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Sept. 21, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
52:17
Episode 670 Scott Adams: Sipping & Talking Biden, Brownface, Children in Charge of Big Decisions
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Hey everybody, come on in.
It's a beautiful weekend morning and it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
Luckily, as luck would have it, you came to the right place because that's me.
And I know you want to enjoy the simultaneous sip.
Of course you do. Who wouldn't, really?
And all you need is...
I always wait until a thousand users are here before I said, here we go.
A cup or a mug or a glass of stein, a gel, a tanker, a thermos, a plastic canteen, a grill, a goblet, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
Get ready for the simultaneous sip, the dopamine hit that makes the rest of the day awesome.
Here it comes.
Here it comes. Go!
Oh. Sublime.
Well, my book, Loser Think, which comes out November 5th, is available for pre-orders, if you didn't know that already.
And the pre-orders are going briskly.
So it looks like it could be a sort of a big book.
Could be a big book because Loser Think is sort of sticky.
And a lot of stuff I talk about in there is going to make your head explode.
In a good way. So, I love the fact that Justin Trudeau decided to announce a ban on assault weapons in Canada.
Really good timing.
Really good timing.
Now, I can't even dislike that because it's so...
It's transparently obvious what he's doing.
He's distracting. But at the same time, totally works.
Totally works. So let's give it up to Justin Trudeau for that.
Now, here's my other comment about Trudeau.
How good a life do you have to live In terms of being good to people, treating everybody the same.
How many years of a really good life do you need to live to get away with being discovered to have had three brown face slash black face events in your life and people look at it and go, eh, you're still not a racist.
That's pretty good if you think about it.
Could any of you do that?
Could any of you be discovered for having three separate blackface pictures in your past and still have people look at you and say, you know, you're still alright.
You know, you've been so good.
I know that's just a bad decision.
It's kind of impressive.
And... I saw two different schools of thought.
Well, maybe I only saw one, because the only other school of thought is me, apparently.
So that's not quite a school.
That's like one student. So one school of thought is that even though Justin Trudeau is clearly not a racist, he crossed some line that if you were on the right, you would be skewered, you would lose your job, you would be vilified forever.
And so people quite rightly say, hey...
They do it to us.
We cannot be cowards.
We must be brave and do it right back to them.
Is that a good strategy?
I ask you.
Now, maybe that was sort of a good preliminary strategy because it did frame things as it's not just one side doing stuff, but rather it's people doing stuff.
So I think it was useful for a long time to push back on all of these little gotcha situations.
But maybe we're reaching a point where a little leadership is necessary.
Because remember, if you were on the camp that says, you know, I think I'm going to accept Justin Trudeau's apology.
Let's say you do it in public and you do it on Twitter.
Let's say you did what I did.
I think I did it publicly.
I accepted his apology.
You know, he wasn't really apologizing to me, but on behalf of a public, which often gets worked up on behalf of other people that we imagine are offended but aren't, I decided to forgive them.
Now, let me ask you this.
If someday somebody produced a picture of me in blackface, there are none.
Trust me, there are none.
But hypothetically, if they did, would I be in a better shape or worse shape having publicly created a record of saying, eh, that's just a custom?
Better, right? Because then if somebody found you or I had made that same dumbass mistake, or any version of that, you know, there's lots of versions of that mistake, if we'd made any version of it, wouldn't it be handy for people to know you're not a hypocrite?
Right? Because at least you'd have that going for you.
Because if you've said of other people, you know, that's not a big deal.
That's just a joke or bad judgment or whatever.
It happened 20 years ago. Let it go.
If you're on record of saying that, you're not a hypocrite if it happens to you and you say, you know, I treat everybody the same way.
I did it. Justin Trudeau did some version of something.
Maybe we should all just lighten up.
You're in a lot better shape To not be a hypocrite if you're willing to let such an obvious...
The thing that's different about the Trudeau case is that I haven't seen one single person suggest he's actually a racist.
Have you? You know, I said this before, but that's kind of impressive.
Right? Right? Now, I'm with most of you, which is he's a bit cringeworthy to watch with his don't say mankind, say humankind.
He takes it a little bit further than it needs to be.
I wish he would stop calling himself a feminist.
I know what he means. Just the way the words hit my head don't work.
