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Oct. 1, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
49:59
Episode 680 Scott Adams: Word-News (Not World News), Gangster Dog Whistles, Hillary’s Odds, China
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That is my cat making scratchy noises.
She's happily ripping up my hassock over on the other side of the room.
Boo, will you leave the hassock alone, please?
Just leave. That sounds like a no.
Okay, there won't be much left of that by the time I'm done.
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Fill it with your favorite liquid.
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So, let's talk about the news.
Do you remember when there used to be a thing called world news?
W-O-R-L-D. It was news.
In other words, events that were happening around the world.
But now we don't have world news.
We have word news.
W-O-R-D. Have you noticed that the news has just turned into arguing about words?
Let me give you an example. In this Ukraine situation, did President Trump ask an ally to assist in a legal matter?
Or did the President push, bully, and blackmail?
We're describing the same set of events.
If the President asked an ally to help with a legitimate legal investigation, There's no news.
That's nothing. Wouldn't that be sort of ordinary for one country to ask another for assistance in a legal investigation?
No news.
But how do you turn that no news into news?
Well, it's through the magic of words.
All you do is change what I said into blackmailed, pushed, he bullied, he bullied, he's a bully.
Did he ask for a favor?
Or was he using his secret gangster talk at the same time as his secret dog whistle?
Now, you know what the gangster talk is, right?
So this is what the Democrats are saying about the president.
He uses gangster talk.
Now, gangster talk, you don't say exactly what you want because that's understood.
So it might be something like, it should be terrible if something happened to your business.
That would be gangster talk.
Gangster's not saying, I'm going to destroy your business.
It's rather assumed in the way the words are chosen.
But the president has sort of a double difficulty, because according to the Democrats, he's always talking with a secret racist dog whistle, but also sometimes with a gangster talk.
And you add that together with what they think is his impulsiveness and mental problems that they assume he has.
And if you put those together, either one of them by themselves would make sense.
So here's, let me give you, here's my impression of the secret racist dog whistle.
Are you ready? I hope you couldn't hear that, because if you could, you're a racist.
That's the secret dog whistle there.
But then the gangster talk is said, I hope nothing happens to your business.
So sometimes he'll have to combine them because he might want to sound super racist at the same time he's threatening somebody.
So you put them together and it's like, I hope nothing happens to your business.
And there you've got the racist talk, the secret double racist signal, and it's overlapped with the gangster talk, and then you could have both of them at the same time.
So, that's what the Democrats are seeing.
And it looks to me like everything that we're seeing is word news.
Now, I'm going to introduce a rule of thumb.
Are you ready? This would be a rule of thumb that I'm not going to say is predictive yet.
It's something I've got my eye on, and I'm going to watch it for a few years to see if it's predictive.
And it goes like this.
If there's an event in the news that everybody agrees on the facts, but they're using different words to describe it, and some of those words make you sound like it's terrible, But other words that also describe it accurately make it sound not so terrible.
It's probably not terrible.
That's my rule. Now, I'm not sure yet if that's predictive.
I'm just sort of noticing the pattern for the first time, so kind of keep an eye on that.
Just track that for a while.
See if it seems to be predictive or not.
This is not scientific, of course, but it feels to me that if there's anything that we're all seeing and we agree on the factual part, yes, there was a phone call.
Yes, the president said these words.
You know, that sort of thing.
We agree on the facts.
If you could describe that in innocent language without lying, there's no lie to the following thing I'm going to say.
The president spoke to an ally and asked the ally to help on a legal matter that has great importance to the country.
True? That's an accurate description of what he did.
Another description would be that he blackmailed and bullied an ally to help him win re-election.
Those things seem to match the facts.
I mean, it's the same set of facts, but one of them is a crime or a crime-ish or treason-ish or just bad form or something.
And the other one is just president doing what presidents do, just doing his job.
I think if you have a problem that can be described in ordinary words, as well as extraordinary words, you kind of have to favor the ordinary explanation.
