a little bit more aware of.
And I think this is always worth noting.
It's a stereotype that's positive, and so he's probably thinking, that's just a positive stereotype, and I'm talking about my own people.
I'm safe, right?
But what would you feel like if you're not Asian?
If you're not Asian American in particular?
How would you take that comment?
It feels a little like my people are better than your people, doesn't it?
Is that sort of the vibe you get from that?
Because since being a doctor is considered a respectable thing that only smart, hardworking people can accomplish, saying that his group, his ethnic group, has a lot of smart, hardworking people sort of begs the question, what do you think, Andrew Yang, of the other groups who don't have as many doctors?
So again, I will take Andrew Yang's leadership on this topic.
And I'm not going to suggest that you or anybody else should have a negative opinion for him for what I think was maybe a small blind spot about how that sounds when he says it.
Now, I don't request an apology.
None needed. I don't even request a clarification.
But it would be useful to him to know how that sounds to everybody.
It's just a useful feedback.
The other thing he said, and I don't remember the exact details, but there was a while ago, early in the process, that Yang made a comment.
That the rhetoric in this country is heating up to the point where it might be unsafe to be an Asian American in this country, specifically Chinese American, because the MAGA people, the Republicans, were going hard at China, the country, and some of that might spill back onto Americans who have some kind of Chinese connection, Chinese background.
Now, he's not wrong.
That that's our risk.
But that, too, feels...
Somebody says, be a freaking man, Scott.
Well, that's a block.
If you had a point, instead of saying, be a freaking man, Scott, I would listen to that point.
But if you have nothing but personal insults, you are not welcome here.
Goodbye. So when, what was Yang saying?
Oh, so he was saying that basically the conservatives and the Republicans might be coming for the Chinese Americans because they would get all whipped up about China, the country, and maybe some of that would spill over.
I took that as a little bit racist.
Because, not against me, but it was a little bit racist because it kind of assumed there was something about the group Presumably the mostly white Republican types were Trump supporters, and that they were somehow a little extra dangerous to the group he would identify with.
I feel like that's a little unfair.
It's a little unfair.
Now again, Andrew Yang's not a racist.
None of the Democrats are.
Trump is not. In their heads, they're not.
But you can say and do things that people go...
And to me, that was a little flag that I said...
That doesn't sound quite as open-minded as I would like.
So that's my little advice to Andrew Yang.
I'm in favor of jokes, and I'm in favor of...
Being accurate. And his description of the risk, I think, was accurate, but it doesn't sound right.
You know, maybe word that a little bit differently somehow.
But anyway, the net of this, I thought it was very productive.
So thank you to Andrew Yang for being a leader.
In a similar way that President Trump is with his railing against political correctness.
Of course, the way Trump does it is completely different than the way Andrew Yang is doing it.
But they're doing the same thing.
I mean, Trump's message is, let's not get caught up in the little stuff, right?
Let's just think past this.
We're all Americans. We don't have to be at each other.
So here's an update on the Houthis?
I'll take your advice on pronunciation.
I used to think it was the Houthis, the ethnic group in Yemen that is alleged to be, not alleged, but they're aligned with Iran.
They're supported by Iran, and they did an attack with drones on an oil production facility in Saudi Arabia and set it ablaze.
Now here's the update of that story.
Is it Houthis?
Houthis? Whatever it is.
Somebody smart, on Twitter, I wish I knew who it was, made the following observation.
That if the Houthis were really trying to hurt Saudi Arabia, they would have gone after the desalinization plants, which apparently would be equally attackable.
But if you attack the desalinization, you would really mess with the whole country.
Whereas if you attack an oil resource, well, it's sort of the people who own that oil facility.
It's a little inconvenient.
It didn't even change the...
I don't even think it changed the price of oil worldwide.
It was an inconvenience.
But if you attack the desalinization plants, you would really be delivering a pretty devastating blow to Saudi Arabia, and they would survive.
I mean, they have enough money, they can ship in water, they can figure it out.
But that would be a real attack.
Now ask yourself, do the Houthis know that?
Well, probably. If they were smart enough to put together a whole drone swarm attack against an oil refinery from a separate country with Iran's help, of course they know.
Of course they know that the better target, equally valid, would have been the water facilities.
Why do you think they didn't attack the water facilities?
Why do you think that?
Here's my speculation.
That people who are trying to influence a political outcome don't want to push the other side too far.
How would you feel if, let's say, you know the Houthis attacked the oil field.
