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Sept. 19, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:03:08
Episode 668 Scott Adams: Let’s Experience the Best Simultaneous Sip of All Time and Hilarious News
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
Possibly the funniest and best coffee with Scott Adams there will ever be.
Until the next time.
But man, sometimes the environment serves up some news that's just so fun.
Today's one of those days.
So we're going to have an amazing, an amazing simultaneous sip today.
And all you need to participate is a cup or a mug or a glass of stein, a chalice, a tank or a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a grail, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the best part of your day, and the part that makes everything better.
Go! Well, I guess we should talk about Justin Trudeau, shouldn't we?
I feel as though I don't actually need to say anything about this story, because you've already read the story, and almost anything that I would be likely to add to the story would be something you've already heard.
But I would just like to join you And enjoying the amazingness of the situation.
All right, so as you know, Justin Trudeau of Canada, there are three separate photos that have surfaced now of three different ages in which he wore some version of brown face or black face costume.
And anyway, he apologized.
So let's...
Well, I tweeted just before I got on, I tweeted, is it my imagination or has politics and comedy basically just merged?
They're not different anymore, right?
When I was a kid, if I turned on the news and it was about politics, it was like death and war and taxes and boring stuff.
And now I turned on the news to follow the politics.
And it's, you know, Trump playing around at the wall and writing on it with his magic marker.
And, you know, he's using his magic marker to, allegedly, increase the hurricane zone and It's all hilarious stuff.
And then you see Trudeau in his costume.
And the news was never this funny.
You know.
I'm not wrong.
The news has never been this funny, right?
No, partly it's a sign that things are going well, because we have the luxury of focusing on stupid stuff, which is funnier.
All right, so here's Trudeau's apology, in which he apologized for the one photo that was public, and he acknowledged that there was another incident out there, and now we found a third one, in which he was young.
That he may have just forgotten about.
So here's his apology.
He says, I shouldn't have done that.
I should have known better, but I didn't, and I'm really sorry.
I take responsibility for my decision to do that.
I shouldn't have done that. I should have known better.
It was something that I didn't think was racist at the time, but now I recognize it was something racist to do, and I'm deeply sorry.
Alright, so according to the rules which I have suggested for polite behavior in the current days, I have suggested that if somebody apologizes and clarifies within 48 hours, you should accept their apology and move on.
On top of that, I have a second rule that says if something happened more than 20 years ago, It just doesn't count.
Because it's a rule we would want applied to us.
Most people are better people than they were 20 years ago.
If you're not, you're not trying hard enough.
You should be sort of trying to improve your situation over time.
So the first thing I say is, I don't know when the other stuff happened, but one of them was 2001, so let's say 18 years ago.
Close enough. Close enough.
I'm not going to fret over two years, right?
So my rule is that anything you do 20 years ago or longer just doesn't count.
The most recent photograph was 18 years ago.
Good enough. Close enough.
I want to live in a world where 18 and 20 are close enough for this purpose.
So, number one, I accept.
I accept.
Justin Trudeau's apology.
Now, I don't think his apology was to me per se, but, you know, as an objective observer, I say that is a sufficient apology, completely sufficient.
Not only was it sufficient, I would go further and to say it was perfect.
You know, if you're going to apologize, here's the way to do it.
Here are the components of a perfect apology.
Number one, fully acknowledge it's true.
You know, you don't argue about the details.
Well, but, you know, you don't offer any qualifiers.
So the first thing he did was he got that completely right.
No qualifiers. It did happen.
It was wrong.
I feel sorry.
And it looked like he meant it.
You know, don't you think he actually feels bad about it?
But I think he does. You know, it's not the worst problem in the world, but I think he feels legitimately empathetic for anybody who felt bad about it.
I think that's real. And then he didn't say directly, but he suggested in direct enough language that it wouldn't happen again.
So that's the other part of an apology.
You should always include why it's not going to happen again.
What are you going to do differently?
Now, in this case, it's obvious.
What he's going to do differently is he's learned his lesson, so he won't do anything like that.
But, you know, he's prime minister, so he probably wasn't going to anyway.
So I give him A+. Complete, solid apology.
Accepted. I also say he's close enough to the 20-year rule, the most recent one was 18 years ago, that I say, doesn't count.
Doesn't matter if he did it or not.
Doesn't count. So if you add the 20-year rule to the 48-hour rule where he's apologized completely sufficiently, I say, give that man a pass.
Now, I also require...
That if you or I are ever in the same situation for some different situation, let's say, we get the same treatment.
Fair? Wouldn't you like to be treated the way I would like him to be treated?
Which is, yeah, it was a mistake.
He apologized. It was a perfectly good apology.
And it was a long time ago.
Done. Let's move on.
Let's take that standard.
Let's take that standard forward.
Now, I get that it's a team sport and you want to zing the other side.
Because they'd do it to you.
They wouldn't let you off.
They wouldn't let Kavanaugh off.
They wouldn't let Trump off.
So you want to do it to them.
That's okay. I'm not going to talk you out of that.
If you need that little feeling of revenge or justice or karma...