All right. I see that Democrats are quite happy because the number of people, both GOP and Democrats, who are in favor of impeachment, or at least the impeachment process, is way up, 47%.
So 47%, including a number of Republicans, have moved over to the impeachment preference side.
Is that what you think it is?
Now this is...
I don't know for sure yet, but this might not be what you think it is.
Here's why. I also kind of want an impeachment.
I'm not...
I don't want the president removed, but I kind of dig the idea of an impeachment.
Because I think it's going to be interesting, and I think the president will win by the biggest landslide any president ever won by, if there's an impeachment.
Because I don't see any chance that the Senate will then, you know, vote to make it any kind of a job-losing situation.
But impeachment is starting to feel like deplorables to me.
It started down as the worst thing that could ever happen.
Oh, impeachment, my God.
That would be the worst thing that ever happened.
But maybe it's my imagination, but it seems to be morphing into just a stupid thing that Democrats say that helps the President raise funds, because he raised a whole bunch of money for his re-election, and probably will lead to a landslide, as well as turning over the Congress to the Republicans.
I feel like when people answer that question, do you want an impeachment?
Some people say, hell yeah, I want that guy impeached.
But I wonder if there aren't other people like me who say some version of this.
Yeah, I love that impeachment.
Try it. Try it.
See what happens. See what happens.
So, It would be hard to parse that out and find out why people will say what they want.
I think some people say, well, if there's an impeachment, then everybody gets to ask questions, and the whole world will see what's happening, and that will be good for the president.
It's just add transparency to an icky process.
Why not? Can you think of any other president, besides Bill Clinton, I suppose, who could get impeached and it would help him?
Think about it. Is there any other president who could get impeached and would end up helping him?
Maybe not. He might be the only one.
So this is another example of being careful about history repeats.
Because which history is going to repeat?
Is it going to be the Nixon history or the Bill Clinton history?
They're kind of different, right? So every time anybody says history repeats or they make an appeal to history repeating, even if they don't use the words, I always say, maybe not, because history doesn't repeat.
Somebody asked, is Hillary running?
And so I guess Steve Bannon said, It was on, what, the Trish Regan show, and he said, I want to get his exact quote, he said that Hillary Clinton is running, again, and, quote, trying to decide how to fit her way in.
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that Hillary is running, and she's trying to figure out how to insert herself in the process?
Here's what I believe.
I believe Steve Bannon wants people to think that.
Alright. Every time I see Steve Bannon say anything...
I automatically start to laugh.
Because you know he's playing on a different level, right?
There's no way that Steve Bannon thinks, I don't think anyway, I don't believe, I'm not reading his mind, so here I'm in speculative territory here.
Could be wrong.
Could be wrong. But I think when Steve Bannon says Hillary Clinton is running again, that that's for the benefit of just messing with the Democrats.
What happens to your funding if you're...
Let's say you're Elizabeth Warren and the rumor comes around that Hillary might be running.
What happens to your funding?
It dries up.
Because people who have big money who think Hillary might run, they're going to hold on to their money.
It's so clever.
Steve Bannon. I tell you, Steve Bannon might be the most underrated...
Mind in all of politics.
Because I think most people just looked at this as a surface thing.
It's like, whoa, Steve Bannon, he's usually right about a lot of stuff, and he thinks Hillary Clinton is running again, and she's just trying to fit her way in.
Well, maybe he thinks that.
It's not impossible.
He might actually think that.
But I'll tell you what makes sense.
It's a real good way to mess with the Democrats.
It's a really good way.
In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a better way to mess with the Democrats than to say you're pretty sure Hillary's getting back in the game.
It's just wonderfully, it's wonderfully effective.
So, kudos to Steve Bannon for the play of the day.
And if you want my opinion, there isn't the slightest chance that Hillary's running.
But I love from the persuasion, you know, sort of political dirty tricks perspective that he said that.
