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Dec. 25, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
46:12
Episode 767 Scott Adams: Merry Christmas, The Simultaneous Sip and Good News Only
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Joel!
Merry Christmas!
Happy holidays. It's good to see all of you.
Good to see all of you, Tyler.
Erica, Merry Christmas.
So, I know why you're here.
You're here for the simultaneous sip.
It doesn't take much.
If you'd like to enjoy the special holiday version of the simultaneous sip, what do you think you need?
Well, I'll tell you.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip.
Go. Oh, best sip of the week.
I've got to tell you, I've been playing with my prednisone again.
Not playing with it, but doctor recommended.
So I have my sense of smell back only the second time in about a decade.
And that coffee smells really good.
Well, I hope all of you are gathered around with family.
Maybe opened your presents.
Maybe waiting for the kids to get up, depending on your time zone.
So let's talk about a few things, but it's all good news today.
No bad news today, okay?
Okay. I think we're all agreed on that.
Let's talk about some of the things that are fun and going right.
North Korea has promised some kind of a Christmas gift that some people are interpreting as maybe a missile test or something like that.
President Trump's response to this, potential of a Christmas present, so to speak, from North Korea, is one of the best responses you'll ever see.
So remember, it's all good news today.
So I'm not saying that the president's never made any mistakes or anybody else has never made any mistakes, but today we're just going to talk about the good stuff.
And the way President Trump handles North Korea, I don't think you'll ever see better.
Now, there might be a limit, you know, what can get done, how far we can go, how safe things can be.
There might be some limits, but the way he's handling it is so masterful.
Let me give you this example.
So North Korea is complaining and they're rattling their sabers and they might do some kind of a missile test to shake us up a little bit.
And when Trump was asked about this yesterday or recently, Trump said, quote, maybe it's a nice present.
And then he said, maybe it's a present where he sends me a beautiful vase as opposed to a missile test.
Trump said, I may get a vase.
I may get a nice present from him.
You don't know. You never know.
Now, if you didn't know how the world works, You'd say to yourself, oh my god, we have to get rid of this president.
He's talking about a vase when a nuclear-capable country is maybe aiming the rockets in our direction.
Why is he talking about a vase?
Oh, he's crazy! It's because he's good at this.
And I've said this in various ways, but I'll say it again.
The trick is not necessarily to get North Korea to get rid of all their nukes.
That would be great.
But just as good would be that they have no reason to point him in our direction and no reason to point them at any of our allies.
And what Trump is doing masterfully, I mean just masterfully, he's taking away their reasons.
You've never seen this before, I don't think.
I mean I've never seen it in my lifetime.
I've never seen anybody go after their reasons before.
Have you? I can't think of any historical parallel to this at all.
I'm no historian, so maybe somebody else can.
But he's literally taking away the root cause, which is the distrust, the dislike, the need to be the bigger country.
He's just taking it away by joking about it, and I think it's completely working.
Now, that doesn't mean we're safe or that North Korea will denuclearize, but sitting here today, I don't feel the slightest chance that North Korea has even an interest, even a little bit of interest, in attacking the United States.
I believe Trump has completely taken that away, right?
Now, who knows what's happening with the sanctions.
They're probably cheating so efficiently that they don't really need them to be dropped, so they don't really need to act desperate.
But it's a lot of pressure, and they don't need any of that pressure because why would North Korea put up with the sanctions when there's nothing in return?
So right now, North Korea is punishing itself, basically, because the United States is all ready to take them in as a friend.
There's no risk, no risk of war.
Totally willing to be as friendly as you can be with, you know, a country like North Korea.
They just have to say yes.
Here's another fun story.
More UFO reports over Vegas.
Now this may surprise you, but these UFOs, I know this is going to come as a big, big surprise, but these UFOs were not clearly photographed.
I know, right?
Because when you're used to seeing UFOs that are so clearly photographed, it's obvious what they are.
You can see the structure of the ship.
But weirdly, these are just splotchy bright spots in the air that seem to be moving fast, according to people who don't know how to calculate things.
So, I'm going to make a prediction.
The Earth will not be dominated by an extraterrestrial force with their new technology.