Let's say you hear that Saudi Arabia went in and wiped them all out.
Just went in hard and just decimated the, not decimated, but worse.
Let's say it was seven times a decimation.
They just laid waste to the entire ethnic community and just bombed cities and took them out.
You would say that's an overreaction, right?
And Saudi Arabia would be in a lot of trouble internationally.
It would hurt them. They couldn't go that brutal, as brutal as they are, and you have to assume it's plenty brutal already, but they couldn't just go wipe out the Houthis.
Like, the world community wouldn't allow that to happen if the only thing that the Houthis done had attacked an oil production facility.
But what if they took out...
What if the Houthis took out their water?
I'm just speaking for myself now.
If I heard that somebody took out the water...
In my country, I would support complete eradication.
Now, that's too strong a statement.
Not complete eradication.
I would literally turn around and I would never read another news story about what our military was doing to that other entity.
I would lose all empathy.
Completely. To me it would be similar to a nuclear attack.
I would support...
So this is just sort of a psychological thought experiment.
If you're a Saudi and you hear somebody attack your oil refinery, you're mad, you want to do something, you want to have a response, but it's going to be a proportion.
If you hear they took out your desalinization plants, you take over Yemen.
Wouldn't you? You would actually just...
Invade Yemen. You would lock up all the people who could find a drone anyway.
I mean, you would go pretty barbaric on that.
So I think that's why the better targets are held off, because the response would be too strong.
Which is a weird kind of a war, isn't it?
A war where you're trying to not hurt the other two as badly as you could.
It's sort of a modern thing.
So there's another story in the news about Brett Kavanaugh.
I'm not even going to repeat it.
It's some allegation of high school impropriety with blah blah.
It doesn't even matter.
Like, do you believe it anyway?
I mean, it's so uncredible.
So, and by the way, I remind you, when I say something's not credible, It just means there's no reason to believe it.
It doesn't mean something didn't happen or did happen.
Just there's no reason to believe it.
So all this Kavanaugh stuff feels like the stalest old repeats.
So think of some of the stories that the Democrats are pushing.
And this gets to S.E. Cupp's commentary that the Democrats are just so pathetic right now.
It's starting to get sad.
So if they're talking about Brett Kavanaugh, still, and made up stories that are obviously not going to have an impact, they're obviously not going to last, they're obviously not going to derail him because they're so old and they're, you know, hard to demonstrate anything.
They're still talking about impeachment and Stormy Daniels.
Are you freaking kidding me?
Still? That's what Democrats feel like is a priority.
Do they see anything else worth working on?
Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh and Stormy Daniels, they're still talking about?
And Russia collusion, still talking about?
Are you kidding me?
They've completely given up at this point.
It feels like they're not even working on task.
It feels like busy work.
That's what it is, busy work.
Have you ever worked in a big company and it feels like your boss didn't have enough for you to do so they just gave you busy work?
It's like, yeah, count these ceiling tiles and get back to me.
It feels like the Democrats can't figure out anything useful to do.
Like, actually, literally.
Can't figure out anything useful to do.
But they have to do something because they're getting paid to do things.
So if you don't have anything useful to do and you're getting paid and people are watching and you've got to do something, you do busy work.
And this Kavanaugh stuff and impeachment stuff and Stormy Daniels stuff, it feels like busy work, doesn't it?
Old nads. There was an article I tweeted around from Haritz.
The name of the publication is an Israeli publication.
You've probably seen it. Haritz?
I don't know how to pronounce it.
But there was an article in there about me, it turned out.
Somebody was writing that Netanyahu is, quote, a master wizard who has learned from Trump that To take all the attention from the news cycle so that his opponents, no matter what they're saying, it doesn't matter because nobody's listening to him.
So apparently Netanyahu is effectively absorbing the news cycle with little controversies and Trump-like statements that just make you spit in your head and then you can't think about anything else.
You've got to talk about what Netanyahu wants you to talk about.
And in that article, they cited me.
So, you know, I sit here in my, like I'm literally sitting here in my little office here in California, and I talk to you on Periscope, and I write my little books and tweet and stuff.
And the next thing I know, I'm part of the national discussion in Israel about the talents of the Prime Minister.
There's no story there. I just thought I'd mention that.
I guess that was a humble brag.
Congressman Matt Gaetz had a tweet in which he was suggesting Eric Prince for National Security Advisor.
If you don't know who Eric Prince is...
You should Google his name because it's a really interesting recommendation.
