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Oct. 8, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
54:43
Episode 687 Scott Adams: Kurds and South Park
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Time Text
Hey, everybody!
Come on in here.
That's my printer, you hear?
Printing off my notes.
Now, I know why you're here.
Yeah, I do. It's for the simultaneous sip.
You came to the right place.
You don't need much.
Tyler. Hey, Arlene, John, good to see you all.
And if you're prepared, you may already have a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein, a chalice, a decorative thermos, a flask, a canteen, a grail, a goblet, a vessel of any kind, and fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit, the thing that makes everything better.
The simultaneous sip.
Go! Oh, one of the best ones ever.
Now, do you have a thing at your home or workplace called a printer?
A printer, where things from the internet can be put on paper and then you can look at them.
I've got one of those.
And I almost throw it off my second floor balcony every time I use it.
And this is just about every printer I've ever owned.
I want to throw them all off the second floor balcony.
Because I've never been able to get a printer that would print out paper and then I could pick it up where it was printed and then I could use it.
I've never been able to do that in years and years.
Only two things happen.
One is that the printer is in a place where somebody else will place something in front of the paper output, and then the paper will bunch up because there's something in the way.
Or I'll do it.
I'll move it and it'll bunch up and it'll all stick.
Or, there's a second possibility.
If you don't have your printer where the printer will come out and it'll bunch up and not be able to print anything, you have to do method two, which is what I've moved to, you can see here, where you print it so that it all falls on the floor.
Now, that looks to you like a mistake.
It's not. To print something is onto the floor.
Because every other way, it'll bunch up, it'll catch on something, it'll catch on the other paper.
So I actually have my printers all print on the floor.
And if you don't mind, I'll have to pick them up off the floor now.
Because these are my notes for the show.
I'm pretty sure that somebody should invent a printer that would print And then put the paper near the printer in some way that's not all balled up in the ball.
All right. That's enough about that and CVS receipts.
People keep sending me memes of people doing ridiculous things with their six-foot-long CVS receipts, which is pretty hilarious.
Did you all see the apology from...
From South Park to China.
So South Park did an episode mocking China.
And I gotta tell you, I saw the episode.
It was brutal.
It was really brutal.
And so China has banned South Park from China.
Now when I watched the episode, I said to myself, I think I'm watching the last episode that the Chinese will see, because it was pretty obvious If you saw the episode, and by the way, you absolutely should watch the episode, even if you don't care about South Park.
I think it's one of the latest ones, maybe it was last week's.
You should see it for its political significance.
You should see it for its importance, you know, its actual political importance.
Global significance.
Because there are a lot of people who found out about China for the first time from South Park.
And South Park, they did not hold back.
They, as is their way, they did not, let's say they did not moderate their opinions.
So they were freaking brutal.
And here's their apology.
So China bans South Park.
So Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, they issued an official apology.
And it says, quote, like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts.
We too love money more than freedom and democracy.
Ouch! They're just taking the NBA and just throwing them under the bus and like, back up, forward, back up, forward.
We too love money more than freedom and democracy.
Xi, President Xi, doesn't look just like Winnie the Pooh at all.
So, if you don't know that reference, apparently...
There's some unflattering comparison of the way Winnie the Pooh looks, just physically, to the way President Xi looks, so much so that Winnie the Pooh was banned in China.
So that's part of what the South Park episode is about, is Winnie the Pooh.
It's pretty hilarious.
So she doesn't look like Winnie the Pooh at all.
Tune into our 300th episode this Wednesday at 10.
So they're using their apology to promote their 300th episode.
Everything about this is right.
Long live the great Communist Party of China.
May this autumn's sorghum harvest be bountiful.
We good now, China? We good now, China?
So, I wouldn't be looking for South Park to be playing in China anytime soon.
What will this do to the total viewership of this one episode of South Park?
Well, if the world works the way I want it to, this will be the most watched episode of South Park in China.
Because if you want something to be watched, Try banning it in only your country.
See how that does to your viewership.
See what that does.
So something tells me that there's going to be a whole lot of viewing of that episode.
So good job for the South Park people.
We're getting closer and closer to decoupling from China because I think it's just becoming more and more clear that whatever they got going on over there We don't want any of that.
So there's this weird situation shaping up where I think there are going to be two planet Earths.
