Dec. 22, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
55:56
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| Time | Text |
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| Hello, Kevin. | |
| Come on in here. | |
| Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Tyler. | |
| Bill, Merry Christmas. | |
| Good to see you. Matthias, Eric, happy holidays to all of you. | |
| I know why you're here. | |
| It's for a little thing called the simultaneous sip and all of the simultaneity that goes with it. | |
| But, special surprise. | |
| Special surprise. | |
| I've updated the introduction to the simultaneous sip to make it easier for you to sing along. | |
| In fact, turn it into a generic drinking toast. | |
| Are you ready? So here's the reworked introduction to the simultaneous sip. | |
| It goes like this. | |
| Watch the rhyming pattern. | |
| You'll be impressed. I'd like to perform this correctly. | |
| For the simultaneous sip, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tankard chalice or stein, canteen jug or flask, vessel of any kind. | |
| Fill it with your favorite liquid. | |
| I like coffee, but if this were a drinking game, or you were doing it for a toast, everybody would get to say their own favorite liquid at the same time. | |
| So I'd be yelling coffee, you'd be yelling vodka perhaps. | |
| It all works. Now join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine to the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip. | |
| Go. Yep. | |
| Yep. Yep. | |
| Yep. Yep. That's good stuff. | |
| So I think this rhyme is better. | |
| So let me tell it to you slower. | |
| So all you need is a cup or mug or glass, a tank or chalice or stein, canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. | |
| Come on. You know that's better. | |
| All right. Let's talk about all the stuff, because there's stuff happening. | |
| Stuff all over the place. | |
| So we're going to talk about that stuff. | |
| Let's talk about impeachment. | |
| Now, you know how some stories, they start out as being one thing, but then as they start to settle in with the public and they settle in with your own mind and how you think about it, a story starts to drift from what you thought it was To some different thing, even though the facts haven't changed. | |
| Have you ever noticed that? I'm going to give you an analogy to make the point. | |
| This analogy is not meant to persuade you, because analogies don't do that. | |
| But analogies are really good at explaining a concept. | |
| Here's the concept, or here's the analogy. | |
| Have you ever been in a situation where you were playing a game as an adult with a child? | |
| And of course, you as an adult could easily win the game, be it checkers or racing or any kind of little game. | |
| What do you do as an adult if you're playing against a child? | |
| Well, I know that some of you beat the child so that the child can learn how to lose. | |
| So that's some of you, right? | |
| But more commonly, you let the child win because that's how both of you win. | |
| As an adult, you would get no joy out of winning, but you would get something out of helping a young person become more confident, learn a game, have a social interaction with you. | |
| And so, most cases, if you have a contest, a game or anything like that, usually you have a winner and then a loser. | |
| That's the normal way things go. | |
| But in my simple example of an adult playing a game with a child and the child doesn't know how to play yet, the best way for both of you to win is for the adult to let the child win, because it's good for the child, depending on the situation, and the adult wins too, because they've taught a child something useful. | |
| Now let's talk about impeachment. | |
| There was an old kind of impeachment that I would call the bad kind. | |
| Let's call that practical impeachment. | |
| President Nixon was impeached for what I would say are practical reasons, meaning that the country said, hmm, that's impeachable. | |
| And the country, even in a bipartisan way, at least as much as these things can be bipartisan, all agreed that what Nixon did was, hmm, that's over the line. | |
| That It has to be stopped for practical reasons. | |
| You can't have that kind of a leader because the whole system falls apart if the leader can just break the law any time they want. | |
| So that's a practical impeachment. | |
| This latest one with President Trump is not really that. | |
| And the more it sinks in, and especially as you see the reactions to it on the Democrat side, and also the reactions to it on the Republican side, does it not look a little bit more, right now today, does it look a little bit more like an adult letting a child win in a game? | |
| Of course, analogies are imperfect, so let's just forget the analogy for a moment. | |
| I'm just using that to introduce the point. | |
| The point is that if you're looking at the reactions from the Democrats, they appear to be weirdly happy about accomplishing absolutely nothing, meaning that the president will not be removed from office, right? | |
| But they're still very happy. | |
| They're unambiguously happy. | |
| How do you explain that they're unambiguously happy when they didn't remove the president from office? | |
| They probably all were aware that there was more chance his popularity would increase and more chance he would be elected, more chance he would have good fundraising, which he did. | |
| So do you think that the motivation... | |
| From the Democrat side would be the stated motivation. | |
| Oh, he's a criminal. | |
| The world's going to go to heck if we don't get rid of him right away. | |
| I think they have revealed by their willingness to wait on the actual sending of the impeachment articles to the Senate, they seem to have revealed that it wasn't really a practical impeachment. | |
| Because there doesn't seem to be anything happening that looks like it could become anything practical, anything that actually happens. | |
| But what did happen, and you see the Democrats cheering about it, is that they have blessed President Trump with a stain that can't be removed. | |
| And they talk about it that way. | |
| We've impeached him. | |
| He will always be an impeached president. | |