You know, as long as you're knowingly taking that path.
That's a fair thing.
It's not unfair to say you're going to zing people the way they've been zinging your team.
I just choose not to.
I just exempt myself from that back and forth.
But I leave you to it.
You can have it. I also asked the following question.
When's the last time you saw a funny movie?
Is it my imagination or has most professional humor just sort of went away?
I don't remember the last time I watched a movie that was like a funny movie.
Do you? It seems a while.
It feels like politics and Trump and the real world and reality have replaced whatever need we had for humor because the unscripted stuff is sort of funnier.
It's tough to beat this.
It's kind of tough to beat this Justin Trudeau thing for just being flat out funny.
All right. Yeah. And Corey Lewandowski was hilarious.
Trump is always funny. Uh...
Here's the question I have for you.
This is for biblical scholars.
Biblical scholars.
How many people did Jesus cure?
Can anybody? This is a real question, by the way.
If there are any biblical scholars, how many reports in the Bible are there of cures?
Did Jesus cure five people?
25? Does anybody have a number for that?
Because I feel like it's maybe less than half a dozen were actually mentioned.
The reason I mention this is because I think I'm beating his record.
So I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I think I have more cures than Jesus.
So I had another one just the other day.
So I told you about my own weird, bizarre medical problem where I had polyps in my eustachian tubes, and it caused me to lose my hearing and my taste at the same time.
So that was the key, and ENT, as soon as they heard, wait, you lost your hearing and your taste and smell at the same time?
Oh, let's look up inside your head.
There it is. There's polyps.
Now, I mentioned this on my Periscope, and I get a DM from one of my Twitter friends who says, hey, my brother just recently lost hearing in one ear and his sense of taste a while ago.
What kind of a doctor did he see?
So I said, well, have him go to an ear, nose, throat doctor in the ENT. So I just heard a report back yesterday.
The brother goes to the ENT. He has polyps.
Doctor gives him some meds and some nasal spray and says, you're going to have your hearing and your sense of taste back.
Cured. Hello?
Cured. Now you say to yourself, well, Scott, that's just one.
Jesus cured more people than that.
You just got one.
Not true. Not true.
I actually have quite a few cures, literally.
I'm not even joking.
Let me tell you about my other cures.
So, most of you know the story.
I've told it too many times. There was a period of about three and a half years where I lost my ability to speak to something exotic called a spasmodic dysphonia.
Part of the problem with that is that regular doctors have never heard of it.
In other words, your general practitioners probably never heard of it.
So you go in with those symptoms and they don't know what to do because they've never heard of it, never seen it.
They sort of fly around blindly tweeting the wrong thing.
I being...
How should I say this?
I don't want to compliment myself too much.
I being more aggressive...
And also having more resources.
I chased down the real cause of that problem until I had a name for it and discovered the one surgeon in the world who had developed a surgery to cure it.
And that's why I can talk to you now.
So having found that one surgeon in the world who could cure it, and then getting cured, I help the, there's an organization called the Spasmodic Dysphonia Organization, and I help them with outreach.
So I help them get the word out that this thing has a name.
If you have these symptoms, maybe talk to your doctor, you might have it.
And if you get the surgery, it can be cured.
And it worked. So, because of my outreach, I have informed people who might have never learned what they had.
And once they learned it, they also learned from me that there is a surgery that can fix it.
Now, the surgery doesn't work every time.
About 15% of the time it doesn't.
But for 85% of the people who heard it from me and went and got the surgery, I cured them.
These are people who couldn't speak.
Who can now speak?
Think of that. So I don't know how many there are.
There might be dozens, might be 20, might be 50, might be 100.
I have no idea because I don't get direct feedback.
But I've heard from a handful of people who heard about it from me or they told somebody in their family, hey, I heard of this thing, maybe you had that, and then they went and got the surgery.
But that's not the only one.
So I've got those cures.
I'm a basket of weird, small medical problems.
I also have something called pyuresis.
Pyuresis, better known as shy bladder.
And it's a condition that maybe 5% of the world has in which they can't use a public restroom because they lock up just mentally.
They can't do their business if there's somebody in the general area.
Now, what's unique about this condition, even though so many people have it, is that people assume that they're the only ones who have it, like I did for most of my life.
I believed... I didn't know what it was.
I just thought, I can't talk to people about this.
All right, somebody right here is saying, I have that.
5% of you have that.
It's pretty common. But probably you didn't know it had a name.
Probably you didn't know there's anything you can do about it.
And watch this. Watch this, right in front of you.
I just cured 5% of the people watching this periscope.
Not a joke. Simply by telling you that this is a real medical condition.
Look at the comments, how many people are saying that they have it.
In the comments, people are hearing for the very first time that it's a common condition.
You're halfway cured.
Here's the rest. Are you ready?
The rest of the cure is that knowing it's a thing is your doorway out.
Because part of it is a psychological thing where you think you're weird, you're a freak, and you don't want other people to know.
The moment I tell you it's common, I have it, my brother has it, My father had it.
It's probably just genetic.