There's going to be one planet Earth that's everything but China and then there's going to be sort of a Chinese bubble where China probably has the resources and the will to literally seal up China so that the Chinese don't know what's happening in the rest of the world and maybe we don't know what's happening in China.
We may actually end up having to just wall it off.
In other words, they would wall themselves off because they wouldn't be able to control their population if the population had access to information.
Yeah, China might not survive access to information.
Think about that.
In order for China to survive...
They have to cut off their population from information.
That's like North Korea, same thing.
All right, what did I tell you about the situation with removing troops from Syria near the border of Turkey?
So the president announced he was going to let Turkey handle this border region that we had some troops in.
And what did the world do?
The world did something like this.
And what did I say?
I said, fog of war.
Wait 48 hours.
This probably isn't what you think it is.
There's probably more information.
What happened within 48 hours?
Story totally changed.
Now, when I say totally changed, I mean there were some significant facts that we didn't know before.
Number one, it was only 50 people.
50 people.
That was the total number of troops we were talking about.
Let me ask you this.
Were those 50 people protecting that entire area from the army of Turkey?
Well... Not exactly.
I mean, it probably helped, because Turkey wouldn't want to kill any of our troops, and if they were there, maybe that was a little bit of a gaining factor.
But, I don't feel as though the story is the same when you say there were 50 people.
Does it feel the same as when you thought we were withdrawing, you know, some major fighting force?
What were the 50 people doing anyway?
They weren't fighting much, right?
Well, I don't know how much fighting they were doing, but 50 people can't do that much in terms of being an army.
So that was the first thing we learned.
The second thing we learned fairly quickly is that the president had said, he said it on Twitter so that Turkey could hear it, and I'm sure Turkey had already heard it, That if they did something that crossed the line, using the president's language, that he would, quote, obliterate their economy.
The president threatened to obliterate the economy of Turkey, and then he said he's done it before, and he has.
He has actually obliterated the economy of Turkey when he was trying to get back the pastor, whoever it was.
He actually crashed their economy.
Fairly quickly, and they gave up their hostage, or prisoner, or political prisoner, or whatever he was.
I forget his name. He was the religious guy.
Anyway, I thought those were the two things you needed to know.
It was only 50 people, and then he had threatened Turkey that if they crossed the line, meaning do something horrible against the Kurds, etc., that he would crash your economy.
Is that enough? Well, here's the thing.
If you see people on TV who have...
Somebody asked me if my polyps are recurring.
I went off my meds yesterday, so yes.
So yes, you're seeing me getting allergy symptoms that are not actually allergy.
It's another story.
I don't want to get into that. Anyway.
So, here's my thing about the situation.
It didn't look like you thought it did.
Coincidentally, the same day that that story happened was when my article in the Wall Street Journal came out.
In the Wall Street Journal article, I said that one of the things you should do to avoid loser think is to wait 24 to 48 hours after a story like that breaks to see if you have all the facts because you almost never do.
Sure enough, The simulation served up exactly, exactly the story type that my article was about.
And it showed the model as clearly as you can see the model.
That your first reaction was completely lacking in important details.
Now, I wanted to show you one of the best tweets about this that I'm sure I printed out.
Oh, man.
How did I not print that out?
What is wrong with me?
Oh, here it is. This is from Representative Matt Gaetz.
So you probably know Matt Gaetz.
It's spelled G-A-E-T-Z, Matt Gaetz.
So you see him often defending the president.
He's on Fox News all the time.
So he's one of the most visible politicians who are pro-Trump.
I would also say, I'm going to have to say, I've been watching him now for a few years, and he has become probably the most effective politician who's on the right and that you see often.
Of the people that you see on TV, etc., the ones that you're aware of, I think he's become the most effective one.
And here's a good example of this.
Here's his tweet defending the president's decision about Syria, pulling out the 50 troops.
And watch how clever this is.
So Matt Gaetz tweets, so the nation with, quote, no-fault divorce is supposed to stay married to the Syrian Kurds forever?
And I'll talk about this.
This is just a brilliant opening to a tweet.
And he says, we gave them weapons, money, and training to run ISIS out of their region.
Emphasis on their. To run ISIS out of their region.
Now we are supposed to entangle ourselves in their 400 plus year conflict with the Turks?
Do we share values?
Now, everything about this tweet is right.
This is really high level...
Persuasive, just really good stuff.
Let me tell you what's good about it.
First of all, it's three questions, not three statements.
If you ask, if you make three statements that somebody is primed to disagree with, and they're primed because they're on the other team.