But none of them suggest he's a bad person.
It's just a little cringy when we hear him talk that way, for some of us.
And I suppose other people are saying...
Sorry, my cat's here.
I suppose other people are saying, that's exactly what we want.
All right. So...
People are talking about how the children are making a big impact on this climate change stuff.
So they had their big climate strike day and they took a day off of school all over the world, mostly the United States, and they protested that their government is not doing enough about climate change.
Here's what's wrong with that.
Everything. That's what's wrong with that.
Everything. At what point did we decide that we would consciously turn over leadership To the dumbest and least experienced people in the entire world.
Actually, literally, the dumbest and least experienced people in the world.
Least knowledgeable, least experienced, and dumbest.
Children. Now, I of course was once a child.
And so that's one of the ways that I can notice that I got smarter since then.
Have any of you noticed that you're smarter since you were a child?
Why are we letting children make our political decisions?
Could it be a worse idea?
No. It is literally the worst of bad ideas.
Now, even in the 60s, when young people were protesting Vietnam, those young people were still older.
Those young people were often over 18.
They were just young. So that was a little bit different.
And protesting a war is sort of a simpler situation.
How many of these children...
Let me ask you this.
How many of the children know the phrase carbon capture?
How many of them even know that there's a whole bunch of startups making carbon capture devices to suck CO2 out of the air?
How many know that?
None. How many of them know, the children who were in the climate strike, how many of them know that nuclear energy is really sort of the only way to attack this, with everything else, but it has to be a big part of the picture, and that even reasonable Democrats say the same?
How many do you think out there were against whatever the climate change policies are, and also against nuclear power?
Probably a lot. So, somehow we managed to weaponize the dumbest people in society.
And again, I say that with love.
We were all children.
We're all smarter now.
Wouldn't you rather have the decision made by the smart people?
I mean, if you have a choice.
And I think we do.
Now, I would even go so far as to say that children do not have opinions on climate change.
They don't have opinions.
Children do not read the news and form opinions.
Opinions are assigned to children.
Am I wrong? You know, opinions are assigned to adults too, usually by your favorite news source.
But for children, it's far more obvious.
Children don't have independent opinions about climate change.
What they know about it is so small that you could not interpret anything they say about it to be anything like an opinion.
What they have is not an opinion.
They have anxiety. They have anxiety.
Who gave them the anxiety?
Well, they're teachers.
Maybe their parents.
Maybe some of them watch the news, but I kind of doubt it.
How many of those kids do you think watch the news?
Five percent? Tops.
So, children are getting all worked up by adults.
Could there be a more unproductive situation than adults...
Making children scared to death and then, wait for it, making children scared to death and then putting them in charge.
Because that feels like what happened yesterday, that they were sort of empowered to, you know, have a political clout that maybe they normally would not have.
So... We should not be happy about that climate strike thing.
We should be condemning it as total manipulation of young minds.
Now, if adults took a day off work and said, well, we've looked into it, we've been watching the news, I'd still think they were under-informed.
But at least they're adults.
At least they had a chance to look into it and do what they could to make a decision.
But children don't look into it.
Children don't research.
They take whatever opinion is assigned to them.
And what was assigned to them was anxiety.
And then we put them in charge.
Could not have been a more ridiculous situation.
All right. I have an announcement to make.
The first announcement is, you probably heard that the Houthis in Yemen, who took credit for sending the missiles and drones into the Saudi Arabia oil facility and blowing it up, they claimed credit for that, but now, more recently, they said that they're announcing that they will not use drones and cruise missiles to attack Saudi Arabia.
And I thought I would follow their lead.
And so I'm announcing today that I too will not be, from this point on, and this is a promise, I personally will not shoot any drones and cruise missiles into Saudi Arabia.
Now you're probably saying to yourself, Scott, that's stupid.
You don't have any cruise missiles, Scott.
You don't have any drones that can go attack Saudi Arabia.
Just like the Houthis.
They don't have that either.
So, if they don't have that stuff and they're promising not to use it, and I don't have that stuff, can I promise not to use it?
I mean, Iran has that stuff, but I don't see them making any promises.
But yes, you're all Saudi Arabia, you can rest easy, because like the Houthis, I am not going to attack Saudi Arabia with all my cruise missiles and my drones, because I don't have them.