| There's a stain. He has to live with that. | |
| What does that sound like? | |
| It sounds like people working through an emotional problem that has more to do with their own life. | |
| Now, Oprah is the first one I ever heard say this. | |
| So here's, I'll give you the Oprah view on this. | |
| If you come to somebody, let's say you're talking to Oprah, and you say, you know, Oprah, I've got a real problem with whatever it is. | |
| There's, you know, it costs too much. | |
| You've got a problem here. | |
| It's hard to fix. And if you can talk about the problem in objective ways and give objective reasons why it's a problem and maybe why you're going to fix it, you would be a person who probably has a real problem. | |
| You understand the problem. | |
| You're looking to fix it. | |
| So Oprah would say, that's a person with a real problem who knows what their problem is. | |
| But, as Oprah points out, if you come at a problem purely emotionally, Oprah would point out, and I hope I'm not, let's say, misstating Oprah's opinion on these things, but I think I'm pretty close. | |
| Oprah would say that if you come to a problem and you talk about it with great emotionality, maybe the problem isn't the real problem. | |
| Maybe the problem is making you think of something in your own life, other problems, your past experience, and that you may be sort of trapped in In a bubble of your own reality. | |
| And that the way you reveal that you're in a bubble, as opposed to just someone who has a real problem and they can recognize it, is that their reaction is completely out of whack with what the problem is. | |
| Now that's what we've been watching with the reaction to President Trump. | |
| The reactions to him seem disconnected from results. | |
| You know, the economy doing well, all the usual stuff we talk about. | |
| So, here's what I think and what I recommend for your holidays. | |
| Those of you who are Trump supporters, you got a holiday gift that you don't realize yet. | |
| And it goes like this. | |
| The temperature of the country was going up and up and up, and you as a Trump supporter were part of the targets of that higher temperature. | |
| In other words, you were being vilified, you were being targeted, especially you're being targeted by people saying that even if you supported this president, you must be vilified too, just for being a voter. | |
| This is not normal, right? | |
| You never saw that before, right? | |
| You didn't see the voters being vilified just for voting for their candidate. | |
| That's new. And I think what you're seeing is that Democrats are working through some personal problems. | |
| There are a lot of people who would have a reaction to somebody like Trump because he presents himself as a bully. | |
| Now, ask yourself about the main players in the impeachment saga. | |
| How many of the people whose names and faces immediately come to you when you think of the Democrats trying to impeach the president? | |
| And then ask yourself, how many of them have probably had bad experiences with bullies, And I'm going to lump into the category any of the Me Too sexual harassment stuff just for this conversation. | |
| Let's just put it into the bully category. | |
| Strong men behaving badly. | |
| Let's just say that. | |
| How many of the people, male and female, have experienced over their lifetime extraordinarily cruel bouts of bullying and harassing? | |
| Probably 100%? I'm guessing. | |
| Maybe every one of them. So, when they wake up every morning and they see a President Trump, how does that make them feel? | |
| Forget about politics. | |
| How does it make you feel? | |
| Well, what it makes you feel like is like, let's say somebody beat you up and went to jail, and then they got into jail and became your boss. | |
| Even if they were a really good boss and everything they did was good for the country, And even if they paid their debt, they went to jail for beating you up. | |
| If you're an employee, and your CEO is the guy who beat you up for it, even though he went to jail, and even though he's doing a good job as a CEO, and even if he's not bothering you necessarily, can you live with it? | |
| Not really. You need revenge. | |
| You need revenge. | |
| So here's the gift. | |
| Democrats got revenge. | |
| The impeachment is revenge. | |
| And it's pretty good. | |
| Because the revenge they were seeking is not to kill the president. | |
| They weren't asking for him to be killed. | |
| I mean, some crazy ones were, but generally no. | |
| They weren't really asking him to go to jail for the things that, you know, anything that we've seen, because none of it is illegal as far as we can tell. | |
| At least not jailable, illegal stuff. | |
| So I feel as though the temperature will go way down now and that Pelosi is completely smart to delay things until after the holidays because people are going to go onto the holiday feeling pretty good. | |
| If you're a Democrat, you're going to say, wow, you know, I've been bullied all my life, but I got one back. | |
| I got a bully back, and not just an ordinary bully, I got like the super bully, the biggest bully, the bully of all bullies, Trump, the one who's been making me lose sleep, the one that's making me, you know, seeking psychiatric help, which is literally a thing. | |
| A lot of people are getting medical help for the way he makes them feel, and it's not because the economy is bad. | |
| It's because the way that he makes them feel. | |
| So in a weird way, this is like the adult who plays the game with the child in which there is a way for both sides to win because you just watched it happen. | |
| The Democrats feel they got the win because they stained a bully forever. | |
| There's no situation, there's no arguing way, there's no saying, well, the Senate didn't confirm the impeachment. | |
| That may all be true, but it is nonetheless true that the people who feel they've been victims of bullies all their lives, they won one. | |
| It's a win. Somebody says, how is this not a bit of mind reading? | |
| It would be mind reading if I said this is the case. | |
| What I'm doing is saying, compare this to your other alternatives and make your own mind up. | |