He put it out there like it's real.
Rosie O'Donnell ran a little Twitter poll.
Now, Twitter polls, of course, are not scientific.
You just get your own. Whoever follows you on Twitter are the ones who answer, so it's not very scientific.
And she asked how many people think Trump should be impeached, and she got 89% to say Trump should be impeached.
And I thought to myself, that's a perfect snapshot of why we don't agree on reality, because the people who follow Rosie...
As one would expect, 90% of them think the president should be impeached.
So Rosie probably lives in a bubble in which she thinks, oh sure, you know, I know it's just my followers answering this question, but it's probably true that at least 70% or 75% want the president impeached.
Isn't that true? It must be.
No. Rosie, you're living in a little bubble.
And we're all in our own bubbles.
But when you read my book, Loser Think, it comes out in a few weeks.
Maybe it'll help you out.
One of the most fun pieces of news today is that there's a Sam Harris podcast in which he actually corrects one of his guests who brings up the fine people hoax.
So one of his guests states as fact that the president said that the neo-Nazis were fine people.
Sam Harris waits until the guest finishes his point and then fact checks him and tells him that in fact there was violence on both sides and the president did call it out.
And he also called out that the president condemned the racists and neo-Nazis in that same statement that his guest was referring to.
So in other words, he fact-checked them on the fine people hoax.
Did you see that coming?
For those of you who don't know, there's a little history to this.
I appeared on Sam Harris's podcast, 2017?
2016? I'm forgetting the exact date.
But it was after Trump had been elected.
And Sam was still in the Trump is going to ruin everything mode.
And I came on his show to be the voice of reason on the pro-Trump side, if you can put it that way.
And we had a very civil conversation.
Which, as you might imagine, everybody who was anti-Trump said, Sam Harris mopped the floor with Scott because of his superior intellect and all of his good points.
And then, of course, everybody who was more favorably disposed toward my opinions said that I completely Dominated and won the day with my clever points and clear insights.
Now, of course, neither of those things is true, probably.
It's probably more true if people just took sides with whoever they agreed with.
But I said at the time, you know, after the interview, I said at the time that this was not a normal interaction in the sense that Sam Harris is not a normal pundit or normal observer or normal intellect.
He's not normal. I mean that in a good way.
He is capable of changing his mind based on data and facts and, you know, logic and reason and all that stuff.
How many people do you know, have you ever seen change their mind on anything important?
It's, like, really rare.
So somebody's going to have to fact check me, but I think we talked about the fine people hoax on there.
And I think I debunked it on that show.
I'm a little off on my chronology, so I think it had already happened and that was part of the topic.
But the point is that I said at the time that Sam Harris would come to understand at least the pro-Trump perspective.
And that he would find his way out of Trump derangement syndrome, which from the observer's perspective looked like what was happening.
Now, I'm not going to declare that anybody's in or out of Trump derangement syndrome, but I would say that is a gigantic intellectual accomplishment for him.
It's so rare to see somebody take a position That is based on logic and rationality and disagrees with what you would say would be his side, whether he labels it that way or not, I'm not sure. But it's rare.
I just want to call it out and show him some respect for that.
Now, of course, he still has harsh opinions about Trump on a number of areas, but at least those are based on solid...
Observation. Solid opinion, solid preference about how things should go.
I have a completely different opinion about those things, because those are opinions.
Everybody can have one.
But being able to change your mind, or at least have clarity on something that your entire team believes is true, but the facts say is false, is very rare.
I just have to call that out and compliment it.
China continues to grind away at Hong Kong.
The news is starting to get repetitive.
I'm getting a little bored with the Hong Kong news, and that's not a good thing.
Because, remember, China has the long game.
They're just going to grind away at Hong Kong until they get everything they want.
It might take a year.
It might take a month.
It might take 25 years.
But China is going to get what they want out of Hong Kong, one way or another.
They can do it the slow way or the fast way.