And it also has nothing to do with actual shyness.
That's the mistake people make.
It's not shyness. So you've watched me long enough to know that whatever shyness is, I don't have it.
Would you agree? You've watched me long enough.
Whatever I have, it's not shyness in any kind of standard way.
I've embarrassed myself in public willingly more than any human you've ever watched in your life.
Well, I don't know how you measure such a thing.
But, so first of all, knowing that it's not shyness as in actual shyness is the first thing you need to know.
Or it's the second thing.
The first thing is that it's a real condition.
And here's how you take care of it.
Are you ready? Here's your cure.
Practice. You find increasingly difficult situations, let's say one where somebody's standing nearby but outside the door, and then eventually you can practice to the point where somebody's at the other side of the restroom, or maybe you're inside a stall.
But whatever you need to do, just do it.
If you need to use the handicapped stall, it's a handicap.
Go ahead and do it. If you need to stand in the restroom for 30 minutes, when other people take one minute, Go ahead and do it.
Why not? You have my complete Permission.
Now, if that sounds stupid, that I'm giving you permission to use a restroom in a certain way, it's not.
Because when you hear it from other people, it's part of your social influence.
And this is a very social problem.
If other people didn't exist, you wouldn't have the problem.
It's the existence of other people and how you feel about them and how you interact that actually causes the condition.
So, Look it up.
It's called Shy Bladder.
It has another word, paruresis.
5% of you, I just solved, or put you on the road to solve, the biggest problem in your life, and you know it.
It's the biggest problem in your life.
Because you can't travel, you can't feel comfortable in meetings, you can't go to gatherings in the same comfort as other people.
But, in a very short time, you can learn to be like I am, Which is if I stand up and somebody says, hey, if I say I'm going to use the restroom and some guy stands up to say, I'll go too, I just say, oh, that doesn't work for me.
You know, but I'll wait for you.
So as soon as you're not embarrassed to tell people you have the condition, you're about 30% solved.
About 30% solved, because then you can do what you need to do.
All right? So you're on your way to a solution.
Now, those of you who say, Scott, Scott, Scott, your ego, what about your ego saying that you're curing more people than Jesus?
I am literally right in front of you curing more people than Jesus.
You just watched it happen.
Now you might, if you don't have the condition, you don't know what I just did.
You don't have any idea how important this was to maybe a hundred people.
I don't know how many people Jesus cured, but I just cured 100 right in front of you.
That's real. I'm not making that up.
That's that. All right.
I see the CNN is running a piece, an opinion piece today, saying that Biden is too old.
They're using a Jimmy Carter interview to do that.
Jimmy Carter said that we should have an age limit on presidents, or at least think about it.
He says that he couldn't have done the job at age 80, and obviously he's referring to Biden indirectly.
What's interesting is that the person who wrote the article, Julian Zelizer, who's an opinion writer for CNN, he's the biggest anti-Trumper.
Somebody says, imagine if Jesus had access to Periscope.
Exactly. Exactly.
I think Jesus could have beat my numbers, but he didn't have Periscope.
So thank you, Jack Dorsey, for just killing 100 people.
That's actually true. Jack, if you watch this, your product allowed me to do what I just did.
So if Jack Dorsey had not started Twitter, had not bought Periscope, a hundred people would have a problem today that they don't need to have.
Okay, so it's notable that CNN runs an article by one of the most I'd say aggressive anti-Trumpers who writes opinion pieces for them has written a very aggressive anti-Biden opinion piece.
So it's pretty clear that at least the CNN Democrats, if I can call them that, the people who would sort of be compatible with that view of the world, are very much anti-Biden.
So I think Biden's days are numbered here.
Let's talk about the big story.
There's some fake news today.
So the fake news of the day is that President Trump made some phone call to an unnamed foreign leader, allegedly made a promise during the phone call that was overheard by some intelligence, no, what do you call it, security intelligence person, some staff member, Who decided to be a whistleblower because it was such a shocking promise he had to become a whistleblower.
Now we don't know what the promise was or who that person was talking to or who the whistleblower is.
So the first thing you need to know is it's fake news.
Now it's probably not fake news that there's a person who's trying to be a whistleblower.
That part sounds probably true.
But whatever it was that that person heard Almost certainly out of context, almost certainly has to be understood in terms of Trump's style, which can be chaotic by design, meaning he can throw out some ideas, see what happens, throw out some more ideas and see what happens.
And if what this person witnessed is Trump throwing out an idea to see what happens, Well, that's the wrong context.
It doesn't mean that that was going to be some kind of an international deal.
He could have just been feeling things out, and that's the president's prerogative.
You'd want him to have that right.
But here's the best part of the story.
CNN is covering the story, and they bring on their expert, Phil Mudd.
Now, you know Phil Mudd from being one of the most vocal anti-Trumpers, like a real, real vocal anti-Trumper.
A frequent guest who just rips the president apart on a variety of topics and has been for, what, two or three years.
So that's the context you need to know, who Phil Mudd is and what he does.