| And the argument is this, not based on mind reading, but based on knowing people and knowing what people do in certain situations. | |
| If you put me... | |
| Let me give you another good example. | |
| When Hillary Clinton was running for president, I hated her frickin' guts. | |
| And it wasn't that I hated her for just being Hillary. | |
| I hate her because she reminded me of women that I hate. | |
| People that I hate, but women that I hate because, you know, you see things in terms of gender. | |
| Now, there are certainly men who would give me the same reaction. | |
| I could see lots of situations in which there would be a man who would remind me of other kinds of men and I would hate that man just as sort of a proxy for all those other men. | |
| But that's the feeling I had with Hillary Clinton. | |
| Especially when she became full misandriest. | |
| Is that a word? When she actually went out and said that women would be better leaders because they have extra skills compared to men. | |
| That was sort of just one of the things that triggered me. | |
| And it seemed to me that I treated her as sort of an enemy. | |
| And I felt a lot like, even during the election... | |
| I could feel in myself that my reaction to Hillary had more to do with my feelings about people she reminded me of. | |
| And I felt it at the time. | |
| I had a visceral dislike for her that was not connected to anything she actually had done or would do. | |
| It was just visceral. | |
| And I will cop to that. | |
| Clearly the anti-Trumpers have a visceral, emotional reaction that's a little bit disconnected to anything he's actually doing. | |
| I think we have the weirdest situation where everybody won. | |
| Because let me ask you this. | |
| Most of you are Trump supporters. | |
| You wouldn't be on this periscope. | |
| Do any of you feel really bad? | |
| That Trump got impeached. | |
| Because I wondered how I would feel about it, and I didn't really have any bad feelings about it at all. | |
| You know, if it were up to me, you know, if I could just snap my hands and snap my fingers and make something different, I would prefer he not be impeached. | |
| But now that it's happened, and I can actually see, all right, well, how do I feel? | |
| You know, how's my coffee taste this morning? | |
| Hmm, still the same. | |
| But I actually am happy, and I know this sounds weird, but maybe it's the Christmas season and I'm full of the good spirits for the holidays or something. | |
| But I'm not joking about this. | |
| I actually feel good for the Democrats today. | |
| Because imagine if you went your whole life being abused and bullied. | |
| Imagine that. And you've got this one chance to, in a very public way, hit back at your bully in a completely legal way. | |
| Nobody went to jail, nobody got physically hurt, but you stained him. | |
| You put the scarlet bee on his chest forever. | |
| How would you feel about that? | |
| Pretty good. Pretty good. | |
| And so I'm looking at the situation where half of the country who got what they wanted, the impeachment, is probably feeling pretty good about it. | |
| And I have to say, I can't hate half of my own country feeling good today. | |
| Like, I don't feel bad. | |
| You know, I didn't see anybody losing. | |
| Did you? Did anybody lose? | |
| Is anybody a loser in any of this? | |
| I don't think so. I think we have this weird situation where Trump supporters are saying, yeah, we just guaranteed re-election. | |
| You know, Trump supporters like that. | |
| And at the same time, the other team, you know, the other team that should have been the winning team, I guess. | |
| Maybe there's the losing team. | |
| If you count the Senate, we'll turn it over. | |
| But how do you ever get a competition in which both sides completely won? | |
| Am I right? Because I think Democrats, on some level, maybe don't think that they're going to win. | |
| And certainly if they look at their own field of candidates, I don't think they think they're going to win. | |
| So I'm not even sure it was about that. | |
| I think it was just a bully reaction, which worked out really well. | |
| And so when you go home for the holidays, I would make this recommendation. | |
| For your Trump-hating relatives who got what they wanted, the impeachment, congratulations. | |
| Congratulations. Now, I'm a Trump supporter, but do I think that Trump's style is good for everybody who's a citizen? | |
| No, not at all. It's very obvious that his style... | |
| Which doesn't bother me personally even a little bit. | |
| Not even a little bit. | |
| Just me personally. But I can observe, and it's completely obvious that his style really, really, really bothers a lot of people. | |
| Let's be honest about that. | |
| Doesn't bother me, doesn't bother most of you. | |
| You see it in a different frame. | |
| Maybe you didn't have a big problem with bullies in your life, or maybe that's just not your biggest drama and you don't focus on it. | |
| But in any case, most of us are completely unaffected by it. | |
| But some people are. | |
| Not some, a lot. | |
| Tens of millions of people are deeply affected by how they just feel about them, and they just got something to make themselves feel better. | |
| Congratulations. Well thought. | |
| Congratulations. And I mean that, actually. | |
| You got what you wanted. | |
| Now, here's an interesting point, according to me. | |
| I've talked many times about this concept of affirmations. | |
| Now, affirmations is the process of repeating or writing down what you want over and over every day, and then it somehow magically manifests itself into your life. | |
| Now, since I don't believe in magic, I'm going to say it seems to do that. | |
| So the human perception of this process of affirmations is that it seems to work. | |
| It's something I've used all my life. | |
| I think it might have more to do with focusing on what you want. | |
| There may be some just psychological reasons why it seems to work, even if it doesn't. | |
| But in the process of affirmations, whether or not you think it's magic or just getting more because you're focusing on it, whatever you believe about it, There is one piece of advice that the proponents of affirmations always make. | |
| And that is, don't be too specific. | |