I believe we will go another 100,000 years of humanity without seeing any actual extraterrestrials.
Sorry. I've been waiting for Alan Dershowitz to weigh in on this whole impeachment.
Is it an impeachment?
Is it not? Because until he talks, I feel like I don't have a good opinion.
Because I swear to God, he ends every conversation.
If you haven't watched this over the past few years, it's kind of remarkable.
You'll see all the nattering heads debating stuff, and they'll be on both sides, and they'll be all over the place.
And then Alan Dershowitz comes in, and he just drops the hammer on the whole conversation.
And when he's done, you read his opinion, and you go, okay, well, maybe I should have just taken his opinion, because whatever the hell I was talking about doesn't make any sense compared to whatever he said.
And he's doing that again.
So, I'm going to conflate two stories.
There's a part not about Dershowitz that didn't come from him, but I'm going to put it in with his story.
I don't know who the author was, but somebody on the internet yesterday tweeted around an opinion piece that filled in the blanks.
For something I totally didn't understand about the impeachment thing, and maybe you didn't either.
And it was, remember when the Democrats' star lawyer, a constitutional scholar-type person, said that the impeachment was not complete because the articles had not been sent over to the Senate?
And a lot of people said, well, that's weird.
How often do you get a Democrat seemingly siding with President Trump when in fact this particular Democrat was chosen specifically because he would say anti-Trump stuff?
And then he comes out and says the best thing the president could ever hear, which is the impeachment is not official because it hasn't been transmitted, so it's not real.
And a lot of people said, wow, that's weird.
And I couldn't explain it.
I couldn't explain it either because we live in a very partisan world.
It didn't make sense to me that in this particular case, somebody would cross sides with an opinion that was clearly for the benefit of the other side.
Turns out, there is speculation, hypothesis, that it was a trick.
It was a trick.
Here's the trick. And this is using Dershowitz's insights to explain it better.
But apparently the Constitution has no requirement for transmitting the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate.
It doesn't exist.
So there's nothing in the Constitution that says you must do this step or the Senate can't vote on it or act on it.
The Senate can do anything it wants because the Senate has...
Complete constitutional authority to decide what a trial looks like and how it is accomplished.
They can do anything they want as long as the Senate majority and leaders are on the same page.
So one of the things they can do is that the Senate can, without the articles even being transmitted, they can still vote on it.
They could have a trial.
They could vote on it. They could vote on it without a trial.
They could vote on it after some witnesses.
They could do anything they want.
So the Senate has the complete power to just wipe the articles away whether Nancy Pelosi transmits them or not.
Now, here's the part where Feldman comes in.
Feldman was trying to argue that you do need to transmit them or else it's not official.
But that was probably, and this is the speculation part, because we can't read his mind, but it's the only explanation that fits the facts in a way that I can understand it.
And that was that it was a diversion.
And the diversion was to make the Senate believe that there was a step yet to be taken.
Because if the Senate believed there were no more steps that needed to be taken, I mean, there could be taken but didn't need to be taken, then the Senate could just vote.
And the Senate could have already voted it away, but the Senate was also confused because I think the Senate was saying, well, we've got to wait for it to be referred over here, don't we?
It's a little unclear.
The scholars are debating.
So I think Feldman did maybe one of the most clever legal political tactics you'll ever see, a complete diversion to make you think there was an issue, When none existed, so that you would be diverted and not just voted away and be gone by Christmas.
So I just put that out there as something I read, not something I necessarily could tell you is right, but it sounds right, doesn't it?
Isn't it the one explanation that seems to satisfy all the observation?
You know, there's nothing about what I said that doesn't fit perfectly, I think.
So that's cool. What else we got going on here today?
My book, Loser Think, ended the year, or it looks like it'll end the year as the number one bestseller in political humor.
Yay! The Kindle version of my book.
It'll be the number one bestseller in political humor.
It is not very close to being number one in the world, but in that category where I think it belongs.
It's not really a political book, but it works really well in that zone as well.
You may have seen on my Twitter feed just moments ago, tweeting around some various articles about major breakthroughs that have happened all year in cancer research.