I would say the Hong Kong situation could be a good proxy for whether we should do any kind of trade deal with China versus decoupling.
Now decoupling doesn't mean you do it today.
It just means you stop coupling.
So there are things that are in China that probably would stay there.
In other words, manufacturing and stuff.
So there's some things that are too hard to decouple.
And I wouldn't have a big problem with any company who said, ah, we'll go on a business if we move our plant.
We can't do that. I would say, okay, I get that.
But you saw that Apple just decided to build one of their Macintosh plants in Texas.
So they chose America as their place to build.
What does Texas have a lot of?
Immigrants. So, that might be a perfect solution.
So, I would like to also compliment Apple.
Because I think Apple made the right choice.
Now, I don't know the economics.
I don't know if they left any money on the table by not putting their production offshore.
Maybe they did. Maybe they did.
They may have left some money on the table by bringing it home.
But was it the right choice?
Absolutely. Absolutely. When I saw that, the president actually tweeted it because he was pretty happy about it.
When I saw that Apple had decided that they would build this factory in America, my immediate reaction was I wanted to go buy something from Apple.
I just didn't need anything.
If I had needed anything, I would have actually picked up my device, you know, Amazon.com or whatever, and I would have bought an Apple product.
I'm that happy with them.
Because if they're on my team, they're supporting America in addition to supporting their...
Oh, and by the way, I should say I own Apple stock.
So I have a sizable chunk of Apple stock.
So I'm not objective. I always forget to mention that sort of thing.
I'm not very professional that way.
But I do own stock.
I'm just a stockholder of Apple.
So I would like them to do well.
And this was certainly an example of them doing well.
For the country, and I think you should help them as a product.
I think we should, we as buyers, and remember, I'm a stockholder, so I'm not unbiased here.
We as consumers should say, that's a check mark in your favor, Apple.
Maybe if you're on the fence, that should push you over to buy their products.
Anyway, my point about Hong Kong is that I think Hong Kong needs to be one of the major triggers about whether we ever sign a deal with China.
I don't believe we should sign any kind of a trade deal with China, ever, as long as the Hong Kong situation is going against Hong Kong, because they're violating a major business agreement by doing that.
You can't do a deal with somebody who's violating a big public agreement of that importance right in front of the world.
That's not a country you can do business with because they have not demonstrated the minimum requirement of doing business, which is some amount of predictability.
If they make a deal, they'll stick with it.
They're doing the opposite.
But the other thing, of course, I say this all the time, is as long as their big fentanyl dealers are alive and we know their names and we know where they live and they're free people, You can't do a deal with that country.
That's a country you cannot do business with.
You have to decouple. So where Apple gets kudos for building in America, if you hear of any company This is my offer to you.
If you hear of any company who is making a new decision, not a decision that's already in the pipeline, because it's hard to take things back once you get going, and I would understand that, that the company has some duty to their shareholders, etc.
But if you hear somebody makes a new decision that's not already in the pipeline to move production to China, would you let me know?
Just let me know. Tweet at me.
Send me an email. Because I might be part of the solution to embarrassing them to change their mind.
So look for that.
There may or may not be an upcoming Sunday Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert's company talks about moving production to Elbonia.
And Dilbert might be reminding the boss about Elbonia's bad track record of horrible, horrible things.
Some people are going to say to themselves, that looks a lot like China there.
To which I say, that's not China, that's Elbonia.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Why would you say that Elbonia is like China just because Elbonia is shipping lots of illegal drugs to this country and killing people?
Why would you say that's like China?
Why would you say, just because in the comic I say Elbonia doesn't keep their deals, why would you say that's like China?
I'm talking about Elbonia.
If you're going to make it about China, that's on you.
But the Elbonians may be building concentration camps and moving their dissidents into it.
That's what the Elbonians do.
Don't conflate this with what the Chinese are doing.
I'm only talking about Elbonia.
Elbonia is a bad, bad place.