So if it doesn't matter who says it, the other team says, you make a statement, I say it's false.
You say A, I say A is not true.
So the first thing he does right is he puts three questions in his tweets instead of three statements.
And they're three good questions.
Now they have to be the right questions or that's not a smart thing to do.
Here's the first question again.
So the nation with no-fault divorce is supposed to stay married to the Syrian Kurds forever?
So, the frame that most people who were critical of this were putting on this is that the Kurds are allies, and you never leave an ally.
You know, they fought on the same team, they were helpful, they were pro-American, at least in their fighting against ISIS, and we should not abandon them.
So that was the frame that the critics were putting on.
So Gates puts this frame on it, you know, that we don't even stay in marriage forever.
That's really good, because he personalized it.
Because most of you have had some experience with marriage.
If you're old enough to vote, you've had at least a flirtation with the idea of being married and then thinking maybe you shouldn't be.
I personally have a divorce in my history.
Many of you do. Those of you who have not divorced certainly know people who have and should have.
What's the one thing you think when you get married?
Well, I'm not going to get divorced.
Everybody who gets married thinks it's forever.
And it's not.
And we have no-fault divorce because we know things don't last forever.
Even things that we all seriously and genuinely want to last forever don't last forever.
So his first question is, why is a country with no-fault divorce?
We don't even think our relationships last forever.
Why would our relationship The relationship with the Kurds lasts forever.
It's really clever framing, brings it to something you really understand, compares it to it in a very clever way, and now you're framed because marriage and divorce are so powerful in your mind, they just evaporate the other frame, and he just takes you right into this, even marriage doesn't last forever, why should the Kurds?
Very, very clever comparison.
Then he says that we helped them out, so basically that we've done more than our duty.
We drove ISIS out of their territory.
It wasn't them doing us a favor.
It was because we were working together.
It was like we did them a favor, they're doing us a favor.
But Gates is framing it as we did them maybe a bigger favor because running ISIS out of their backyard Feels like a bigger deal than it is to us.
So that's fair too.
It's fair that they got more out of this than we did because it's their backyard.
And then here's the clever part.
He says in question form, we are now supposed to entangle ourselves.
He uses the word entangle sort of uncritically.
If you hear tangle, what do you hear when you hear the word entangled?
Entangled. You want to get out of it, right?
There's no positive use of the word entangle.
We got entangled.
It's never good. So rather than say we're partners with them, we've had a productive teamwork, any of those, he says we're entangled.
Good word to just slip in there uncritically.
We're supposed to entangle ourselves in their 400 plus year conflict with the Turks.
Now there you go.
400 plus year conflict with the Turks.
When you hear that the Kurds and the Turks have a 400 year conflict, does that feel like your problem?
It suddenly doesn't feel like your problem, does it?
Because you can solve a short term problem.
Just sort of in general.
Generally speaking, if there's something that looks like a short-term situation, that feels like maybe something you could solve.
But now I tell you that there's a problem that's been the same for 400 years.
It doesn't matter what the problem is.
I tell you the problem has been the same for 400 years.
Now if you said you had a scientific solution, I'd listen to that.
But if it's a political problem, essentially, that's lasted 400 years, are you going to fix it this year?
No. All you have to hear is that it's a 400-year problem and you say, only a sucker would try to solve that.
Only a sucker would try to solve a 400-year problem that's political.
Again, if it were scientific and you had invented something, sure.
But not a political problem, because nothing changed.
There's just not that much that's different.
It's not going to fix itself.
I think the president referred to them as natural enemies, which is also a good phrase.
So, I would say, whether you like it or not, AOC is the strongest persuader on the left.
I think Matt Gaetz has become the most effective...
I'll say communicator and persuader on the right.
And honestly, if he's not running for president someday, I would be really surprised.
I would be really surprised if you don't see Matt Gaetz, you know, in the hunt for president in a few years.
I don't know when. So that's my prediction.
And here, I'll double and triple down.
I predict. Long-range prediction.
Are you right? Are you ready? Someday, Matt Gaetz will run for president against AOC. And that is going to be fun.
That is going to be a good time, let me tell you.
Speaking of AOC, she cannot not make news.
AOC doesn't know how to stay out of the news, and I mean that in a good way.
She knows how to keep her name in front of the news.
Her latest thing was that we...
I want to get the exact quote.