Now, Despite all the things Phil Mudd has said about the president, many of which I would take exception to or see it differently, here's the thing.
I don't think anybody has ever accused Phil Mudd of not being a patriot.
Can we agree? You can agree you hate his opinions.
You can even not like him personally.
You can not like him on TV. You can not like him for all kinds of different reasons.
But has anybody ever questioned...
His patriotism. You know, his commitment to the country.
I don't think so, right? He's a patriot.
So here's what's interesting.
CNN covers the story about the alleged whistleblower.
Should be a great anti-Trump story.
The best anti-Trump story you could ever have.
You've got the best anti-Trump story that he's done something so bad that has to be a whistleblower.
And then you bring on Phil Mudd, the best, you know, one of the most vocal anti-Trump people you could ever have.
And what does Phil Mudd do?
He just ripped that whistleblower to shreds.
He just tore him up for being a traitor, basically, for doing something so wrong, which is selling out the president, standing in the office, standing in the presence of the president, and then turning on him and snitching on him.
Phil Mudd is a patriot.
Because when it came down to country over party, he picked country.
That's what you want, right?
So congratulations to, not congratulations, that's the wrong word.
Respect. Respect to Phil Mudd, who I would say I have not been a fan of for his opinions, not for anything else.
But when it came down to country over party, Country over party.
He picked country.
And he did it right in CNN's face.
Now, I don't know what CNN was expecting him to say, but I don't think it was that.
And I love the fact that, and also respect to CNN for putting him on and giving him a full platform to rip the whistleblower apart.
Just ripped him apart.
I've never seen anybody get ripped apart that hard.
He ripped him apart. And so thank you.
Thank you to Phil Mudd.
I think that was exactly the right patriotic tone to take.
And to Phil Mudd's credit, he even went further and said, does it matter what the president said to a foreign leader?
Nope. Nope.
Because the only person whose business that was was the president's.
That's his job. He gets to say what he wants.
He gets to play it the way he wants.
He gets to lie if he wants.
He gets to say any damn thing he wants.
That's why we elected him.
And Phil Mudd, thank you for supporting that concept.
Let's talk about the UFOs.
You've all seen by now the story that apparently the government has confirmed That some videos of alleged UFOs are indeed unexplained.
Now, unexplained doesn't mean guaranteed to be foreign aircraft, meaning alien aircraft.
But here's my opinion.
Not real.
Not real.
So, I don't yet know, I don't have a good theory for what they are or why we have this video.
I do have a strong opinion that there's not the slightest chance that these are alien aircraft.
All right? Now, partly because we would have seen more of them.
It seems weird that we would just have, you know, some limited little things.
But the biggest thing is that they seem to do that quick turn that it would be impossible according to our technology.
They seem to be going really fast and then just turn.
That tells me probably not a spacecraft.
Let me tell you...
Now, I don't know what it was.
I don't know. Who knows?
But I don't think it was a spacecraft.
That's just my opinion. If there's more information later that proves I'm wrong, I'll change my mind.
But no, I don't think there's much chance that's real.
All right. Let's talk about...
You probably saw some tweets going around in which some organization, I forget who, had compiled all of the wrong climate doom predictions for the last 50 years.
And it's a very impressive list because it's an impressive list of wrong predictions over the years.
Now, here's what Mark Levin says about all of those wrong predictions over the years.
He says,"...it's been a subterfuge to undermine our constitutional system, to undermine our capitalist system, and to create this almost zen-like support for this radical agenda, which has as its purpose to destroy many of our freedom institutions in this country." Do you buy that?
So we have this history of bad climate predictions of doom, and Mark Levin says that it has a sort of a unifying theme that is to undermine our capitalist system, create an almost zen-like support for radical agenda, and its purpose is to destroy our freedoms and institutions in this country.
How many of you believe that?
To me, that seems bad shit crazy.
Like, actually just bad shit crazy.
Here's what's wrong with it.
To me, this is a standard...
This is a very classic case of what I call loser think.
Now, to be clear, I'm not calling Mark Levin a loser.
Loser think... Is a style of thinking, and I'm going to describe it a little bit more, that gets you to the wrong place.
So in other words, the outcome is the loser part, not the people doing it.
So I'm always respectful to the people, but this way of thinking seems deeply defective.
And here it is. The first thing it assumes is history repeats.
In other words, The climate doomsayers keep being wrong, and therefore that tells us they're being wrong again.
Is it good thinking to say that history repeats?
We've got an unbroken chain of here we go again, here we go again, here we go again, here we go again.
Therefore, they're still wrong this next time.
Is that good thinking?
It is not. The most you can make out of the fact that there's a 50-year unbroken chain of wrong predictions is that we absolutely could be wrong.
Absolutely 100% practical and viable that their predictions we're seeing today are totally wrong.
But that's all it does.
If you take that from, it's possible that we could be wrong 50 times in a row, but, you know, it's certainly possible.
If you take that to, we are wrong, you have fallen for loser think.
Because history can't repeat.
Not in a sense that patterns are somehow magically predictive.
Here's why.
For about 100,000 years, it was a fact that humans could not fly.