Sending drugs, building concentration camps to put their people in it, the dissenters.
I mean, Elbonia is just a bad, bad place.
And they don't keep their deals. They steal intellectual property.
Did you know that? Elbonia steals intellectual property.
So in the world of Dilber, Elbonia is no longer a place that you can invest because of all those things they're doing.
Now, here's something you don't know.
Somebody says I'm confused now.
Here's something you don't know.
For decades, managers and CEOs have written to me and said some version of this by email usually.
Damn you, Scott.
I was planning to introduce a program or a policy and I saw you mocking it in a Dilbert comic and now I can't do it because you've made a laughing stock of my plans.
Now usually they're laughing when they say it, but I really did actually make them cancel their plans.
That's a real thing.
I've been hearing it for years and years and years.
The power of mocking cannot be understated.
So I now have a comic about Elbonia, but I can see how some people would incorrectly think it's about China.
I don't know what you're thinking. But I can imagine that when that comic is published, I think it's in a month or something, when that comic is published, I can imagine...
People sending that to their boss, if their boss decides to invest in China, because they might say, this is the sort of thing a person might say, hey, look at this comic about Elbonia.
Does it remind you of anything you're doing?
Because if you do it, you can't say you weren't warned.
Can't say you didn't know what you were doing.
So in my view...
The movement of manufacturing to China from the United States is probably done.
And I don't think you need to decouple hard in terms of just closing plants and moving them back, because that's expensive, and we don't need to shoot ourselves in the foot to do what we need to do.
We simply need to do a soft decoupling.
So the soft decoupling is that it is now Toxic for any manufacturing entity from the United States to move into China if they're making the decision based on current knowledge.
It's going to be toxic.
And trust me, I'm going to keep it toxic.
So we got that going on.
Evangelical Pastor Robert Jeffries...
From Texas, he warned that if Trump were successfully removed from office, civil war would follow, and President Trump tweeted that out.
Civil war would follow.
So CNN runs an opinion piece in which the opinionator says this.
This is just part of it.
In the world of white power, what?
In the world of white power.
What the hell does that mean?
In the world of white power?
I didn't know I was in a world of white power, but okay.
Where a civil war is a race war.
What? What?
Why would a civil war be a race war?
Whose idea is that?
Is there anybody talking about a race war?
I mean, there's a race war in terms of, you know, people talking on television, but are you and your neighbors getting tense with each other?
You know, is your co-worker who's a different ethnicity, are you getting into it?
Maybe it might turn violent?
No. No.
There's nothing like that happening in the real world.
Nothing. Not even the slightest amount of it.
If there were ever to be a civil war, it's going to be conservatives, Republicans against left-leaning people.
But it's definitely not going to be a race war.
What Republican wants a race war?
The crazy ones? There's crazy people on both sides.
I'm sure you can find a crazy Democrat and a crazy Republican.
Three or four of them will want to go off and have a race war with each other.
But count me out.
Count me out if there's a race war.
Can I opt out now?
There's no frickin' way this country's citizens...
Won a race war or would participate in one.
Yeah, there are crazy, you know, mass shooters who are going to do things and have, they'll have their manifestos and stuff.
Sure, sure, that's going to happen.
Can't stop the crazy people from doing what crazy people do.
But seriously, we are so far from a race war in this country.
Why? Because we don't want one.
Nobody wants one. Zero people want a race war.
Zero! Only just crazy people, and nobody listens to them anyway.
So, the thought that there's some actual risk of a race war in this country is so disconnected from the ground, you know, from real people.
Have you ever met a real person that wants a race war?
It's ridiculous. There's no real person who wants a race whore, unless that person is also batshit crazy.
Those people exist, but not normal people.
You need a lot of normal people to think it's a good idea before it's going to happen.
That's not going to happen.
So did you notice that the Trump administration is backing reparations for slavery?
I'm just going to leave that there for a moment.
Why, you didn't notice?