Christina says differently.
Okay, that's funny. So there are reports that we're tightening the banking-related sanctions on Iran.
But have you noticed that's not a big story?
The first time I heard it, it's like, whoa, we're going after the National Bank or the Central Bank or something about a bank.
We're going to shut down their banking.
Man, Iran is in trouble now.
And then you look into it a little bit and it's like, Well, it turns out we're not really going to do anything to their banking system.
Because I think we did all the things we can do.
Whatever this latest thing is, I don't even know if they're going to notice.
Because the news, at least this is just based on the news coverage, the news is treating it like maybe all the good sanctions have already been used and whatever's left with this banking situation probably won't make any difference.
So we'll see.
So here's one of the most clever tweets that you will ever see.
This comes from Naval Ravikant.
Now, I've talked about Naval before.
I refer to him sometimes as the smartest person in the world.
I don't know that that's true, but until I see somebody who's smarter, I'm gonna go with that.
As far as I can tell, He might actually be the smartest person in the world, in terms of things that you need to know.
Certainly there are scientists who know things he doesn't know.
But in terms of a good general understanding of reality and how to deal with it business-wise, social-wise, intellectually, on a lot of different ways.
Now, I know him.
He's a friend. So I can confirm that he's just as smart in person, if not smarter.
So he's a real deal.
Anyway, he's Naval. He's at...
N as in neighbor, A-V-A-L. And if you're not already following him, you're missing out on some good stuff.
So here's his tweet.
I'm going to read it, and then I'll tell you why it's so good, because it won't be obvious at first.
He said, Naval says, quote,"...does it bother anyone else that our elected officials live in a panopticon run by our intelligence agencies?" Now, what's the first impression you had when I said that?
You said to yourself, what the hell is a panopticon?
What's a panopticon?
So that's the first brilliant thing about the tweet.
Naval knows, and I'm not doing mind reading here exactly.
I know him well enough to know that he certainly knows that the vast majority of people who see that word as in 99% won't know what it means.
So the first thing you need to know is he's definitely smart enough to know you're going to have to look up the word.
That's the first smart part, because I did look up the word.
I didn't know what it meant. So what it means is a situation, like a building, for example, in which the observers can observe whoever they're observing, but the people being observed can't observe them back.
So in other words, it's a one-way observation system.
So what he's saying is, then I'll read it again.
So now that you know that a panopticon is a situation where somebody can see you, but you can't tell who's watching you, he says, does it bother anyone else that our elected officials live in a panopticon run by our intelligence agencies?
Now, here's the second brilliant part of this tweet.
The moment there's a word for it, it changes how your brain processes it.
Because if I said to you, let me tell you about a concept.
There's a concept in which some people can see you, but other people can't see you back, and that could cause some trouble.
Concepts don't hold us.
They don't move us.
They don't persuade us. They don't frame things.
But as soon as you've got a handy word for a thing, you can capture all the concept into the word.
People can look it up, and from that point on, the word is weaponized.
So what Naval did here, this is not an ordinary tweet.
This is not ordinary.
You don't see ordinary people doing something like this.
What he did by putting a word on it, panopticon, and making us look it up, and then collapsing everything that we know about the concept of people spying on us into this thought, and then it gets even better.
He puts it in the form of a question.
Very powerful. Statements you automatically want to disagree with.
If somebody makes a statement, we're spring-loaded to say, what's wrong with that statement?
I disagree, and then I'll figure out why I disagree later.
So, instead of making a statement, he puts it as a question.
Does it bother anyone else that our elected officials live in a panopticon run by our intelligence agencies?
And I have to say that after I looked it up, I had an OSHIT moment where I thought, uh, that's exactly what's happening.
As long as your intelligence people can see the politicians and the politicians can't see them back, who's running the country?
Eh? Eh?
Who's running the country?
If the intelligence people can see you and you can't see them back and they are watching and they're watching all the politicians, who's running the country?
It's not the politicians.
Because if you're watching carefully, you can always find something to take the politician off their game.
And we're watching that with the Ukraine situation.
Now maybe the Ukraine situation would have happened anyway, etc.
But as long as we live in a world in which the watchers Can suddenly break the fourth wall?
I'm using a terrible analogy here.