| And an example would be, let's say you had an affirmation, I, Scott Adams, will become a millionaire. | |
| I will become a millionaire. | |
| And then you win the lottery, and you get $100 million. | |
| But somebody immediately steals $99 million of it, and you're left with $1 million. | |
| The trap is that you'll get what you asked for, and you could have had a hundred million. | |
| So the trap with affirmations is don't be too specific about what you're asking for, because you might limit yourself from getting something better. | |
| So it's better to say that you'll be wealthy than that you'll make a million dollars. | |
| Because wealthy is uncapped. | |
| A million dollars, that might be exactly what you get when you could have had two million. | |
| Impeachment is just like that. | |
| For how long have people been saying, let's impeach President Trump? | |
| You see where I'm going with this? | |
| They got what they asked for. | |
| They didn't get what they probably were thinking they wanted. | |
| What they wanted was to remove him from office. | |
| Right? But nobody thought that, or nobody repeated that as their mantra. | |
| Take a look at, you know, even, what's his name, who's the billionaire? | |
| Steyer. Steyer? | |
| He didn't say remove from office. | |
| He may have used the phrase, but primarily he was talking about impeachment. | |
| Impeach, impeach, impeach, impeach. | |
| So the Democrats got exactly specifically what they asked for, But not what they wanted. | |
| And that's the trap of affirmations. | |
| If you focus on the thing you're asking for, you might get it. | |
| It might not be the thing you wanted. | |
| The thing you wanted was to remove him from office. | |
| And that also is a tell, I think. | |
| That I don't even think that Democrats in the small rational part of their brains, everybody has a small rational part, so that's not specifically Democrats, but in the rational part of their brain, did they really want to remove a president with all of the trouble that would cause? | |
| I don't know if they did. | |
| I mean, if you asked them, they would say yes, but I don't know if in their private thoughts they wanted that or they just wanted to punch a bully. | |
| And so, my take on this is that everybody won. | |
| Nobody saw that coming. | |
| I didn't. I didn't predict it. | |
| But I think this is one of the best things that's ever happened to the country, because you had a country that was genuinely suffering from having a bully president. | |
| That's a lot to ask. | |
| For people who have been bullied all their life. | |
| Would you agree? So even if you are not personally ever affected by a bully, maybe you were a bully, but would you still not agree that if you had been a victim of bullies all your life, that putting somebody who clearly has the bully vibe in the presidential office, how do you wake up in the morning with that? | |
| Like, how does that make you feel? | |
| Pretty bad. And the impeachment, I think, went a long way to evening things out in people's psychological framework. | |
| I gotta tell you, I am so proud of the people who follow me on Twitter. | |
| I set a little trap for you and not a single person fell into it. | |
| Now, I didn't think of it that way when I posted it. | |
| I wasn't thinking of it as a trap. | |
| I wanted to get opinions on it without biasing you. | |
| But here's what I did. I tweeted an idea from a group called Folsom Based Citizens again. | |
| And Duane Nason, he's the founder, and he's released details of a plan for building a $3 billion private city equipped with amenities and services for $150,000 of what he calls the high-needs population, or the homeless. | |
| Now, I put that out there because it was basically like a dormitory situation, low-cost housing with probably some facilities for helping people have special types of needs. | |
| Now, I put that out there and I wondered what people would say. | |
| Did people say, thank goodness, there's a plan for ending homelessness? | |
| Nobody did. Not one of you. | |
| Not a single person thought that was a good idea, or at least people commented. | |
| I don't think a single person said it was a good idea. | |
| Do you know why? Because almost all of you have been educated, largely from Dr. | |
| Drew's good work, and people like me who are amplifying his message, to know that it's not a homeless problem. | |
| It's never been a homeless problem. | |
| It's a drug addiction problem. | |
| It's a mental health problem. | |
| And the people on the street want to be there. | |
| You could put them in a house tomorrow and they'd just say, I kind of like the sidewalk. | |
| And so, not a single person who follows me on Twitter that I noticed, I mean there might have been, but I didn't notice any, fell for the trap of building homes for homeless people. | |
| We all know it won't work, right? | |
| Now many of you pointed out that there were other attempts to do this. | |
| They've failed. There's some famous ones that are in the literature. | |
| People tried to do almost exactly this thing and ended up tearing it down. | |
| Because what happens is if you take all the people who have problems and you put them in one place, It doesn't make it easier to solve. | |
| It turns out there's probably some ideal ratio of people with addiction and mental health problems that, you know, you don't want to put them all in one place because they're not going to fix anything if they're all in one place. | |
| It's just going to become a mess and you're going to have to tear it down later. | |
| Now, contrasting that, there's a place in San Francisco for drug treatment and career training called the Delancey Street Foundation. | |
| And... They've been around for decades, and they're one of the most, if not the most, they're one of the most, at least, respected treatment centers for long-term addiction sort of things. | |
| So I believe that people go there, they live and work there, they learn to trade. | |
| I think they've got a restaurant, so you can learn restaurant businesses. | |
| They have a moving company, I believe, so you can become a mover. | |
| But the point is, you can learn various trades while working through your addiction problem. | |