It's one of the big stories that doesn't get reported because it's really a bunch of little stories, and if you don't see the whole field, it's hard to know that there's a big story.
So Jake Novak was tweeting around a bunch of articles this morning About what looked to be serious, serious major breakthroughs in cancer treatments.
So it might be that the biggest story of 2019 was in cancer research, but since it was lots of little stories and you have to wait for them to play out, maybe it takes a while to know, but this might have been one of the most consequential years in human history.
It's possible. Yeah, somebody's mentioning that the president being aggressive with HIV medications To try to essentially eradicate it in this country and others, I assume.
So these are gigantic, just gigantic humanity benefits.
And I wanted to check in with you since it's sort of the end of the year and this is when people do this.
About some things that many of you have participated with me in, let's say, magnifying messages.
I think that's what we do best here on Twitter, is that we can magnify messages that are good and debate things that are wrong, and maybe that helps in the long run.
But here are some topics that I believe that That you collectively and I made some difference.
Now, that doesn't mean we're the leaders in any of it, but we were participants in boosting certain messages all year.
And most of you were sort of on board with a lot of that.
Here are some of them. One of the messages I think we successfully boosted this year was the idea of decoupling with China, but strategically.
In other words, don't just walk away.
Do what you can do. We got business, ongoing business.
You might have to wind them down in a very long-term situation.
But don't bring any new business over there.
That would just be crazy.
I think that that idea, promoted primarily by people like Gordon Chang and Kyle Bass and some others, and I've definitely joined that message as well.
And I feel, would you agree, That the decoupling idea is far more prevalent, at least as an option, in people's minds than it was a year ago.
Now, the Hong Kong stuff makes a difference.
The Uyghur stuff makes a difference.
The organ transplant stuff makes a difference.
The trade deal makes a difference.
But, yeah, I'm seeing some yeses go by.
I believe that we succeeded.
Collectively. Because it doesn't make...
If I tweet something, it has no power whatsoever unless there are hundreds of thousands of you looking at it and saying, yes, I amplify that message.
So there's nothing I can do on my own.
I can only tweet and you can decide to retweet.
And I think the China message, I think, changed the world.
Honestly. I don't think that's too strong a statement.
I think that collectively...
We are part of, we're not the reason that anything changed, but we're part of this growing influential message that the direction we need to go with China is a strategic, you know, managed decoupling over time.
And that seems to be now drifting into the common, I would say that's drifting into common sense, where before it was, think how radical that was even a year ago.
Think what it would have sounded like to say we should decouple with China one year ago, because some of us were.
And now think about how it sounds today.
It doesn't sound bad, does it?
Because we saw that the trade war didn't really hurt the economy.
At least it didn't drive it down.
Maybe it could have been higher if things had been different.
Here's another one. As you know, with Mark Schneider and Michael Schellenberger and others, we've been helping boost the idea that clean, safe nuclear energy has to be a big part of the coming whatever.
You know, whether you believe in climate change or you don't, it ends up being the same.
I feel as though, and this one would be a little harder, you know, this might be confirmation bias on my part, I don't know, But I feel as though the national mood about nuclear energy is really different in the past year.
But I don't know if that's just my little corner of the world, but it seems that now that some of the Democrat candidates have come out and said full-throatedly, yes, nuclear has to be part of the solution, and you see the Perry Energy Department saying, yes, we're building test facilities for fuel.
We're very aggressive in this.
And you see other countries, and you see Bill Gates trying to get his Generation 4 up, etc.
I feel as though this is another category where we collectively actually made a difference.
Can I get your opinion on that?
This one's harder to judge, right?
I think a little harder to judge.
But it feels as if in the past year we went from some kind of full-on panicked 12 years we're all going to die to drifting toward the opinion that between the new technologies for scrubbing CO2 and the limitation of our ability to be able to predict things,
our strong economy and the fact that nuclear energy is very promising at the same time that solar and batteries and wind are getting more efficient.
I feel as if all the smart people are on the same page now.
Or it's getting that way.
Now, the world is still afraid of nuclear, you know, the population in general, but I feel as though the decision-making public has all drifted in the same direction.
So that doesn't mean we get something fast, but at least the mines are in the right place.