She says, America needs to, quote, have a real conversation about abolishing prisons.
Now, if you hear that AOC wants to abolish prisons, and we've talked about this before, I think Biden said something about it.
But when you hear that, that's a headline, right?
You can't get that out of your head.
You're suddenly thinking about abolishing prisons, and you're like, what?
What? How can you do that?
Now, she's not talking about violent crimes, I think.
I don't know. She doesn't have details.
But I've said before that when somebody says we have to have a conversation about it, it's not real.
Every politician who says we need to have, and they use these words, we have to have a conversation about X, it means that they know that nobody has an idea for solving it, so you don't really need that conversation.
You would need somebody who has a suggestion for how to do it.
If you have a suggestion, then you can look into it.
But if you don't have a suggestion, it doesn't help to say we need to have a conversation about it.
You need a suggestion.
So, one of the biggest criticisms about the president now, now that the fog of war is cleared, about the Syria pull-out, people are saying it's impulsive.
The president's impulsive.
Does that word, and you've seen that everywhere, he's impulsive.
When you see that the president is being accused of being impulsive, what should you say to yourself?
What should be your immediate reaction to hearing that the critics of the president are starting to settle in on saying he's impulsive about some specific decision?
What's that tell you?
It tells you It tells you they don't have anything.
Because impulsivity is a generic statement and almost never true.
Trump has been talking about pulling out of Syria Since he was campaigning, it's literally the thing he's thought the most about.
There's probably nothing he's thought more about.
How much advice do you think he's gotten about Syria in the three years or so that he's been president and almost president?
How many times do you think advisers have given their opinion about Syria, plus the news, plus the pundits?
This is the least impulsive decision of all time.
There could be no decision, I doubt.
Do you think there's anything the president has thought about more, except maybe the wall, you know, border security?
I don't think there's anything he's thought about more.
So, when all the enemies are saying it's impulsive, the first thing you should say is, you don't know that about another person.
We never know how much somebody thought of something.
That's not even a thing.
Hey, I saw that you had a sip of coffee this morning.
Being impulsive again, are you?
I don't know that.
I don't know how long you planned to be sitting here this morning and have your simultaneous sip.
How could I possibly know how much you thought about something?
Just think about that.
The whole notion that a stranger can know how much the president thought about something.
Is that not the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard?
You can't know that.
You know, unless he told you. I suppose if he said, well, it never occurred to me until today, but I decided to pull out.
I suppose if he told you, you know, maybe that would tell you a little bit of something.
Even then, you wouldn't be sure.
You'd only know what he told you.
So, when you start seeing the mind reading, and this is in the category of mind reading, because to know how much somebody thought about something is ridiculous.
It's just ridiculous.
And it's mind reading.
All right. Our two-movie situation today is that there are two versions of reality, one on Fox News and one on CNN about this whistleblower situation.
One says that the whistleblower, the original whistleblower complaint was debunked by the actual transcript.
The other says, the transcript says exactly what the whistleblower said.
The two completely different versions of reality.
One says that we have a document that says the president did something awful and you could read it for yourself.
The other says we have a document proving the president didn't do anything wrong and in fact his phone call was perfect.
And all you have to do is read the document.
See it for yourself. Could there be a better example of the two movies on one screen when both of them are saying, look at the same document.
It's right there. Look at it with your own eyes.
Look at what the whistleblower said.
Compare them. They're either the same or they're totally different.
One of those is true.
Well, perhaps neither of them is true, because it might be a subjective world we're living in.
More about that later.
But it's interesting to me.
And by the way, I think it kind of boils down to more of an opinion than a fact.
So both sides are reporting it as fact, but really it's sort of an opinion.
You could kind of look at it and say, well, I can kind of see how you would interpret it that way, but I can see how you'd interpret it the other way.
Let me tell you what the critics of the president on his side are getting wrong.
So these are the critics of the president who are Republicans and conservatives and are trying to support the president on this whole whistleblower situation, but they're doing it poorly.
And I'm not going to name names, but you can see them, only because I can't remember some of the names, not in any other reason.
But people are saying that, sure, the president had a good reason to ask about the crowd strike stuff, You know, that was a fair question because that had to do with legitimacy of the 2016 elections and it's an ongoing thing and Ukraine is important to the story.
So completely legitimate that he asked about CrowdStrike.
But even the supporters of the president are saying, oh, but when he asked about Biden and having Ukraine investigate Biden, that's not as easy to defend because that's more clearly just a political thing about his enemy.