They could not develop a machine that would let them fly.
So for 100,000 years in a row, history repeated, didn't it?
Every time somebody tried to jump off a hill and flap their arms, they died.
Then they tried to put wings on their arms and they jumped off a hill and it didn't work.
100,000 years of history repeating and then the Wright brothers Built an airplane and then it stopped repeating.
So history doesn't repeat, but it is true that people can be wrong for a long time.
That's certainly true.
The reason that the Wright brothers could do what nobody could do for 100,000 years is that they had new technology and they had the advantage of knowing what everybody else did wrong.
So history gets smarter and smarter over time.
So it's never the same as the last starting point.
You're always at a new starting point.
Yeah, there are always black swans and surprises, as somebody says in the comments.
And today's technology can't be compared to anything in the past.
If you're looking at the history of climate predictions, and you're saying that the accuracy that we have today after the modern era of satellites, if you're saying that the science before the era of satellites Is going to be predictive of the era after satellites, you're on pretty shaky ground.
Those satellites are pretty darn good at measuring temperatures and being able to cover a lot of space.
So, here's the thing.
It is certainly...
Fair game to say they've been wrong for 50 years.
So there's something about humans that makes us panic about things that are really just coincidence or speculation or imaginary thinking.
So that part's true. So Mark Levin would be accurate in saying, if he were to say this, he would be accurate in saying that humans don't change much.
So we're pretty much the same humans we've been for 50 years.
So our ability to be fooled by BS... Our ability to be fooled by scare tactics is the same.
So we should be looking out for it.
So that much is true.
We should definitely be looking out for it.
But we cannot therefore say that old technology is comparable to the most modern...
Science we have. That's just not productive thinking.
Because history doesn't repeat in that way.
It is true that we get fooled easily.
That part's true. But the science of it all is completely different.
Next, Mark Levin says that all of this past doomsaying really had a secret agenda to it.
Sort of secret. Not secret enough that he couldn't see it.
But it's to undermine the Constitution and capitalism and to destroy our freedoms.
What evidence is there of that?
Can anybody point me to the evidence that all of those 50 years of newspaper articles were written by people who had a secret agenda to destroy capitalism?
I don't think so.
Far more likely, it was a whole bunch of people Acting independently for their own reasons and almost none of them were thinking about capitalism and probably almost none of them were thinking about anything about destroying freedom.
So this is what I call the mind reading illusion.
The mind reading illusion is that you can look at hundreds of different people acting independently for whatever reason Many of them being fooled or scared.
Many of them just being wrong about the science.
Some of them maybe just trying to get attention.
Some of them maybe trying to raise money.
Probably hundreds of different reasons and combinations of different reasons and different people at different times.
And Mark Levin has summarized this as they want to destroy freedom and get rid of capitalism.
That might be the worst take of all time.
It might be the worst take of all time.
And it's a common one.
It's not like one person has that take.
It's one of the most common takes, and it's ridiculous.
Whose mind are you reading who has these secret thoughts about destroying freedom and capitalism?
That applies to exactly nobody.
There's probably literally nobody who's ever had that opinion out of 7 billion people.
But, you know, I suppose you could find one person.
You know, just like you can find Beto O'Rourke wants to go to your house and take your gun away by force.
You can always find somebody.
So I'm not, I wouldn't dispute that Mark Levin could find somebody who would say, oh yeah, we just want to destroy capitalism.
That's our secret plan.
But I don't think that's a good way to think of this whole situation.
All right, let me ask you this.
Let's talk about the Iranian drones.
So it looks like Saudi Arabia has confirmed, the United States has confirmed, and they have some of the unexploded drones.
There were a bunch of them, and some of them did not hit their targets.
So they could piece together the drones, and now they know with complete certainty it's Iranian technology.
So... There's a question that seems to not matter that much, which is, did the Iranians give these weapons to the Houthis in Yemen, and then the Houthis who claimed responsibility, did they use them against Saudi Arabia, or did Iran launch them from their own territory?
Doesn't matter. I think everybody agrees.
It's an interesting question, but it has no relevance in terms of how anybody would respond to it, because in both cases it's an Iranian-sponsored attack or a director attack.
It's all the same. So, the big question is, will the United States and or Saudi Arabia respond militarily and create a hot war?
And President Trump seems to be quite hesitant, and there's some reporting that Saudi Arabia wants to do anything but start a war.
That was before the attack, but I haven't heard anything change.
So compare these two plans.
One, we respond in kind.
So there's some military attack on Iran, hypothetically, and it's something proportionate to destroying a large oil facility in Saudi Arabia.
So that's one plan. And then what happens?
Somebody says it matters if they were fired from Iran.
Geez, Scott. No, it doesn't.
Why in the world would it matter?
Because Saudi Arabia and the United States would both treat it as the same.
Because whether the Iranians gave it to the Houthis to use against Saudi Arabia, it's all the same.
So, and by the way, you know, the Iranians could throw the Houthis under the bus if they didn't approve of it, right?
You know, the Iranians could have said, oh, okay, that's too far.