But as long as they can go from just watching to leaking and then or even getting the justice system involved, as long as they have that power, the politicians are not exactly in charge.
Even though those people work for them, the people who are watching, the people who can't watch back, It's the watchers who are in charge because they have the power of the leak, which we're seeing this week.
It's a very powerful thought.
It's one of the most powerful tweets maybe I've ever seen.
You know, I don't know how to rank such things, but you're not going to see one that's like a bulldozer in your head often.
Not often. That was pretty impressive.
All right. I'd like to go back to this quote by Mark Twain.
Mike Cernovich surfaced this quote the first time I ever saw it.
So I give him credit for surfacing it because it applies to just so many things.
And the Mark Twain quote is, I'm paraphrasing, but he said that we humans, we can't tell the difference between good news and bad news.
Now, isn't that true? We just can't tell the difference.
Is the economy good, or is it on the edge of a recession?
Is it good news?
Is North Korea going a great way because the President and Kim are friends, or are they building news?
I don't know. I can't tell good news from bad news.
Can you? I mean, I literally can't tell.
Now, I have opinions, but I can't really tell because I can't know the future.
I can't know all the things I don't know.
So, I'm thinking about that when I'm looking at this Ukraine situation.
What's happening with this Ukraine situation?
People are framing it in all different ways.
So the anti-Trumpers are saying, my God, it's a quid pro quo, even if he didn't directly say what Ukraine would get in return, should they look into Joe Biden?
So from the Democrats, it's all bad news, and the president has crossed the line, and that whistleblower is absolutely right to do what he did.
How could you possibly ask another country to interfere in our elections by researching your opponent who's leading in the polls?
How could you do that?
So that's one frame.
The other frame is, ah, it was a private conversation.
Even if you don't like it, the president can do that.
So the Conservatives are kind of stopping at, it kind of doesn't matter what he said.
He got elected, you didn't.
As long as what he said was legal, as far as I can tell it was, whatever he said, I don't think anybody's saying it was illegal.
As long as it was legal, as long as he had a reason, you don't have to agree with the reason.
He can ask questions.
Now, I added a third frame.
So your two frames are that he did something horribly inappropriate by asking another country to get involved with the election and with a competitor.
The second one is the conservative saying, it doesn't matter what he said, private conversation, end of story.
I'm adding the third one.
And I tweeted about it.
Comes with two questions.
Number one... Whose job is it to guarantee the integrity of presidential elections?
President Trump.
Am I right? Isn't it literally his job, as it was Obama's job to make sure that the Russians didn't interfere in 2016?
We've been saying that forever.
It's Obama's job. He didn't do his job.
And now we have a situation where the current president is now his job.
So I think we would all agree that if there's foreign interference, whether or not it could have been stopped, it's still the president's problem, still his responsibility.
No matter how it goes, that's his job.
Now let me ask you this.
Does election interference include knowing who might be influenced by another country, such as blackmail?
Of course it does. That's what we've been talking about for three years.
We've been talking about how Russia might have had some secret information on Trump, could have had control of him.
That matters, right? That's all part of securing the integrity of the election.
Because you wouldn't want to have a fair election that elected the person who's a Russian puppet, or a Chinese puppet, or a Ukrainian puppet.
Everybody's agreeing, right?
So, so far we all agree it's Trump's job to secure the elections, and that part of that job, quite legitimately, is to make sure that nobody who gets elected is being influenced by another country.
Now, with this Biden situation, obviously the other entities in the administration were not having any headway And getting any information about what could have been a compromising situation for Joe Biden, should he get elected? How is it not President Trump's job to ask the question?
Now, if he didn't need to ask the question, that would be the best situation.
Because then, let's say, the FBI or whoever's working on making sure that foreigners do not interfere, if they could have gotten Ukraine To tell them everything that needed to be known about Joe Biden and especially his son's involvement, Hunter Biden's. If the FBI could have done that on their own, probably they would have done it.
Do you think that the president would have asked eight times?
Somebody says your whataboutism is showing?
I don't know what whataboutism would apply to this case.
So... So the point is that it was literally the president's job that we all agree to know if Ukraine has an influence on the election, and we certainly would need to know if Biden was compromised by anything that Ukraine knows and we don't yet know.