You didn't notice that the Trump administration strongly backed reparations?
I'm just leaving that there for a moment while you chew on it.
And people are saying, what?
I missed that story.
Yes, you did. You missed that story.
Let me tell you that story.
So, apparently the Trump administration, and I don't know where this is in terms of Becoming real versus a proposal.
So somewhere in the pipeline is the idea that historically black colleges would be fully funded by the government.
In other words...
Those historically black colleges, so my understanding is there are several.
I don't know how many there are.
Is there fewer than 12?
Can somebody give me a number on that?
It's like a handful plus, something like that, of these colleges that are historically black, meaning that you don't have to be black to go to these colleges, of course, because we don't have...
You know, racial requirements for college.
But traditionally they had been black-only colleges.
They have evolved to really good institutions, I hear.
And they have mostly black students.
And the government, the Trump administration, has decided to at least push the idea of fully funding them.
I don't know how approved that is, but I can't imagine the Democrats disagreeing, right?
Now, I will take you back to a proposal that I made some time ago in writing.
I said, reparations in any kind of a normal way where you write a check from some part of the citizens to another part of the citizens could never work.
There's no... There's no scenario.
Oh, by the way, the full funding for the historically black colleges wasn't the only thing.
There was also some kind of program to help low-income people in general.
So you wouldn't have to be black to go to a black college.
And you wouldn't have to be black to take advantage of the other stuff that they're proposing for helping the low-income people go to college.
But anyway, back to my point. I had suggested that there might be some way to do something that looks like reparations without it being the ugly kind where you're just writing a check.
Because that just wouldn't work and that would cause social unrest.
And I had suggested...
That one way to do it might be for a special tax on the rich, let's say top 1%, which I would be, so I'm recommending taxing myself here, to make something like a 25-year commitment that if you're black you can go to college for free.
And the idea is that you put a 25-year time on it, so that says this is not forever.
We expect this to time out, but for one generation or so, You would make sure that if you wanted an education, you knew how to get it and you could afford it.
Now, I also said that you can't do that either, unless you're also making sure that low-income people of every ethnicity are getting helped as well.
So, what you see is that there's a little focus on the historically black colleges, but remember, you don't have to be black to go there.
So other people can go there, and they would be fully funded, as I understand the program.
And in addition, they would have these other programs that no matter what color you are, you also could get help going to college.
So collectively, I would say that the Trump administration is implementing reparations.
Because it is exactly...
I think it's exactly...
What I recommended, I don't know, a year or two ago, as the only way to sort of finesse the situation that is hard to finesse.
Now, I don't think that the administration could or should ever sell it to the base as reparations.
That would be politically unwise.
But, in terms of addressing the same psychological and financial and very real You know, disparities that have happened because of historical reasons.
I think that's a pretty reasonable way to go because education is the doorway for success for everybody.
And even if you can't get into college, knowing that other black people did get into college is going to create more jobs, you know, they're going to start companies, they're going to be another way, another source for people to get jobs, etc.
So, While you weren't paying attention, the Trump administration basically just wrapped up the black vote.
Not in terms of getting a majority of them.
But they have an argument now that they've done more for the black community than maybe anybody except Lyndon Johnson or something.
Am I wrong? Because if you look at the First Step Act, you know, is that what it's called?
The helping people get out of college, I'm sorry, get out of jail and get trained, and then you add that to the support for the historically black colleges, along with support for, you know, everybody to get a better education.
That's pretty solid stuff.
It's pretty solid.
How would you like to be Elizabeth Warren running against that when you already have such low African-American support?
Tell me what Elizabeth Warren did for the black community.
How about nothing?
I mean, I don't know. Maybe she did.
I shouldn't say that.
Let me back up to a factual statement that I can actually support, because maybe she did as a senator or as a lawyer or something.
She may have done a lot. I don't know.
But in terms of running for president, the president's got a good-looking portfolio now, right?
Unemployment looking great.