Even we don't support that, so we're going to raid in our Houthis, try to keep this just a Yemen civil war.
I mean, if they had done that...
Okay, but they're not doing that, so it's all the same whether it came from Iranian territory or Yemen.
So here's, so option one is we do something militarily and take out some facility in Iran.
And with all of the blowback that that would cause, all of the public opinion that that would change, and all of whatever that would change.
Compare that to option two, which seems to be where this is heading.
Which is that we don't.
That we don't.
It's actually a better plan than it sounds like on first blush.
Because your first reaction might be, okay, over in the Middle East, if somebody punches you in the eye, you have to punch them in two eyes, or else they'll just keep doing it.
If you show any weakness, They're just going to keep punching you.
So if we don't respond militarily, well, there goes a second Saudi installation.
And if we don't respond to that, well, there goes a third one until Saudi Arabia is completely destroyed and nobody fought back.
Maybe. But...
Here's my take.
Suppose we use this as an excuse to tighten the economic sanctions in a way that maybe was politically impossible before.
In other words, other countries were not willing to participate as aggressively because they were still sort of...
Playing it on the fence a little bit like, well, we don't want to lose Iran as a trading partner and let's try to keep them in the nuclear deal and let's not be so hard on them.
What if this latest event allows the president to tighten with his allies in a way that they couldn't tighten before?
Iran's economy is right on the edge.
It seems to me if what Iran is doing is trying to taunt us into an attack for their advantage.
What if we taunt them into an attack instead?
Which looks like the way we're heading.
In other words, by not attacking militarily, we will have another crushing twist of the tourniquet on their economy.
It's a free punch, right?
It's a free slap.
Because they slap Saudi Arabia.
We get another turn on the tourniquet.
It's a free turn.
Doesn't cost us anything this time.
And then, what if we don't attack them militarily?
Think about it.
Just sort of think about the psychological response of not attacking them militarily.
Because the first thing it says is that we can do it economically.
So it tells the Iranian people they might be closer to economic complete meltdown than even they thought, and they're probably pretty worried about it.
But it also paints a picture of Iran being so weak that an attack isn't necessary.
It might be unnecessary.
We might also feel that it could put just the right kind of Pressure and or carrot and stick with whatever is the second tier of Iranian leadership, perhaps the military, to take care of business.
In other words, we may be holding out for Iran to make an internal change that would be more to our liking.
And this would be a good time to give them a little space to do that.
Now, I have no way of knowing if we have any intelligence that such a thing is happening.
But I would think that it would have been the leader that old, who is creating this much trouble, that we probably should give the second tier of leadership a little breathing space, don't you think?
And the way to give them breathing space to take care of business themselves, which is the ideal way to do it, Would be to crush their economy further, show them that that was the Ayatollah's fault, and don't allow the country to coalesce around the Ayatollah by attacking militarily.
So my feeling is that Trump and the administration, by holding off, and I don't know if they'll continue to hold off.
By the time I'm finished with this periscope, we may have taken out a major refinery.
But if we don't, It could be that holding off is just exactly the right thing to do.
And I'm actually pretty happy that the President is taking this so cautiously.
At the same time, we're pretty sure who did it and we know how bad it was.
Remember, it wasn't our money that they bombed.
They bombed Saudi Arabia's money.
When I say money, I mean their asset that's worth a lot of money.
Alright, enough on that.
Let me throw out some off-the-hook ideas on gun control.
You have a right to own a gun.
Do you have a right for people to not know you have a gun?
Meaning your fellow citizens.
Not the government. But do you have a right to keep your gun ownership a secret from your fellow citizens?
It's just a question. Now, again, nothing I'm going to say here is a recommendation for a policy.
I'm just asking the question.
All right, so most people are saying, yes, we do have the right of privacy, and we have a right to keep that private.
Let me throw out this idea.
Suppose there was a law that says you can own an AR, but there's a new law that says you have to put a gun lock on it in order to own it legally while it's being stored.
It has to have a gun lock on it.
And, wait for it, wait for it, when you take the gun lock off, It sends a signal through the cell phone world to alert maybe law enforcement.
So let's say law enforcement knows if you've taken the safety or you've taken the gun lock off your gun.
Maybe they know where it is too.
Suppose they knew you took your gun lock off.
Now let's say Let's say you had made a reservation at the shooting range.
Now, the police might say, oh, he's got a reservation at the shooting range.
I see he's at the shooting range.
His gun lock is off. All good.
Suppose somebody takes their gun lock off for 10 minutes.
Police see it and they say, oh, okay, he's just cleaning his gun.
Whatever. Changing the batteries on his gun lock.
It's all good. But could you imagine that there was somebody who had maybe been flagged as a...
Wait for it. Somebody had been flagged as maybe one of these red flag people.
Maybe somebody who's in the system as being a little bit more problematic.
They take their gun lock off and their phone rings.
The phone rings and the police say, hey, you know, you're in our database as sort of problematic.
We see that your gun lock is off.
Can you talk to us?
Now, maybe the person will say, oh yeah, I'm going to the gun range.