Had you heard that frame before I tweeted it this morning?
Who was it who said to you?
In this whole conversation, you've been watching this wall-to-wall story.
Has anybody said to you, it's Trump's job to ask that question?
Because if the FBI can't get the answer, maybe you have to talk to the boss, the head of the country, and say, can you work with us to get this done?
He wasn't asking...
The president of Ukraine, to answer the question at the moment, he was asking him to get his people involved with Trump's people.
How else could you interpret it?
He wasn't saying, you personally go find out what's going on and you personally tell me.
How else could you interpret it?
Then can you have your people work with my people?
And my people are the right people.
FBI, whoever does this stuff.
I assume it's the FBI. So, let me ask you again, because I'm not seeing anything in the comments.
Is there anybody, before I said it, was there anybody who said, you're describing his actual job duties as president?
He is supposed to ask the president of Ukraine to help us look into something that is so well known that even the public knows there are some questions to be answered.
Now, it might be there's nothing there, but he still has to ask that question, doesn't he?
Now, some of you might say, Scott, Scott, Scott, you naive, poor bastard.
Don't you know that that's not why he's asking?
He's not asking because he wants to protect the country.
He's asking because he wants to hurt his political opponent.
So... Doesn't matter.
If he's also doing his job in exactly the way you would want him to do it.
And by the way, that is exactly the way I'd want him to do it.
I'd want him to be talking in front of witnesses, which he was.
I would want him to say, can your people work with my people?
Because this is a legitimate question, which he did.
And apparently he had to ask eight times because Ukraine wasn't catching on the first seven times.
And I don't know if they've agreed to do anything or not.
So, that's that.
I tweeted that, jokingly, that, you know, President Trump made his critics talk nonstop about Joe Biden's son, which is all good for the president.
A number of other people have made that observation.
That the more we talk about this, sort of the better it is for the president.
Because over time, your, your, let's say your outrage over the fact that the president made a phone call, because that's what it was, How outraged are you that, well, the president made a phone call.
There's not much there.
It's pretty thin.
But all of these things seem bigger because of the way they're covered and talked about in day one.
A month from now, I'm not even sure that anybody will remember this, unless there's new news about it.
So, but I, just to clarify, in my tweet, some people took it to mean that I thought it was President Trump's clever plan from the start, that he was going to, you know, put this out there and get it leaked and talk about Biden, and I don't think that's the case, but it's just what happened.
What happened was, it turned out great for the President.
This should be the end of Biden, I would think.
If you lose sound, just sign off and sign back on.
So I just saw a clip by Bill Maher, whose show runs on Friday night, so I guess there was a segment there, and I watched it, in which he talked about how the Trump supporters are always claiming that people like him have Trump derangement syndrome.
Now, first of all, I was very happy to hear him use the phrase, Trump derangement syndrome.
But he suggested that they're not the crazy ones, and that for supporting Trump, his supporters are the crazy ones.
To support that, they showed a montage of President Trump saying a bunch of things which, if you saw them out of context, sound kind of crazy.
Most of them were actually literally related to jokes.
Where you take a little bit out of context where the president was making a flourish to tell a joke.
And then you put them all together and it looks like he's acting crazy.
So the first thing you should learn is that any compilation...
Of a person's verbal gaffes makes them look crazy.
So, you know, we see it with Biden, but you also see it with the Trump compilations.
It doesn't mean either of them are crazy.
I think that Biden is incapable not because of the gaffes, but because when he's just regular talking, he looks incompetent to me.
I'm not waiting for the gaffe.
But here's my takeaway.
This is very much a protest too much situation, because if you look at the clip, you're going to say to yourself, this looks like the worst case of Trump derangement syndrome I've ever seen.
It looked like Marr is just out of material.
Material meaning criticisms of the president.
Because he kept saying he would show the president doing the president's usually, let's say, theatrical style.
And then he would say, you know, we can't normalize this.
You know, we can't allow this to be a normal president.
Do you know what he left out?
The reasons. He left out the reasons.
So the statement is, here's Trump, a bunch of clips showing Trump being Trump, just the way you expect him to be.
Most of them use clips you've already seen.
And then they say, and all the panelists are nodding their heads, oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, you can't let this be normalized.
But they leave out, because, because what?