| And the Delancey Street operation has only grown for decades. | |
| I was familiar with it in the 70s. | |
| So something that's stood the test of time several decades. | |
| Several decades. | |
| I mean, that's really standing the test of time. | |
| So obviously there are people who know how to do it. | |
| There are people who have figured out what works and what doesn't. | |
| And that's not necessarily the same people who have good intentions and are trying to build a place for the homeless. | |
| So what I would like to see is Dr. | |
| Drew help us with an outline of some kind of a better approach. | |
| You know, just sort of a PowerPoint. | |
| Dr. Drew, if you could just bullet point it for us. | |
| Tell us what it should look like. | |
| Is there a law or laws that need to be changed? | |
| What are they? And what do we need to do differently based on what we've learned and what we know works and what doesn't. | |
| So, my take on this is that we probably do need some kind of private industry to build this. | |
| Now, there are two things that get conflated. | |
| One is building low-cost housing for the homeless, which I think The big problem of addiction and mental health have to be dealt with. | |
| I would think that probably you need a separate and maybe smaller, maybe Delancey Street is a good size, because there's probably a scale that works best. | |
| You don't want to be too small. | |
| You don't want to be too big. | |
| I'm guessing Delancey Street hits the sweet spot there. | |
| But you also, completely independently of the homeless problem, we need to fix the cost of living, the cost of having a high-quality life, so that people can retire into a good situation that they're not wanting for anything, but it just doesn't cost very much. | |
| So I think we do need to develop that, and here's how it should be done. | |
| I'm thinking of doing this, and it would look like this. | |
| I start a separate Twitter account for building low-cost housing. | |
| And then I do a series of tweets which only are subject categories. | |
| So one of my tweets might be, put it in the comments, the best kind of plumbing. | |
| For a low-cost housing. | |
| The best kind of heating, cooling, structure, location, you know, so you have all the categories, and then you let all the commenters and vendors who make the kinds of things that make sense for these questions, just let them comment. | |
| And then you let other people vote up things, and of course people put links in the comments so you could go and take a look at, you know, the link. | |
| So, the question is this. | |
| Could you design a low-cost city? | |
| And here's the other thing. | |
| I think you need to design it as a community. | |
| You can't design a home by itself. | |
| And let me give you the most stark reason why. | |
| If you're trying to make it low-cost and better, both low-cost and better than living is now, you might want to, and this is just a suggestion, get rid of your kitchen. | |
| And put in an iPad where you can just have your food delivered from the central cafeteria. | |
| So it's a cafeteria, so the cost is not that high. | |
| But you can get rid of kitchens. | |
| So you wouldn't have to shop. | |
| You wouldn't have to clean. | |
| You wouldn't have to cook. | |
| You just go to your iPad. | |
| And I do that now with DoorDash, right? | |
| But it's too expensive. So you need the sort of community co-op version of the DoorDash. | |
| And you can get rid of kitchens. | |
| Likewise, I always use the example of my dorm experience in college. | |
| If you put people together who want to be together, seniors like to be around seniors, young people like to be around young people, etc. | |
| Families like to be around families. | |
| You don't need the great physical structure because it's the people that make it special. | |
| That's why college was so awesome. | |
| I had the worst physical living situation in college that I've ever had. | |
| But even though it was the worst building, walls, bed, I'd walk outside and it was kids, people I wanted to hang out with. | |
| So it was the best situation and it had nothing to do with the cost of my housing. | |
| So I think those are the kinds of systems-baked approach where you design the whole community where you can get the real cost savings. | |
| And I would also like to see designs for the perfect living room, The perfect bathroom, low cost, you know, the perfect bedroom, etc. | |
| And then once you've designed each of these individual spaces, then people can say, ah, well, I'll just take one of these, one of these, one of these, I'll put them together and run it through my computer and I don't need an architect and I don't need an engineer. | |
| Because the engineering and the architecture would all be, you know, built into a system that only gave you so many choices, but all the choices were the best ofs. | |
| It's the three best choices for what your living room could look like, the three best choices for your laundry room, etc. | |
| All right, so that's that. | |
| Robert Reich, well-known Democrat. | |
| I know him a little bit. | |
| We've chatted by email. | |
| And he released the following estimate. | |
| He said that 60% of wealth is inherited. | |
| And so his point was that we have an unfair system, basically, because if 60% of all the wealth is just passed down as opposed to earned, that's not a very fair country. | |
| And to which I added this question. | |
| What percentage of people inherit any substantial money? | |
| Of all the people who will be born this year, how many of them will inherit money? | |
| Five percent? Three percent? | |
| Very few people inherit money. | |
| It's almost trivial. | |
| Now, the amount they inherit is so grotesquely large that it makes all the averages skewed. | |
| I think Bernie Sanders says, I might have this wrong, but it's something like this. | |
| He says that the two richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the entire country, because 50% of the country has no wealth, and a few billionaires got a lot. | |
| So other people weighed in. | |
| And apparently only 20% of, this is some statistics somebody put in the comments, only 21% of millionaires received any inheritance at all. | |