And then the police say, okay, you sound like you're in good mental state.
You're going to the gun range.
Please put your gun lock back on when you return.
Now, again, I realize most of you are saying, I don't want this.
This is another infringement on the Second Amendment.
And it is. Of course, it would be an infringement.
But I'm just going to put that out there.
So is there some technological way that everybody who has a God-given, if you like, right to own a gun can still do everything they want to do?
At the same time, there would be some kind of a technological way to flag the police when somebody who is maybe a little less safe takes the gun lock off.
And maybe it's just a phone call.
Just a phone call. Hey, gun lock's off.
I just want to see how you're feeling.
Are you okay today?
I can tell from your voice that you're, oh no, I just took the gun lock off.
I'm just cleaning my gun or whatever.
Okay, carry on. So that's one idea, and I acknowledge that it's a bad idea.
Let me give you a... Now, for those of you who are new to my periscopes, I often suggest what I know to be bad and unpopular ideas, if they're different enough, then it might make you, stimulate you to think of an idea that's a better version of it.
So that's all we're doing here.
So don't get too caught up on whether that's a perfectly good idea or not.
It's to spur thinking.
Here's another one. And this is, again, just to spur thinking.
Suppose we had a law that says you can buy an AR, you can buy one, but you must join the NRA. So that's the rule.
You must join the NRA, or if you wanted to be fair, you could say, or any similar national organization that has, you know, in case there's some competitor to the NRA, you don't want to give them a monopoly.
But you say, you've got to be in the NRA or something like it, and you've got to sign up.
Now you say to yourself, how the hell does that help?
Somebody says awful idea in the comments.
How the hell does that help? Because the bad guys are just going to be, you know, they'll just sign up and then they'll just do what they're going to do anyway.
How does that help anybody?
Are you ready? Right now, my understanding is that no member of the NRA has ever been accused of one of these mass shootings.
So first of all, fact check me.
Is that true? That no member of the NRA has ever been subject, has ever been a mass shooter?
I think that's true. But if it's not 100% true, it's mostly true.
Oh, I'm seeing some people saying it's a better idea.
So you're getting ahead of me because you've already thought this through.
Here's what this idea does.
It pairs the people who have the most dangerous weapons with the organization that has the most incentive, besides the government, the most incentive to help them stay safe.
And it becomes then a de facto problem of the NRA To manage gun safety.
Because the last thing they want to hear is that three more members of the NRA shot up a school.
Am I right? The NRA is almost entirely focused.
That's not true. I don't want to say that.
The NRA has two main focuses, I would say.
Gun safety and freedom.
You know, the Second Amendment. Is that fair?
Two main goals.
Gun safety. And remaining free to have the guns that the Constitution allows you.
The gun safety part, they could be very productive, because who better to educate?
Who better to police their own?
Right? If you're a member of the NRA and you find out that there might be somebody else who's a little dangerous who's a member of the NRA, well, maybe you put a little extra effort into making sure your brand doesn't get ruined.
Anyway, the point is, I don't know specifically how that would play out, but I like the idea of pairing the NRA by law With somebody who has a dangerous weapon.
Because you want to get that training, that brainwashing, if you will.
Brainwashing, I'm using in a positive sense.
If you're an owner of a dangerous tool of any kind, I want you to be a little bit brainwashed on safety.
So, that would give the NRA more authority in a way that I think would be productive.
Here's the question.
Can the law require Amazon to label goods that are made in China as a filter?
Because if they could, would you filter out products that are made in China so that you as a consumer can use your consumer clout To help international affairs.
Now, you could just do it with Amazon, because there's such a big footprint, you wouldn't even have to do it with any other product.
That's it. Just do it with them.
Or how about this? Instead of just flagging it, suppose that with Amazon's suggested products, you know, if you look for one product, Amazon will suggest a number of other products.
What if one of those suggestions is something made in America?
Suppose there were a requirement that whenever that is practical, and somebody says, oh, here's the product I'm looking for, it suggests right under it several other products, but one of them, maybe just one, is an American-made product, and it's flagged as American-made.
Would that help us in international relations?
I believe it would.
I saw some, I think it was maybe the CEO of Blackstone or something, some famous investor was saying that he believes, he's heard, that China is working hard to curb the fentanyl export from China.
So somebody who was allegedly well-informed and in the know says that China is working hard to curb fentanyl.
Absolute bullshit.
Complete bullshit.
Do you know what working hard to stop fentanyl would look like?
They know the name of the guy and where he lives.
There's a guy, like a guy with a name and a face.
They know his address, China does.
They know who he is.
He's very prominent.
As long as he's alive, they're not trying at all.
That's not trying.
That's what not trying looks like.
If you know who he is, you know where he lives, and what he's doing, and he's still walking around free, that's exactly not trying.
So anybody who says that China is putting in the effort to stop fentanyl, absolutely not possibly true.
There isn't the slightest chance That that could be true.
Yeah, somebody says 60 minutes, found him.
If you hear that that guy is in jail or dead, then I will say, aha, it is the beginning of China getting serious.