Because our GDP will continue to be strong.
We don't want to normalize this because what?
Unemployment will stay low for every segment of the population?
No, we don't want to normalize this because we might not have enough wars.
What exactly?
What exactly are we worried about normalizing?
This is the strongest country we've ever had by far.
By far. Has the United States ever been this solid?
Now, some people would argue that the national debt is a big time bomb.
That's a separate conversation, because I'm not sure that national debt works the way you think it does.
So it's not like owing money on your credit card.
But otherwise, I would say the country is in massively good shape.
And if you're best...
If your best complaint about the president is we don't want to normalize the behavior that put us in the best shape we've ever been, you're kind of out of material.
You're out of material.
All right. There's a growing list of reasons that Elizabeth Warren can't become president.
And I think it's useful to mention them every now and then.
Because when I'm watching the Democrats say, all right, all right, okay, it's not Biden.
It turns out he's incompetent.
All right, all right. But we're still good.
We got all these other candidates.
But Biden, how about Bernie?
Oh, damn it, damn it. Bernie's too old, too.
And, you know, he's not popular enough.
He can't cross the line.
All right, all right. But Warren, oh, Warren.
So now the Democrats who are the smarter ones, the ones who can tell with clarity that Biden will not be the nominee.
That would be every smart Democrat knows that now.
And they can tell Bernie probably won't get there either.
So now they're like, ah, Warren.
Warren, yeah, Warren.
Warren's killing it.
So you see lots of positive articles about Elizabeth Warren.
Her crowd sizes are good, and the energy is good, and she's got policies, and she's really sticking it to the president.
Yeah! But there are a few problems with Elizabeth Warren.
Here are a few.
She wants aggressive movement on climate change, but she is not in favor of nuclear energy.
You can't get elected with that.
You can't. You can get elected if you were a Republican saying, I don't think climate change is a big deal, but I'm still in favor of nuclear energy.
That might be a suboptimal political opinion, but still got Trump elected, so we know it can be done.
But I would state with some confidence that nobody in the world could ever get elected Being totally afraid of climate change and knowing that we have to be aggressive, at least that would be their position, we have to be aggressive, and saying no to nuclear energy.
It's like you just haven't looked into it.
That's so disqualifying.
Now, you might say to yourself, I don't know, voters aren't that smart.
But they will be, because all you have to do is educate the voters and say, do you really care about climate change as much as Elizabeth Warren?
Yes? Well then why don't you do something that's not the dumbest thing in the world, which is what Elizabeth Warren is suggesting, which is the only thing that makes it worse.
What is the only thing that will make climate change substantially worse?
Getting rid of nuclear energy.
Every expert would tell you the same thing.
I believe 100% of experts would agree, left and right, if you get rid of nuclear energy, you're making things worse.
So how could you win on that?
It's a completely unwinnable case, especially since even Democrats don't agree with that position.
Secondly, healthcare for all.
Now, I'm in favor of figuring out a way to get this country to cover everybody, however we can get there.
I don't think it's as simple as, let's raise taxes and give everybody free healthcare.
I'd like something a little more elegant than that, a little more market-based.
But be that as it may, so I only say that to tell you I'm not giving my opinion on healthcare.
I'm just going to make a mathematical statement.
People who already have health care and like it are just not going to vote for her.
Because who wants to lose the health care they already have?
We are far more triggered and far more emotional about losing something than we are about the opportunity of gaining something.
So the risk of losing your good private health care that you like your doctor, things are working out for you, that describes at least half the country, I would think.
Those people are just not going to vote to have their own health care worth while paying more.
If you had good health care and your company is paying for it, would you ever vote to make your health care worse and for you to pay more so other people can have it?
Some people will. Some people are awesome.
Some people care about other people more than they care about themselves, or at least they live their lives that way.
So it might be a few, but you can't get elected in a general election by telling half of the country their situation is going to worsen and they're going to pay more for it.
That's her proposition on healthcare.
And again, without even criticizing whether the plan is good or bad, you can simply say that you know that for every person who gets healthcare, there are going to be X number of people who are saying, hold on, mine is just going to get worse, and I'm going to be paying more for it.
What's up with that? Can't get elected for that.
The other reason she can't get elected are she has low support from the African American community, and I'm not really seeing that changing.