One of the things that I wanted for 2019 is for the president to declare the Mexican cartels terrorist organizations.
I understand. I watched a clip in which Brandon Darby was talking about this.
He's an expert on the border and the cartels and works for Breitbart.
I've had him on this podcast before, on this Periscope.
And he's probably the most, as far as I can tell, the most knowledgeable person about what's actually happening on the ground.
And he said something interesting I hadn't heard before, which is that it might make sense to designate a few of the cartels, the Mexican cartels, as terrorist organizations, but not all of them.
Now, I didn't hear the thinking behind that, and I don't know exactly how that could make sense, but because it comes from somebody I know to be sensible, I'm going to say there's something in my knowledge that there's a gap I need to have filled in.
So there is some thinking, That I can't validate as being agreeable with me yet, but I imagine it probably is, is that you wouldn't do it to all of them.
Now, the President has been talking about it.
It's on the table.
So I would say that that is yet again another situation, certainly with the fentanyl situation.
Wouldn't you say that we've been part of productively persuading toward Getting tougher with the cartels?
I think so. I think we can pat ourselves on the back for being part of the public voices that are in favor of that.
Another gigantic thing that I think we did this year, and here I'll call out especially Steve Cortez and Joel Pollack, and I all worked very hard on this for the last three years, and most of you did as well, which is debunking the so-called fine people hoax.
Now, I've often said that the fine people hoax, if you're new to the Periscope, it has widely been falsely reported that President Trump called the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville fine people.
The quick version is if you read the transcript, he said the opposite of that.
But when it's taken out of context, it reverses his meaning.
So that has been widely reported as a true statement.
That he actually did that.
While all the facts are unambiguously as clear as they could be, then he said the opposite, and he said it as clearly as you could possibly say it.
Now, for whatever reason, fake news and confirmation bias and everything else, that became sort of, I would say, the tentpole that holds up the entire...
Racist accusation against the President, which, of course, all of his supporters are affected by as well.
It seems to me that we've made progress.
It seems to me.
It's really hard.
It's maybe the hardest hoax that has ever been attacked.
I mean, it's one of the most resistant hoaxes.
But hoaxes die hard.
I would, however, say that the number of people this year, 2019, Who were exposed to the truth, which is the actual transcript so they can see for themselves that the tentpole racist claim was just made up.
Literally just made up.
Now, if you don't know what a tentpole reference is, it's a reference to if you have a big circus tent, there's one main pole in the middle.
It's like the important one.
So I think if people understood that they had been duped, I mean really duped, seriously duped, duped by the fine people hoax, it should soften them up to at least be open to the possibility that they've seen other things differently and wrong as well.
So I think that's good.
I think we did good work on those things.
Is there anything else we did good work on?
It's the end of the year and I'm hearing from a lot of people on Twitter who got some benefits from my book and anyone in my books.
People are reporting that they've lost 80 pounds.
That's you, John, talking to you.
People say that they've changed jobs, they've upgraded their careers, they've improved their social lives and all kinds of stuff.
So I'm feeling good about that.
A lot of people reporting in that That their lives have improved because of either this periscope or my books.
And if any of you have any success stories you want to tweet at me, this would be a good week to do it because I like to read that stuff.
It's very motivating to me to find out that somebody read something or took some advice and got a good result.
So if you'd like to share that, I'll tweet around any good ones I see.
All right.
Somebody says, "I survived." Somebody says, "You have changed my life.
I don't ever write on Twitter, but will for you.
Well, thank you. Becoming a certified hypnotist.
Did somebody do that? China and fentanyl.
I feel like I made a dent in the Chinese fentanyl story, but no yet result.
So we don't see anything that looks like China actually cutting down on the fentanyl.
Are Trump supporters a cult?
Well, that's what I call word thinking.
So you've been seeing a lot of cult 45 on the internet.
The idea that President No.
45, President Trump, is a cult and that the people who follow him believe him because he's a cult leader of some size.
Now, if you'll notice a pattern here, there's a pattern.
The pattern is that the people on the left, let's call them the anti-Trumpers, consistently can't understand their world.
Would you agree? And so they're looking for reasons to explain their world.