And even that wouldn't be serious, because obviously he's going to be replaced by somebody else.
So you're going to see a lot more than that.
But step one is that guy's dead or in jail.
If you don't hear that, There is nothing happening on fentanyl in China.
Trust me on that.
And number two, we should have no trade agreement with them whatsoever.
We shouldn't even be in negotiations.
And some people say, well, you know, that should be part of the negotiations.
No, we shouldn't.
That shouldn't be part of the negotiations.
That's what they give up to negotiate.
That's the ticket.
The price of even being at the table, I'm trying not to use the F word, the price not even to be at the table with the United States and talk trade is you stop the fentanyl hard.
I want to see bodies dropping.
I want to see the dealers we know literally dead.
Without that, Let's just talk.
We should have no deal with China while they're killing tens of thousands of our people right in front of us.
No deal. No negotiations, much less no deal.
We shouldn't be talking about that at all.
All right. Thoughts on decriminalizing opioids.
Yeah. My solution for the mental illness and the addiction problem and the homeless problem, all of which are describing LA and a lot of San Francisco right now, is that I don't see any alternative to what I'm going to describe.
Are you ready? We have to create magnet communities for those people.
We have to make it more attractive to go someplace where they can get help or at least someplace where they're away from the rest of society who they're defecating on and leaving their needles to step on.
They have to be separated from the people who need to be separated from that for safety and for health and security reasons.
So once separated, there is a second question.
For the drug addicts.
Do you give them drugs and try to give in the safest possible way?
Because until they change their mind, there's nothing you can do.
If they don't want to be clean, there's just nothing they're going to do.
But you need to get them in their own place, and maybe they can choose two separate places.
One would be a place where they could get, let's say, food and shelter, but they would have no access to drugs, and it would be a drug rehab facility.
A second place would be just like it, except instead of rehab, they get drugs, actually just given drugs.
But instead of fentanyl, which will likely kill them, maybe they get heroin or whatever is slightly less likely to give them an overdose.
Because they're going to die anyway.
So the best you can do is to get them away from you and get them away from the people who could get a disease from them.
I have a contrarian view on the people who are addicted and living on the streets.
Maybe not contrarian from you, but contrarian from a lot of people.
Which is, you can't talk somebody out of something that is rational and good for them.
What do you say?
Are you talking about drug addiction as being rational and good for you?
Yes. That is exactly what I'm saying.
That if your living situation is so awful That your only alternative is complete misery and suicide.
Taking hard drugs to have an awesome day while you're literally defecating on a sidewalk is completely rational.
It's the most rational thing you'll ever hear.
If I were in that situation and I were not a drug addict, I would become one by choice.
Because those drug addicts are having some really good days.
You know, this might blow your mind, but I'll bet the average drug addict who's literally laying on the streets in Los Angeles has, at least during the time they're on the drug, a better day than you do, because that's what those drugs do.
They kind of give you a good day when you weren't having a good day, even if things are terrible otherwise.
So it is completely unrealistic to say, hey you people, listen to me who has a good life and a good job and I live in a nice place and my family loves me and I've got a great sex life and I'm totally healthy and I like what I see in the mirror.
Why don't you quit drugs like I did?
You dumbass.
You're just a dumbass if you think that.
If you're looking at these drug addicts on the street with your far more put-together life and saying, well, if I can quit drugs, if I can stay off of drugs, certainly you on the street can do it.
No, you're just a dumbass.
The reason that you can be off of drugs is because your life is not so terrible as it is.
How hard is it for me to stay off heroin?
Easy. Easy.
Because my average day is better than most of your best days ever.
I don't have good willpower.
Do you know how much willpower I have?
None. I have no willpower.
If you give me a life that's similar to these street people, that for whatever reason I can't live, maybe it's mental illness, for example, maybe I just can't live in the modern world, But you give me access to heroin, bam, right in the arm, five minutes.
I'm not even going to wait.
So, trying to deal with people who are making completely rational decisions, given the misery of their situation, you just can't treat them the same as people who really do want to quit, and those people need some help.
So, we need places where the people who are certain classes of problem can be separated from the other people until they get help and then can be integrated if they want.
And you heard Michael Schellenberger talk about this maybe on Tucker, is that we need more of a carrot and stick approach.
Probably we need to be able to, legally, force people to live with people who are like them.
Like them in terms of lifestyle, not any other way.
Lifestyle meaning if you have a mental problem, we probably need to force you to be in some community with other people who are dealing with something related to that and also are getting help.
If you've got a drug problem, we probably need to take you away from the rest of people in two different groups.
One that is trying to get help and one that...
Hasn't made that decision.
And for them, there's no point in trying to help them.
Just help them stay alive.
Do what you can. You know, try to have some empathy.
Anyway, that's all for today.
I am going to talk to you later.
If you have not purchased your copy pre-order of LoserThink, well, you're missing a lot.
You're missing a lot.
It's already available on Amazon and wherever books are sold for pre-order.
It's called LoserThink, the best book in the world.
And I will talk to you later.
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