Even the president's supporters are saying that.
Not all of them, but some of them.
Here's where they're wrong.
Asking about Biden was the highest priority for the president.
It was his highest priority.
And if that's not obvious to you, I don't know how it's not.
Because Biden still is.
He's number one in the poll to be President of the United States, and he has an obvious on its face conflict of interest with an important country that probably is also a little too close to Russia, even though they don't want to be.
Meaning that anything that Ukraine knows, Russia's going to find out, right?
Don't you figure that's true?
So... Given the situation, wasn't that his highest priority to find out if the, at least in the polling, The most likely next president would be Biden, according to the polls, and according to a lot of experts.
So finding out if that person is beholden to Ukraine, which would make them very likely beholden to Russia, in other words, if Russia found out whatever blackmail material or compromising information that Ukraine had, and probably already know it by now, Would we not be in a weakened position with President Biden?
Same thing with China.
Would it be important to the United States, and how high a priority would it be, to have everybody in the United States know that Biden might be a little cozier with China in the past than the voters would be comfortable with?
How important is that for the public to know and for even the legal system to look into it?
It's our top priority.
The people who are defending the President on that phone call are totally screwing the pooch on this.
I mean, they're not helping him. If they're saying that asking about Biden wasn't the top priority for the President of the United States, what was?
Because all the other stuff was kind of, you know, under control.
Like, you know, the conversations with our other countries, the negotiations are ongoing, the economy is looking good.
Pretty much all the other, you know, big stuff that presidents do...
I've got to plug in my iPad here for a second.
Pretty much all the other big stuff the president does was kind of under control.
But find again, if your possible or even probable next president is in the pocket of a foreign country, stop telling me that's a low priority.
Stop telling me that the only reason you could do that is to win an election.
That's not the only reason you do it.
How about the reason is it was the most important thing that the president should be doing?
Finding out if the next president's in the pocket of a foreign country.
How in the world is that not his top priority?
I just, I don't get what his supporters are doing.
They're totally screwing the pooch on this.
Totally. All right.
Elizabeth Warren makes news.
Not in a good way.
So Elizabeth Warren is getting some incoming flack.
She has some kind of a story in which she was, a long time ago, she was working at a school as a teacher.
When she became visibly pregnant, she says the mean old misogynist principal fired her because in those days you just fired women for getting pregnant.
Except that, apparently, there's some factual counterfactuals to this.
Specifically, there's some records that show that she quit and she wasn't fired at all.
And that they had a very high opinion of her and that they would have definitely hired her back.
So, if you were to look at this in isolation and say, oh, there's a candidate for president who lied about something on her biography and pumped it up.
Sort of a corn pop situation.
Now, is that story a big deal?
Well, probably not.
You know, somebody running for president and, you know, pumping up their resume, making a story that wasn't quite the way it happened into something that makes them sound a little bit heroic or a little bit of a victim or a little bit understands the voters or something like that.
Is that a big deal?
I would say no. In general, a little bit of a small A small inconsistency with your story and the facts is not really too damaging for a politician because it's so routine.
We're so used to it that it kind of just rolls off.
It's like, okay, they exaggerated that a little bit.
But here's the trouble.
It forms a pattern of being a fake victim.
One, when she was saying that she was a person of color, when she said she was Native American.
And now the second story, in which she was claiming to be victimized for being a woman who was pregnant.
Those are two stories that have something very troubling in common.
That she's a phony.
Nobody likes a phony.
What do even the critics of President Trump say is one of his strongest qualifications for president?
I'm talking about President Trump's biggest critics.
What do they say, even his critics say, is one of President Trump's best qualities?
He's authentic.
Even though he fails the fact-checking consistently, He does it in a way that you know is hyperbole, you know what his point is, and you're used to it.
You're used to the fact that if 10,000 people come to his rally, he might say 30,000.
That doesn't strike you as inauthentic, because he does it every time.
And you know why he's doing it, you know the point of it, and you expect him to do it next time, because that's who he is.
He tells you he uses hyperbole, and then he uses it right in front of you.
Weirdly, The President has created a brand, cleverly I would say, too, in which he can fail the fact-checking 10,000 times, I think 11,000 times now, and his supporters and even his critics will say, well, he sure is authentic, because he is authentic.
And I would expect him to fail the fact-checking maybe 20,000 times, and I'm not going to care.