The Jail First Step Act looks great.
Historical black colleges, it's looking pretty strong.
Could he do more?
Maybe. Now, you've also noticed that there seems to be a stark reduction in police shootings of unarmed black men.
It could be just a coincidental lull.
Could be because the news is covering things differently.
It could be because the police are finding better, smarter ways to avoid violence.
I don't know why, but there aren't at the moment any high-profile stories of that kind, where people rally around a story, and we're kind of story-free at the moment.
If you say to yourself, what's the last story?
That was sort of a black versus white story.
It turned out to be a fake story.
There was a 12-year-old girl who told the story of her white classmates, held her down and cut off her dreadlocks, became a national story, and then her parents recently came out and said, no, she made the whole thing up.
Now, first of all, respect to the parents.
Thank you. Thank you, parents, for doing what you do to make the world a better place.
So the parents of this girl, stand-up citizens, I mean, I only know about this one thing, but that is worthy of your respect, that they corrected a wrong unambiguously.
They just corrected it. Boom.
No ambiguity.
They just fixed it. Boom.
All right? So respect to the parents.
But that's the last story you heard that was sort of a national story about black versus white.
I think it's a made-up problem.
Once you hear Sam Harris say, yeah, the president did condemn the racists, it's being reported wrong, essentially.
So you hear that.
And then let me ask you this.
Now that we're talking about all this Ukraine stuff, hasn't the racist thing just sort of gone away?
Do you notice that people are not doing the racist attack on the president as their main attack because they got this little Ukraine thing?
So let me ask you this.
If anything that the Democrats thought about the president being racist, if any of that were true, Why weren't they pushing for impeachment on that?
Would it not be sufficient if you had an actual racist in office?
Would it not be sufficient to impeach based on that?
You know it would. Of course it would.
Of course it would. Because remember, impeachment is a political process, and certainly supporting, you know, if they believed it were true, they were supporting white supremacists, you could pretty reasonably come up with a case for impeachment, I think. But the reason that is not a case for impeachment, and it's not even on the list, is because it wouldn't hold up to scrutiny.
The thing that they have with this Ukraine situation is that they believe they have the facts on their side.
That's why they're focusing on this, because they're saying, we can prove he made a phone call, and we can prove he asked for something, and we can prove that the funds were being withheld during that time.
So finally they have something that, although it's subject to interpretation of what was going on, at least there are actual facts.
So this is the best case they've ever had, and it's completely empty and stupid and void of reason.
So ask yourself, how solid was the, he's a white supremacist, talking about the president, how solid was that attack that they've abandoned it completely for this ridiculous Ukraine thing, that there isn't any chance in the world the president is going to be removed for office for that?
I mean, really, none.
Just think about it.
How does their belief that the president is literally a racist, how did that just go away?
How is that not the top thing you're worrying about every day?
Well, if it were real, you'd be worrying about it every day.
But they know it isn't real.
They know that. All right.
I tweeted a link to an organization in San Francisco called Delancey Street.
It's the Delancey Street Foundation.
You can see it in my Twitter.
Delancey. D-E-L-A-N-C-E-Y. They have a model for treating addicts in which they have basically they built a city within a city and my understanding is you probably can't leave You know, without some kind of conditions, but you check yourself in, it's voluntary, and you're taught a trade, but they keep you there for like four years.
So getting into Delancey Street could be a four-year commitment on average.
I think you could stay there different amounts of time because it's voluntary.
But people will stay there for years voluntarily because they're learning a trade or two.
There's a whole bunch of trades that they teach them.
But they also teach them how to live together without using.
And it seems to be one of the more successful programs.
So my ex-wife, Shelly, Who lost her son to addiction, and fentanyl was in his body.
We don't know the exact mix of chemicals, but if you die of a drug overdose and you have fentanyl in your body, well, it's probably the fentanyl, probably not the beer.