| Just 16% inherited more than 100,000. | |
| And get this, only 3% received an inheritance at or above 1 million. | |
| So, that feels like a pretty good country. | |
| Let me give you another reframing of something. | |
| You saw that the Democrat candidates attempted to say that the economy is not so good because even though the stock market's up, there are a lot of people in the middle class who are not gaining as much as the Democrats would like them to gain. | |
| So the Democrats are, at least Joe Biden is, making a case That the economy is not as good as it looks on the surface because people aren't doing as well as they should be doing. | |
| Here's the psychology that I think Joe Biden misses. | |
| And as the creator of the Dilber comic script, this is something I've been sort of tracking for decades. | |
| And it's this. When unemployment is high and you're not doing well, who do you blame? | |
| If there's lots of unemployment and you don't have a job or you don't have a good enough job, who do you blame? | |
| You blame the government or the system. | |
| Because there's no jobs for you to get. | |
| If you can't get a job, it's not your fault. | |
| There just aren't enough jobs and you don't have the right training. | |
| But your tendency... | |
| Your tendency is to blame the system because it didn't give you opportunities. | |
| Now what happens when the unemployment rate reaches an all-time low? | |
| And now you're still not doing well, you wish you had a raise, etc. | |
| When unemployment is at an all-time low, who do you blame if you're not doing well? | |
| Do you see it yet? | |
| You blame yourself. You blame yourself. | |
| I saw this first during the dot-com era. | |
| Let me give you a little history. | |
| When Dilbert first came out, it wasn't really about the workplace, but he became... | |
| I transferred it to be a workplace comic strip in the early 90s. | |
| In the mid-90s, there was this huge wave of layoffs that came after the dot-com era. | |
| Right? Yeah. So in the dot-com era... | |
| Everybody was printing money, it felt like. | |
| Everybody felt like, even if they weren't doing well, it was their own fault. | |
| There was a period when I was doing the comic when I couldn't really write good jokes for a few years because I couldn't get anybody to complain about their job. | |
| Think about that. People who had the same job that they'd had for 10 years stopped complaining about their job because, wait for it, Everybody else was doing well. | |
| Do you see it yet? | |
| If everyone else is doing well, you stop complaining about your own job, even if you've had it for years, because you know it's your own damn fault now. | |
| Because all those other people don't have your problem. | |
| What are they doing? They're working harder, they're going to school, they're training, taking a chance, they moved. | |
| They're doing something. So suddenly, your entire psychology of whose fault it is Now, as soon as there was lots of unemployment, then everybody blames the government, blames the big companies, blames the outsourcing, blames the CEO. But with low unemployment, good luck, Joe Biden, getting your own voters to think it's the government's fault. | |
| When you've got this good of an economy and this good of an employment, it's your own damn fault. | |
| Now, it's not, right? | |
| There are plenty of people who are doing the best they can, and that's the best they can do. | |
| But it's going to feel like it's your own damn fault. | |
| So I'm only talking about what it feels like. | |
| So I don't think the Democrats have a message that can really hit at the moment, because people aren't just going to feel like it's the government's problem. | |
| It just feels like your own problem when the economy is doing this well. | |
| If you're not following the Epoch, I don't know how to pronounce it, Epoch Times, Epoch, E-P-O-C-H, Epoch, the Epoch Times. | |
| Turns out that's a word I've never said out loud, I don't think. | |
| And Jan Jekilik, whose name I also can't pronounce, he was interviewing a CNN whistleblower. | |
| Now, I'd seen this guy before, but this was, I don't know, there was something about the way the interview went that made this a little special. | |
| And this is a CNN employee who quit CNN because he couldn't stand the fake news. | |
| And this guy's name is Kerry Porch. | |
| And he said, quote, I was part of that team in Charlottesville, parenthetically. | |
| He was talking about Charlottesville. | |
| Everyone said Trump didn't condemn the Nazis, and I knew that wasn't the case. | |
| In other words, he was there and he watched it. | |
| So he knew that the way CNN was reporting it, saying that he hadn't condemned the Nazis, was obviously not true, because he was there. | |
| He watched the speech. And he observed it with his own eyes. | |
| So he says, that basically raised my antenna. | |
| He said, what else am I being fed? | |
| So when he saw that the CNN's reporting on Charlottesville, the claim that the president called the races fine people, which of course never happened, but it was widely reported that it did, this guy who worked for CNN and watched it on the ground, he was actually assigned to that event, First of all, he could see that there were plenty of people there. | |
| He said this separately. | |
| But he saw that there were plenty of people there who were not marching with the racists and were not Antifa. | |
| They were just other people. People in plain clothes who were there for their own reasons. | |
| Some forged statues, some against for historical reasons, for free speech reasons. | |
| Just a whole bunch of people with different opinions. | |
| What is... What does CNN say about their own whistleblower saying that they've been making up the news on one of the most important pieces of news that has affected us for years? | |
| It's kind of amazing. | |
| All right. One of the surviving members of the massacred families down in Mexico, you know, in the cartel massacre, the Mormon families that had moved to Mexico recently, one of the dads, who lost a daughter and several grandkids in that massacre, is trying to get the Mexican government to allow him and others to form militias. | |
| To form private armies within Mexico to fight the cartels. | |