Because every time he does it, it's going to be in the direction that you know, okay, he's saying this is bigger than it is.
He's saying this is better than it is.
He's saying he had more contribution to the success than he did.
I get that. That's who he is.
That's who he says he is. He tells us that in direct language.
You know, he wrote a book about it.
You know, The Art of the Deal.
He uses hyperbole. And he uses it for good effect.
So you've got one candidate who is probably the most famous, authentic person.
He swears in his tweets.
The impulsivity that people accuse him of also comes across as authenticity, even when it's not really impulsive.
It comes across as, okay, that's what he's really thinking.
The fact that he tweets directly to the people with spelling errors, does that make him look like a phony?
Or authentic. It makes them look authentic.
Years from now, historians and experts are going to look at the president's misspelled tweets, and they're going to say to themselves, you know, back then we thought he should have deleted that tweet and retweeted it with the correct spelling.
Back then we thought he should have had an editor look at every tweet so that before they go out, somebody makes sure the spelling is right.
But now we realize that people registered it as just being a real person.
Real people spell stuff wrong on Twitter.
I think I did it yesterday. Pretty sure I think I had a spelling error yesterday.
So, how do you run the phoniest candidate we've ever had, somebody who's taken on two separate identities that just were not even true, against the most The most authentic candidate we've ever had, probably more authentic than we'll ever have, in his own way.
You know he's a showman, you know he uses hyperbole, but he's always him.
Trump is never not Trump.
He never leaves Trump-ness.
There's never a day when he's less Trump.
Elizabeth Warren, she could be whoever you want her to be.
She could be a Republican.
Oh, yeah, she was.
She used to be a Republican.
Now, Trump used to be a Democrat, but it's not going to hurt him at all because, you know, he's just more transparent.
And people say, oh, yeah, he says he used to be changed.
You know, he looks like who he is now.
But Warren's gonna have a problem with that authenticity, and I think that makes her unelectable for a variety of reasons.
I'm gonna sneeze here.
It's gonna be really ugly. I think there might be a few more in there.
All right. Just a few more things.
I had an author come and spend a day with me.
I guess it was over a year ago.
And there's an author named Joel Stein.
You've probably heard of him. He's a very well-known humor writer.
And he wanted to include me in his new book.
So his new book is called In Defense of Elitism.
So he's what you'd call a classic anti-Trumper.
And so his book, at least the part that's about me, is sort of an anti-Trumper talking to somebody who has a different opinion, and that case would be me.
Now, one of the things I write about in my book, LoserThink, LoserThink, which is available now for pre-order, everywhere that you pre-order books, wherever you like them, And in LoserThink, I talk about the Gelman effect.
It's hyphenated Gelman.
And Gelman was a person who made this observation, you've heard this before, that if you happen to be the subject or the news is about something you're an expert on, you can tell how wrong it is, because that happens to be your expertise.
But if you were not an expert, you couldn't tell.
So his point is, why is it that every time there's a story where I do know the truth, I can tell that the news is wrong?
But then when I read all the other stories, I assume it's the news is right.
And I'm probably wrong about that, because I'll bet the people who know about those topics also think the news is wrong every time.
So there's a fairly lengthy section, several chapters, about me.
So I got to read, Christine and I spent some time last night taking turns reading the chapter about me.
And we're just laughing about how much of it is wrong.
So essentially what he does is he describes my opinion of one thing or another, and then he says why it's bad.
She's crazy. Except, as I've told you before, he never explains my side right.
So what he does when he's debunking it and saying how stupid and crazy I am, essentially, he's defending his own...
He's arguing against his own misinterpretation of what I said.
And so he sets me up with all these fake opinions.
And a lot of the other facts are just, like, totally wrong.
He says something about...
He tried...
He got... Listen to how wrong this is.
He said that I have proposed...
A 25% tax on the top 1% for reparations.
That's in his book.
So his book says that I have proposed a 25% extra tax on the top 1% for reparations, slavery reparations.
Do you think I did that?
That's published as a fact in a book now.
Everybody who reads that is going to think that's a fact.
Now, am I going to correct it?
No, because I think it's hilarious.
It's no more or less accurate than all of the other stuff in the book.
Almost everything, there might have been, I didn't count, but there might have been something like 25 factual errors just about me.
Something like 25 of them.
Now let me tell you where that came from.
I did write a blog post some time ago in which I said this.