It's Eric with a K, last name Prince.
I'm going to try to get him on the podcast because I think he would be one of the most interesting people in the world.
So I've got that.
I'm working on that.
We'll see if that happens. And that is all I have for today.
Scott, do you realize that in California there is a bill to mandate adult vaccines?
Let me give you my opinion on vaccines.
I haven't looked into it, and I feel like I don't want to offer an opinion on it.
Here's why. So the vaccine thing is a lot, in some ways, is a lot like climate change.
It is, somebody says, Shiva knows.
Yeah, so Dr. Shiva actually just sent me a tweet of his, and I'm not going to retweet it.
I don't know if you're watching, Dr.
Shiva. But the reason I'm not going to tweet it is because I'm not informed.
And I don't feel that I could become informed.
In other words, if I thought I could just go do my own research, if I thought I could do my own research and come to a good decision, I suppose I'd do that.
But I don't think that I could dig into it on any level and learn enough beyond the fact that most scientists say it's safe.
Now, my understanding is that President Trump's take on this It's not so much the individual vaccines that are the problem, but the dose schedule.
So it's an old tweet from Trump I saw recently, 2014 or something, in which he was saying that you're dealing with a little baby or child or whatever, and that if you give them all the vaccines at once, that might be a lot for their body to process, and so that introduces a risk that, wait for it, has never been tested.
If you test vaccines individually, which I assume is the common way to do it, you can tell if that vaccine individually is good or bad or what the risk is.
At least you can get close to knowing that.
If you test 20 different vaccines, you can know that all 20 of those, if given in isolation, is safe.
But where did you test all 20 of them given together?
Where did you test any combination of them given together?
Here's one of those situations where Trump, the non-scientist, is just asking a fairly basic question.
Have you tested it?
See where I'm going with this?
Trump is asking, why are we giving untested medicine to kids?
Now you say to yourself, it is tested.
That's the whole point. FDA, go through the approval.
There's no vaccine a kid is getting in this country that hasn't been tested.
Wrong. That's just not true.
Because it's only been tested in one context, and that context is not the one it's used in.
So we only tested it in the context in which it's not used, which is just by itself.
The context is in combination.
So, are there scientists who will say, Scott, Scott, Scott, what you don't understand is that we do know how things interact well enough that we can tell if you take an aspirin and a vitamin C, I'm just making this part up, we know that's not going to be a problem.
And probably for a lot of things, I'm guessing that would be true.
I'll bet they know that if you eat some broccoli today and take an antibiotic tomorrow, they probably know that's not going to do anything to you because broccoli is good.
They've tested the antibiotic.
But they haven't tested the combinations.
And to the extent that some of these vaccines have common elements, So there might be something in the mix of each one that might be common to one or more.
Have you doubled the amount of just that one component simply because you gave it all at the same time?
Now, that's why I do not have an informed opinion.
If a scientist said to me, Scott, Scott, it's a good question, but we do have a good handle on that.
And we have also tested how the vaccines perform as a group.
So we have plenty of testing that even when they're given as a group, works out fine.
Maybe. So I just don't feel that I'm qualified for this conversation.
And I don't know that I could get there.
And so I don't feel that I can add something of value, except maybe describe it in a way you hadn't heard before.
So that's that.
And that is, I think, the last thing I wanted to talk about today.
Somebody says vaping was safe too.
Well, the vaping problems seem to be related to illegal non...
I guess black market devices.
Somebody says don't drink alcohol and take Tylenol.
Well, I don't know about any of that stuff.
And by the way, this is why I made a big point about lifestyle medical records.
Wouldn't you love to know?
All the people who have done the things similar to whatever you're doing, like what their outcome was?
Because, you know, you might say, well, because even vaccines, you could find out, I'm just going to give you a hypothetical.
Let's say all the people who took vaccines and later had some kind of a problem that may or may not have been involved with the vaccine itself.
What if all the people who had problems were also, let's say, drinkers of alcohol?
Or they all had some other common medical condition.
You could find that if you had a database of enough information.
You could say, oh, yes, there is a situation in which the vaccines taken as accommodation could be dangerous, and that is only in the case where the person's lifestyle includes this other, I don't know, dietary or lifestyle or exposure or something.
Be good to know. I saw a number of people asking me about Jack Dorsey, and he has agreed to be on the Periscope.
We're just trying to schedule.
As you might imagine, Jack Dorsey's kind of busy running two gigantic companies.
But he has agreed to come on.
We just have to pick a ton.
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