| Now, I don't think he's going to get approval for that, because I think we all expect that the Mexican government is essentially working for the cartels at this point. | |
| I mean, that might not be true, but I think we all assume that's true, right? | |
| So I don't see he's going to get approval to form a militia to fight the cartels, because the government is more pro-cartel than anti. | |
| But it's interesting, isn't it? | |
| It's interesting that the topic has been raised. | |
| Because I think you're going to see militias formed. | |
| Whether it's this guy or some other Americans... | |
| I would guess you are going to see militias formed to fight the cartels, and those militias might be well-armed. | |
| I don't know if you caught this, but there was a story the other day, just recently, in which the U.S. military was doing some war games in which they had a standard set of troops facing off in a war game against troops that had drones that they could control and robots. | |
| So I don't know what form the robots took, but imagine that they're like little tanks or something. | |
| You know, they weren't robots with feet, but I think they were like motorized robots, I'm guessing. | |
| And they would war game it time after time again. | |
| Who do you think won between the mechanized robot army using current equipment? | |
| That it wasn't futuristic, it was stuff we already have. | |
| Who won between the conventional army and the robot mechanized army? | |
| Robots. What percentage of the time did the robots with the humans beat just the humans? | |
| 100%. That's not even the good part. | |
| They won 100% of the battles because they had better drones and robots. | |
| That's not even the interesting part. | |
| Here's the interesting part. | |
| How many troops, human troops, did the side that used robots lose in the war games? | |
| Every time. None. | |
| None. | |
| Zero. They ran repeated war games. | |
| Of a conventional army, presumably a high-end conventional army, against our forces with some drones and robots, and our forces lost zero people. | |
| None. Now take that concept and imagine that a, let's say, mercenary and or volunteer militia Gets a hold of some good stuff and knows how to use it. | |
| Could a militia with robots and drones eliminate the cartels? | |
| Well, the cartels are not a standing force, like a standing military force, but at least raises the question, you know, if we could identify who they are, Is that all you need? | |
| Are the cartels even hiding? | |
| I don't think they are, right? The cartels come into city centers with these trucks that are fortified and have machine guns on the back. | |
| The cartels have armored trucks with machine guns that they'll drive through a city, apparently unabashedly. | |
| If we can identify them, and there's a militia that has drones and robots The militia might lose zero people. | |
| The cartels might lose a lot. | |
| So those are some forces that are all coming together. | |
| Here's the dumbest take I saw from somebody named Pam Keith, who had been some kind of Democratic politician who didn't make it, I guess. | |
| I don't think she got elected. But I don't know. | |
| Whatever. She's a Democrat. | |
| Let's just say that's the part I know. | |
| She's a Democrat. And she tweets... | |
| The thing with this whole circle game bullshit, talking about the cadets who are doing the circle game symbol, is that every one of those guys knew, in capital, knew it would be seen as a white power symbol and didn't care. | |
| They aren't stupid, just racist. | |
| They lack honor. | |
| Do you buy that take? | |
| Do you think that the young men, the cadets who were making the little OK symbol... | |
| That apparently the investigation found out that they were just playing a game. | |
| They were playing the circle game where if somebody sees you making that gesture, you can punch them in the arm, which apparently is a universally known game for a long time. | |
| Lots of kids play it, I have confirmed. | |
| Now, do you think that they knew, according to this Democrat, Pam Keith, that it would be seen as a white power symbol and they did it anyway on national television? | |
| First of all, that's the most crazy idea I've ever seen. | |
| But, let me say, on top of that, anything, any prediction, well, let me say it a different way. | |
| The worst take on any public situation like this, the worst opinion you could put on it, is that these young people were smart and well-informed in the same way that you are as an adult. | |
| That's the worst take. | |
| The worst take is that these, what, 18-year-olds were wise? | |
| They're not wise. | |
| There are no wise 18-year-olds. | |
| If you took 10 18-year-olds and said, how many of you know that that OK symbol is considered a white power sign? | |
| How many of 10 of those kids would have known that? | |
| Close to zero, I would think. | |
| No U. I feel like the number is close to zero. | |
| Maybe one out of ten. | |
| But a take like this that says with confidence and in public, oh yeah, they know what they were doing. | |
| First of all is mind reading. | |
| As one of my clever Twitter followers pointed out, that it's just pure mind reading. | |
| There's no possible way that this stranger could know what these kids were thinking. | |
| But one thing we can say for sure, they're at an age where their brains are not developed fully, and that the average person in that age would certainly not know that doing that sign would be a white supremacist sign. | |
| That's the sort of thing, in fact, the only people who know that are news junkies. | |
| If you were not a news junkie, you wouldn't know about that okay sign thing, would you? | |
| Test it at home. When you're with your family, Ask your family members, just your random family members every age, how many people have ever heard of that as being a white power symbol? | |
| What you'll find is that your three or four, you know, uncles and aunts who watch the news all know it. | |
| And then you'll find that most of the world doesn't watch the news at all. | |
| How many 18 year olds watch the news? | |
| Almost none. It's probably like 3%. | |
| So in your own family, you can test it. | |