What I said was that for 25 years...
So the 25 was a reference to years when I was talking about it.
He turned it into a reference to 25%.
So probably he was working off his old notes and forgot what I actually said and turned 25 years into 25 cents.
So my proposal was...
And this was more of a thought experiment because I never imagined it could be a practical idea.
But what I said was that over...
25 years, so you'd put an end date on it.
For 25 years, you'd do a tax on the top 1%.
I never put a percentage on it.
I just said a tax on the top 1%.
So that anybody who was African American below a certain level of income could go to college for free.
But here's the key, which was also not in what Joel said.
It would also apply to everybody else who was below that income.
That's it. So it wouldn't be just for black people.
It would be for anybody who's below a certain income.
There would be a tax on the 1%, and they'd get to go to college for free for 25 years.
Just to adjust for the fact that some people are starting from so far behind, you'd have one generation, 25 years, in which everybody would have the same opportunity for a while.
See if it helps, you know, even things up.
And then after 25 years, you say, okay, we're done with the reparations.
We helped poor black people, but we helped poor everybody else at the same time.
And that was based on sort of the Hawke Newsome idea that the best way to help the black community is to help everybody else who's in the same situation.
It just makes it easier for everybody.
And so using that.
Now, My thought experiment was that the top 1% are the ones who always gain the most from any improvement in the economy.
And if you could make a major improvement in the education of the poorest people in the country, that the boost to the economy would more than make up for the top 1%.
Because remember, every time the economy gets better, they get richer.
And they get richer faster and more than anybody else gets richer.
That always happens.
So for them, it would be a tax that was, wait for it, an investment.
So they're the only people, the top 1%, for whom a special tax to help the poorest people get good educations would act exactly like an investment.
Most taxes are not investments, they're just expenses.
That's what's special about this.
If it's just the top 1%, they gain when the economy goes up, and what could be better for the economy than 25 years of really making sure you've educated your best people, the smart people, no matter what their income was?
So Joel Stein turned that into, I wanted to tax the elite 25%.
And then left out all the reasons.
Imagine what I just described, but without the reasons.
Well, it sounds batshit crazy, without the reasons, right?
Now imagine that all the other opinions that he assigned to me were about that bad.
Here's another one. He mocked me for saying that experts should not be trusted, which I also say in here with more nuance than he said, while at the same time I go to a doctor and the doctor cured, for example, my voice problems and other problems.
So he said that I was being quite silly and inconsistent, those are my own words, for decrying experts at the same time that I use experts, so therefore inconsistent.
Does that sound like me?
Does that sound like an accurate representation of my views?
Here's what I actually said.
When I talked about my voice problem, I said several doctors, I don't know how many, let's say half a dozen doctors, could not help me.
And then on my own, I hunted down the one doctor who could.
And so, if you were to look at experts in general, six out of seven Didn't have anything to help me.
They were all wrong. One out of seven was right, but I didn't know that until I actually went through the operation and it worked and all that.
I couldn't be sure.
So what I say is if you know that six out of seven experts can routinely be wrong, you know experts were wrong about the nutrition pyramid, you know experts were wrong about the hole in the ozone, that you should not automatically, and here's the key word, automatically, Assume that the consensus of experts is right.
That is very different from saying that the experts are always wrong.
So somehow, Joel Stein made my very reasonable statement that there are many examples in our own experience in which the majority of experts are wrong, that you should go into every expert situation saying, okay, four out of five times they could be wrong, but I'm going to check into it.
There are certainly cases where if you find the right expert and you know you have, you want to follow their advice, of course.
So all of the nuance taken out of my point about experts and boiled down to why do you think experts are wrong at the same time you use experts?
And then he writes a book about it.
Now imagine that times, I don't know, 10 or something for the rest of the book.
Now, here's the point.
Anybody who's not me, who reads that book, they're not going to know it's all made up.
Nobody's going to know that all of my opinions, I think all of them, pretty much all of them, as represented in the book, are not real.
Nobody's going to know that.
Those things become now part of my permanent record.
And when I argue with somebody online for the rest of my life, For the rest of my life, if I argue with people online, somebody's going to say, well, you said there should be a tax on the top 1% of 25%.
Explain that, cartoon boy.
That's why cartoonists should not be involved with anything.
So the other thing he mocked me for in the book...
It was part of the conversation about experts.
And he asked me if I thought that I was qualified to be Secretary of State as an example.