So Shelly, my ex-wife, did a fundraiser at GoFundMe that's completed now, In which she raised, I think, about $11,000 for Delancey Street, and she went down there and presented it on the anniversary of my stepson's death.
Now, they run, I think, entirely by donations, I think.
I don't believe that they charge anybody to be there, which is also part of the magic, because if you're an addict, what are the chances you can afford, I don't know, $30,000 a month for an addiction treatment?
Pretty low. So, Delancey Street has been around since I think the early 70s.
I knew about them when I lived in San Francisco in the 70s.
And they were always spoken of with reverence.
I've been hearing about them for literally however many years that is from the 70s.
But whenever I hear about them, it's with reverence.
I have not heard, and now I'm not the expert...
But I've never heard any critique of their method, except that obviously not every addict can be cured.
But now after decades of running, they've refined their model, apparently, and they're starting to clone it.
So they're cloning their whole system, if you will.
And it's a system.
That's what I love about it.
They've developed a little system where they can isolate you, put you with the right people, the right inputs, train you, give you motivation for life, all that stuff.
And now they're cloning it and taking it around the country.
Somebody smarter than me probably should be looking into this.
So I copied Dr.
Drew on that and Michael Schellenberger, who are both deeply involved in the California homelessness crisis.
Now, to be clear, California homelessness probably has a lot to do with mental illness.
I don't believe the Delancey Street model, I could be wrong about this, but I don't think they're optimized for mental illness.
So that's a whole population that I don't know any kind of solution for.
So, Dr. Drew, we're just talking about you and my tweet about Delancey Street.
As a possible model for treating addiction, I'd have to know more about it, but everything I hear about them is good.
So Delancey Street in San Francisco, take a look at it.
They have a button for donations.
I'm not going to ask you to donate because...
Every time I do that, somebody says it's some kind of a scam.
So use your own judgment on anything like that.
All right. What I like about Delancey Street in particular is that it's a 40-plus year experiment in which I'm sure they have tweaked and tweaked and adjusted and changed.
They've added different kinds of skills and vocational training to it.
They really kind of know what works and what doesn't at this point, and so now they're in the cloning phase.
Now, if I were to describe a perfect system for solving anything, it would look like this.
Lots of people in different places try different things.
The things that don't work, we stop doing.
The things that do work, we keep doing, and we tweak it.
And once we're pretty, pretty sure that it works, or at least it works better than the other things, Then you clone it.
So Delancey Street is at the cloning stage.
That's a big deal.
If you reach the cloning stage where you're reproducing your system in other places, it means you have something.
And so, kudos to Delancey Street for doing the hard work.
I mean, that's the hard work.
I have so much respect For people who do real hard work, like they're actually on the street, they're picking up the trash, they're working with the addicts, they're working with the homeless.
I have so much respect for people who will do that kind of work, because frankly I wouldn't be up to it.
Apparently the country has, the country, the government, Homeland Defense, has contracted for a drone bubble defense on the border.
So we actually have technologies now in which they can scan for drones and then if a drone is detected anywhere within the bubble, you know, on the border or anywhere else.
So if a drone is detected, they actually They initiate anti-drone defenses, I think automatically.
There might be a human involved, but it would happen quickly in any event.
I think there's a three-minute lag time from spotting the drone to taking it down.
And they take it down, I believe, electronically.
So they take out its electronic controls and they just bring it safely to the ground.
So I just mention that because it's...
Kind of amazing. It's amazing that there is an anti-drone technology that works well enough that we're actually building defenses against it.
Somebody says they hired Delancey Street as movers and they were very professional.
Yeah. The job of being movers is one of the things Delancey Street trains, and I think that's actually, yeah, I think the way they fund their program, if I'm not wrong, is that they have their own restaurant where people learn to do the restaurant jobs, you know, the ex-addicts, or I guess their current addicts, and that's all part of paying the bills.
So that moving company, I think, is the same thing.
I might be wrong about that, but I think that's how they pay for stuff.
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