| You'll find that most of your family doesn't watch the news. | |
| That would be true for most of you, I think. | |
| And they don't know that. | |
| So this is just the worst take. | |
| The kids are well-informed and smart. | |
| All right. What else we got going on here? | |
| I think we hit the highlights. | |
| Let me just check my notes. Oh no, there's one other thing that's really good happening. | |
| So, Hong Kong protesters who are a plucky and it's a group who have certainly earned our respect, would you now say? | |
| If you're a Hong Kong resident and you're standing up against China, you know that's not going to end well for you. | |
| I mean, these people have guts. | |
| Some serious guts. | |
| Hong Kong is also well educated. | |
| That's the real risk. | |
| China is not dealing with a bunch of idiots. | |
| China is not dealing with cowards. | |
| China is dealing with brilliant people who are very brave. | |
| If you ever get in a battle, you don't want to do it with brilliant people. | |
| Who are also very brave. | |
| And that appears to be the Hong Kong profile. | |
| Brilliant and brave. | |
| Braver than I would have expected them to be. | |
| We don't know where this goes. | |
| But to my point, the Hong Kong protesters just made a really good play. | |
| They held a pro-democracy rally in solidarity with China's Uyghurs. | |
| Is that the smartest thing you've ever heard? | |
| So Hong Kong is trying to expand their grievance to include the Uyghur Muslim minority population that China is putting in concentration camps and torturing and assigning rapists to their wives who are still back home. | |
| This is actually happening. | |
| A million Uyghurs are in concentration camps. | |
| So Hong Kong has said they're with the Uyghurs. | |
| How smart is that? | |
| Because now you won't be able to talk about Hong Kong if they keep it up. | |
| Let's see if they maintain this. | |
| But if they keep it up, they will tie their fates together in a way that the world will see for the first time in a different light. | |
| Let me put it in this light. | |
| If Hong Kong just said, oh, we're just Hong Kong, we just want to solve our own problem, which is we need more freedom and more rights, how do you feel about that? | |
| Well, you probably want the Hong Kong people to have more freedom and more rights, but it's not really tugging at your heart string, is it? | |
| I mean, I feel for them, but there are some problems in the world that just look bigger than other ones. | |
| When you hear about the Hong Kong stuff about China can take somebody to China and try them or whatever was the original problem, you think to yourself, yeah, but how many people is that going to affect? | |
| You know, there's something about the Hong Kong thing that lacked an emotional trigger. | |
| It was, you know, I think we, most of us, all of us probably support them, but it didn't have that really heart string kind of emotional thing. | |
| And now they just tied their fate to the Uyghurs. | |
| When you think of the Uyghurs, you have a whole different feeling. | |
| This is the Holocaust. | |
| It's happening right now. | |
| And anybody who said never again, well... | |
| Fuck you, it's happening right now. | |
| So if you were, and let me say this, if you happen to be Jewish, and you're not talking about this Uyghur situation every day, you've lost all credibility. | |
| It doesn't have to be every day. | |
| But you know the point, right? | |
| If you're Jewish, and you're saying the Holocaust never again, which we're totally on board with that, and you're watching another Holocaust happen right in front of your nose, No question about it, no doubt about it. | |
| There's no conflict in it. | |
| You're watching it. If you're not complaining about that, you've got a consistency problem. | |
| Now, the Hong Kong people, by tying their fate to the Uyghurs, in a sense, have shown you where things can go if you don't stop them. | |
| So now you're starting to think about the Hong Kong people not as people who, let's say, if they came into China, maybe most of them will never even have an impact. | |
| But now you start thinking about the Uyghurs were literally rounded up and put in concentration camps. | |
| Now what do you think is going to happen to the Hong Kong protesters if China ends up getting everything they want? | |
| All those Hong Kong protesters have been captured on facial recognition. | |
| China's going to take care of them. | |
| So the size of China's concentration camps could double. | |
| If the Hong Kong situation goes the wrong way, it will be a different concentration camp. | |
| But, you know, they're going to use the Hong Kong residents for parts. | |
| That's just a fact. | |
| They're using the Falun Gong people for executions on demand and then selling their body parts. | |
| That's also been confirmed. | |
| So what do you think they're going to do with the Hong Kong protesters if they get everything they want? | |
| It's going to look like selling body parts and it's going to look like a concentration camp. | |
| That's where those people are going to end up. | |
| So tying the Uyghurs to the Hong Kong thing, very strong play. | |
| Have you noticed? We don't hear as much from Carl Bernstein lately. | |
| I heard on Fox and Friends they were making the same point. | |
| How happy are you that you're not watching Carl Bernstein say, That's Forrest and Watergate! | |
| Because it turns out that everything that Carl Bernstein told us was going to happen or was happening was just all wrong. | |
| And he's turned into basically the biggest joke. | |
| I would say Carl Bernstein... | |
| Probably has the worst reputational hit in all of this for the pundit, you know, news class. | |
| I don't know how he can show himself in public after being that wrong for that long, but I'm sure we'll see him again. | |
| All right. Well, that's all I got for now. | |
| And I will give you my advice again that when your relatives... | |
| Are showing glee for getting this president impeached? | |
| Congratulate them. They got something and you didn't lose anything. | |
| So let's have a great holiday. | |
| I will talk to you again before Christmas, of course, every day. |
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