And they're trying to understand how there could even be a President Trump and how he could have tens of millions of supporters.
It doesn't make sense in how they understand their world.
So under those conditions, cognitive dissonance kicks in.
And when cognitive dissonance kicks in, you come up with all kinds of wild explanations to paper over the fact that your worldview just has a problem.
There's a break in your consistency of your worldview and it has to fix it.
And so you saw, well, he must have been elected by the Russians.
I mean, it must have been the Russians because no Americans would do this.
Then, of course, people had to prove that they were right all along, and even though the president's progress seemed to be pretty good, you know, the economy and ISIS and all the things he did, they still had to be right.
So how can you be right about him being the worst president while the observable facts are that everything's going well?
Well, you declare that he's secretly a racist.
He's secretly a dictator.
He's secretly trying to take over.
He hasn't done anything yet, but he has bad thoughts, and he has bad intentions for the future.
So you end up with all this magical thinking and weird stuff.
Now, the cult part is part of that field of cognitive dissonance patches.
These are things that people are trying to imagine to make their world make sense.
You and I don't need it.
Because our world made sense from the beginning, right?
Here's what my world looked like.
2015. Here was my view of the world.
Huh. There's a whole bunch of standard, boring politicians running.
There's one really capable, super persuasive guy who seems to have every tool you need to win against all odds.
My world was completely consistent because I saw a guy with special tools use his special tools and get exactly the result you'd expect when the person with the best tools competes against the people who don't have any tools.
To me, that seemed completely consistent.
Next, I assumed that he would do well with the economy because he's a salesperson.
What the economy needs more than anything is a good cheerleader.
He said that he would be that good cheerleader and that he went out and did it.
And he did it so well that it was exactly what I expected because of his toolbox.
I saw the tools, and I said, well, there's a guy who could sell an economy, and he's also smart enough.
You know, the way he conceives the world is as a psychological engine, and he knows that to prime the psychological engine, he just has to say, here's a good reason the economy is going up.
Here's another good reason the economy is going up.
And here's the key part.
It doesn't have to be that true, meaning that the president cut a bunch of regulations.
And he uses that as one of his reasons for why the economy is going up.
Is that a reason? Well, maybe.
Maybe in some small way.
Maybe not. But it doesn't matter.
The President understands that when you say, the economy is going to improve and here are my reasons, A, B, and C, that's good.
You're done. A, B, and C don't have to be that true.
They only have to make you think it's true.
And you think, well, if the economy is going to be better next year, I better invest.
And that makes it a self-fulfilling economy.
So the president understood that.
So what I got was exactly what I expected and predicted.
We are currently experiencing the identical future that my worldview predicted.
Economy doing well.
ISIS defeated for all the reasons that the president said he would.
Doing better in our conversations with even our frenemies.
Everything that I expected happened just the way I expected.
So you would expect that since my worldview was completely consistent, I would have no triggers to create cognitive dissonance because everything was consistent.
But if you were an anti-Trumper, none of this made sense.
How could a crazy guy be presiding over a great economy?
How could it be that Kim Jong-un hasn't already nuked us?
How could it be that he's not in the pocket of Russia?
I mean, all these crazy stuff.
And so the cult accusation is just more of that confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance kicking in.
But I did write in my book, Loser Think, that there is one cult quality that is becoming common for both sides.
Let's say Democrats and Republicans, just to keep it simple.
And that is that cults don't like you to communicate outside the cult.
And if you notice that it's getting harder and harder to talk politics if you're talking to somebody who you don't already know agrees with you.
So there's sort of an accidental double cult situation happening on the left and the right, but it's not because there are cult leaders.
It's because the media and the way things have sorted out, social media especially, just makes us less likely to talk to each other if we think we disagree.
So in a sense, there's an accidental cult being formed, two of them, just because we don't talk in the same way we used to talk.
All right. That's the good news.
What other good news happened this year?
I think we had good news with ISIS. We had relatively good news about terrorism.
Merry Christmas to you too, just looking at your comments.
Somebody got a job? Congratulations.
Brexit happened? Yeah.
I mean, if you think that's good, it probably is.