And I said, yes.
Except for two qualities which actually do, you know, make it impossible.
One is I don't have the energy to fly all over the world all the time.
I just don't have the energy to do that.
There's no way I could live with, you know, jet lag all day.
Secondly, I have a poor memory.
So these are the two things that I said to Joel that he reported.
I have a poor memory, and if you're going to be the Secretary of State, you have to remember all these heads of states and their ambassador, and you've got to memorize their capital and their cities, and you've got to know a little bit about their history, etc.
And so he mocked me for thinking that except for those two things, I could be such an expert, I could be Secretary of State.
To which I say, have you ever looked at all the other secretaries of state?
Are they experts?
Is Mike Pompeo an expert on foreign countries before he was in the CIA and before he did this?
No. Everybody learned their job sort of on the job.
The nature of those jobs is that they're political.
Yeah, Hillary. Was Hillary an expert in foreign countries?
Was John Kerry an expert in foreign countries?
So, without putting...
If you didn't put that context in the book, that essentially all new secretaries of state, or at least many of them, are not experts.
They learn it on the job.
They have experts who work for them.
Those experts tell them the lay of the land for any particular decision, and then they make their decision.
So... Was President Trump an expert at being president?
No. The most normal thing in the world is for people who are not experts to have those jobs.
It's the same thing I said about Hunter Biden, and you probably didn't like it when I said it about him.
How unusual is it for someone who doesn't know anything about the oil business to be on the board of directors of an oil company?
It's typical. That's actually normal.
It's completely normal when people reach a certain level of executive influence that they're not experts.
That's actually how it works.
That's the most typical way these jobs work.
And so Joel Stein mocks me for saying that just because I'm a smart adult that I could be Secretary of State.
But it's not about me.
I'm pretty sure anybody who had, let's say, a college degree and a master's degree.
Most people who could get through a good college...
I went to Berkeley, so that gives me a little bit of credential.
It's hard to get into Berkeley.
I got my MBA there.
I would say anybody who's gone to a college of at least that level of That level of filter, meaning that it's hard to get into them.
Pretty much any of those people could have done a reasonably good job as Secretary of State, in my opinion.
So it wasn't really a statement about me, that I could be Secretary of State.
It was more about, it doesn't take that much.
You don't have to be born magic.
You don't have to be a genius.
You just have to be an adult who's seen enough of the world.
It would help to be a certain age to have seen enough.
But yeah, I could be Secretary of State, absolutely.
I would say that there are probably quite a few people on this Periscope right now who if they were to look at their own educational credentials, maybe their own success in life, they know how to communicate.
You could probably find quite a few secretaries of state watching this periscope right now.
Literally. That's not even an exaggeration.
Probably quite a few people who could do that job.
All right. And keep in mind that a lot of people who do that job don't do it well.
Tillerson didn't last that long.
Was Tillerson qualified because he was the CEO of Exxon?
Does that make you qualified to be secretary of state?
I don't know. Alright, that's all I got for now.
And I will talk to you all.
Tomorrow, make sure that you order LoserThink.
If you like to support these Periscopes, by the way, Patreon has largely shrunk to nothing.
So I used to get funded through Patreon.
But Patreon deplatformed some people, so conservatives stopped giving money to Patreon.
So Patreon's no longer very relevant.
I get a little bit in front of that.
And then YouTube demonetized almost all of the videos now.
Some of them automatically.
They just demonetized them on arrival.
So I thought that I could get monetized through YouTube, but I can't.
They put a cap on that, and that will never be a significant number, no matter how many subscribers I have.
So the subscribers keep increasing, but the ad revenue goes down.
So the ad revenue has gone down every month lately while the number of subscribers and the watch time goes up.
It's just a total fix.
So, that leaves me with exactly one way that it can be worthwhile to me to do this.
Now, I do it honestly.
I would probably still do this if there was no monetary benefit because I love it.
I actually...
It's often the highlight of my day is doing this.
I just love... This interaction.
There's something about the comments and the fact that it's interactive, the fact that we meet here every day that does make this kind of special both ways.
I don't do it just because I've got some larger ambition.
I do it because I really enjoy it.
I think you can tell.
And it would do me a great favor if you pre-ordered it because that gives it a bump to start.
And then if it makes it bestseller list, it sells itself.
So if you really want to help me out and you were thinking of buying it later, it would really help me if you pre-order it on Amazon or wherever you do it.
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