Can a Democrat get elected without really, really solid support from black voters?
We'll find out, because I don't think she's going to have it, if she gets nominated.
And then she also did another disqualifying thing in the vein of Hillary.
She made a blatant anti-male comment at one of her rallies.
Her statement was, we're not here because of the men who went before her.
In fact, we're not here because of men at all.
Now, of course, the pedantic people are saying, well, but there had to be some sperm in an egg, so there was a man involved, blah, blah, blah.
But just on an emotional, how that makes you feel level.
Forget about the details of what she said.
Don't you feel that she's taken the most loserish Path anybody could ever take, which is basically pro-woman, a little bit anti-male, at least in the way it feels.
Now, I'm not reading her mind.
I don't know that she has any anti-male feelings internally.
But if she's talking in a way that makes people feel that, men are going to show up.
And they're not going to vote for her.
But here's the... I don't know why this isn't already a thing.
Maybe it'll be the first time you heard it from me.
Do you want a president who has war right in her name?
Warren. So, and I would love it if she picked a vice presidential running mate whose last name happened to be Peace, so they'd be War and Peace.
But you think to yourself, Scott, that's just her name.
That doesn't mean anything.
It kind of does.
It kind of does.
If you have the word war in front of you all day long, because that's what all reporting about the president is, Warren, Warren, Warren, do you think that that makes you more likely, somebody's asking me if I'm kidding, totally serious now, What I'm saying about her last name is completely serious, based on persuasion, based on what I know about hypnosis.
If you make the country say the word war a billion times, because they're just talking about war end, it does influence you toward war.
Now, somebody's saying nonsense, so I will accept some fact-checking on that, because I don't think anybody's ever done a study that would be so specific that you could fact-check me on this.
But let me say it this way.
If it makes you feel better, I will soften my opinion on this a little bit.
Based on everything I know about persuasion and how the brain is wired, it should be true They're using the word war continuously, just in the service of talking about the name of the president, should she become president, should bias you toward war.
It should. I mean, that would be the normal thing you would expect.
Now, how about if your last name is Trump?
Literally, a word that means win.
If you say Trump long enough, are you more likely to be biased toward winning?
Maybe. I don't know.
In the case of Trump, his brand is so strong that it probably overwhelms what the word means.
But in the case of Warren, she's a little washed down brand.
Her name is going to have more power because she's sort of a weaker brand.
She doesn't overrule her own brand.
All right. Dan Crenshaw...
has tweeted a pro-nuclear energy position and I wanted to describe to you one of the benefits of social media that's not obvious to you.
One of the problems with getting people in the government to say, yes, we need nuclear energy, is...
What's the biggest obstacle?
The biggest obstacle is that they think it will bite them in the ass, right?
They think that if they come out in favor of nuclear energy, that they're exposed.
That it's going to make them look like the out-of-touch one.
Now, Modern nuclear energy technology is the safest energy we have by far.
It's not even close. But not everybody knows that.
So if you were a politician, let's say you knew that.
Let's say you're one of the politicians who knew nuclear energy is not the less safe versions of our past, but is the safest energy source we have by far in our present.
If you knew that, you still wouldn't want to go out and say, Nuclear energy.
Even as a Republican, you might hold it back a little bit.
Because you don't know how people are going to respond to it, and you don't want to give people a reason to hate you, and maybe it's not your cause, so you're not going to go die on that beach.
Here's what people like me, and people like Michael Schellenberger, and people like Mark Schneider, and those of you who tweet us.
Here's the service that you perform.
You made it safe.
Collectively, and I would thank mostly the people who are, you know, I judge as my mentors on this, so Schellenberger and Schneider, the two most vocal Twitter users who are promoting nuclear energy.
And education so that we understand is a good deal.
So their guidance allowed me to feel comfortable tweeting my full support that we should be developing that path.
Now what happens when I tweet it?
Well, the world sees what happens to me.
Do I get slapped down?
Or do people say, okay, I wasn't up to date?
I'll take a look at that.
So, it's not just me, but everybody who retweets me, everybody who's boosting the signal of the two people I mentioned, or just boosting nuclear in general.
Social media becomes the way you test whether you can stick your head up.
You know, if you stick your head up out of the hole, do you get it lopped off, or...
Or do you get away with it?
And I think that what I and everybody who's been tweeting about the positives of nuclear energy has shown, and I think Cory Booker has shown it, and now Andrew Yang has shown it, and by the way, even if those two lose, I'm guessing neither of them will get the nomination,
but you've got to give it up for Andrew Yang and Cory Booker because they've completely changed The way we can look at climate change because of being pro-nuclear energy.
And that change allows, it makes it safe for other Democrats to say, huh, are you, Booker and Yang are both in favor of nuclear energy?
Because if you're a Democrat, no matter who you are, you look at those two guys and what do you say to yourself?
They're the smartest ones in the game.
Now, maybe not literally, because everybody running is pretty smart.
Buttigieg, very smart.
But when you're looking at Yang and Booker, the first thing you think is, okay, whatever else you think of them, whatever else you think of their policies, they're super smart.
Like super smart.
Like really, really smart.
And they're pro-nuclear.
You can't ignore that.
So here's what I think.
I think that Everybody I've mentioned, collectively, and many of you who have retweeted the same content, collectively, we just made it safe for politicians to tiptoe out and say, how about a little nuclear energy?
Wouldn't you say that two years ago, if you gave a full-throated endorsement of nuclear energy, don't you think just two years ago you would have been pretty slapped down on social media?
Don't you think? But the links and articles written by both Michael Schellenberger and then Mark Schneider doing his own content, plus lots of tweets and retweets of useful links that show you the safety of nuclear energy.
And those guys basically created a base of tweetable links so that people like me could feel completely safe going out there and say, oh, yeah, you know, if you're not looking at this, you're on a date.
And then we make it safer in an expanding circle.
We make it safer and safer.
We're still right on the edge.
And I don't think we're quite there yet, actually, to where President Trump could go in front of the public and say, not just as an afterthought.
Here's what the Republicans like to do, and it's starting to bother me a little bit, and Crenshaw did it too.
They like to throw it at the bottom of the list as an afterthought.
Yes, we need to do things to clean up our energy, and we should clean those rivers, and maybe use carbon capture and nuclear energy.
So that needs to move to the top of the list, so that if you're going to talk about anything in that domain, you start with, well, we need a robust nuclear energy industry, both for energy and for pollution reasons, for safety reasons, for CO2 reasons, if you care about that.
And if it's not a problem, you still need nuclear energy.
And, of course, we can't be competitive in space without a robust nuclear industry, which we don't have right now.
It's shrinking. So people are saying nuclear needs to be named something else.
Eh. I have mixed feelings on that.
If nuclear were any other topic, I'd say, yeah, let's talk about coming up with a clever, friendly branding for it.
But I think it has too much history.
I just don't know that you can...
I just don't know that you could ever change that.
So I see some chatter in the comments about Candace Owens ripping somebody apart at some congressional hearings.
Now, if you haven't seen the clip, it's totally worth watching.
And it doesn't even matter who it was, like who she was slapping down.
So there was some... I'm a left-leaning person who said something that, and I'm listening to it, and I'm watching Candace Owens because she's on the screen at the same time, and I'm watching her nemesis, I guess, at least in that meeting, saying things that, you know, it was obvious as soon as it came out of her mouth, I thought to myself, well, I don't think that represents Candace's opinion.
But here's the funny part, and this is why it's worth watching.
Candace is completely quiet.
While her nemesis is spouting things that are just utter BS. And basically slandering her by putting opinions in her mouth and stuff.
And you watch her sitting there.
And we've seen this before.
She gets quiet.
So she doesn't interrupt.
You would expect sometimes people would interrupt if somebody is mischaracterizing their opinion.
But she doesn't interrupt.
She just sits there.
And you can see her, like, collecting energy.
Those of you who saw it, you know what I'm talking about.
She's just like collecting her energy, and then it's her time to talk, and she just filleted.
She just filleted the person who was lying about her opinions.
And it was a beautiful thing to watch.
But what I liked was how, we've seen this before, because I've talked about almost the exact same thing in some other contexts, I forget.
But watching her collect her energy and then release it, it's just beautiful to watch.
It's just beautiful. So, alright.
That's all I've got today, I think.
Let me check my notes. That's all I've got today.
I'm going to talk to you later.
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