The Iran protests, yeah, we'll see if the Iran protests turn into something productive.
Somebody had their best year in real estate, congratulations, we had hostages released.
Somebody says, still no wall.
Yeah, but you know, the president did get money approved to put it in the places where...
To put it in the places where it makes the most difference.
So we'll see if that makes a difference.
Space Force, yes. First Step Act.
There was an Iran-MIG shoot-down last night.
Somebody's saying in the comments. I didn't see anything about that in the news.
Hong Kong is trying to become the 51st state.
Hong Kong's a big problem.
I don't know how that's going to be.
Let's talk about Hong Kong.
Gordon Chang has been hinting at this for a long time, and he's one of the smartest guys on this topic, so I take him seriously.
And the thought is that Hong Kong could end up taking down mainland China.
Now, my first reaction to that was, that's not going to happen, because mainland China is pretty darn secure and pretty solid, and Hong Kong is isolated.
I didn't see how it could infect the mainland.
But, if Hong Kong doesn't give up, and it looks like that might be the case, it looks like Hong Kong might not have any give up in them.
Hong Kong may have decided.
You know, you've heard me say this before.
It's one of the best pieces of advice and ways to look at the world you'll ever see.
There's a real big difference between wanting something and deciding to have it because you act differently.
If you simply want it, you might not put in all the sacrifice and cost to get it.
It's just something you want, but you can't afford it.
If you decide to get it, then cost doesn't matter because you're just going to go all in.
You're going to die trying if you've decided.
And it's starting to look like Hong Kong has maybe...
Maybe shifted from wanting more freedom and wanting China not to have this power over them.
They may have turned the corner into deciding.
It's starting to look like that.
I can't tell because that's really internal thoughts.
You can't see them from here.
But it looks like they've upped the level of personal risk to American Revolution levels, meaning that the founders of the American Revolution They knew full well that if they didn't succeed in the most unlikely task against the biggest foe, you know, Great Britain, England, just England, they knew if they didn't succeed, they'd all hang.
And they said that expressly and they were right.
So Hong Kong is in that same situation.
If the people whose faces have already been caught on surveillance, if they don't succeed, A lot of them are going to hang, you know, figuratively speaking.
They may end up in jail. So it's not impossible, as I sit here today, it is not impossible to imagine that Hong Kong will change China.
I wouldn't have said that a year ago, but when you see how plucky and determined the Hong Kong residents are, they're not joking.
And when you have people that smart and that brave, what can they do?
Because the reason that the Americans won the revolution is that England had all the resources and the wherewithal, but the plucky revolutionary army and its leaders were apparently very smart and very brave.
If you put those two things together, smart and brave, And you're on your home court territory.
I mean, there's a reason that the Taliban can kick everybody out of Afghanistan.
Maybe not the smart part so much, but certainly brave.
If you're brave enough, you can't lose, it seems.
You're just willing to put up with enough loss.
So, do not count out the fact that China might be in a lot of trouble next year.
Hong Kong might be part of it.
Debt might be part of it.
Shrinking economy might be part of it.
So it could be a tough year for China shaping up.
All right. There's more stories about Ukraine and Rudy and Hunter Biden and all those, but at this point, all of that looks like Stuff you shouldn't rely on to be true yet.
So I don't want to talk about that stuff because I don't think any of it's reliable yet.
But she'll be fun.
All right. Yeah, there's stories about Paul Pelosi, etc.
So I don't believe any of that stuff.
Comey and Brennan. Well, I'll tell you.
I have...
Let's say a psychological barrier when talking about Brennan and Clapper.
From the very beginning, Brennan and Clapper have the faces and mannerisms and let's say their exterior presentation and the words they choose and just body language and everything else, they look like they're the guiltiest two people who ever lived.
Now, I can't tell if that's pure confirmation bias because in my mind I think they're guilty of something or maybe I want them to be guilty of something.
And so I'm interpreting what I'm seeing in that frame totally possible.
But I've never seen two guys who look more guilty from the start.
I mean, from the jump, they look guilty.
And I would say that's not true of, you know, Comey.
I didn't say that of McCabe.
If you look at Comey and McCabe, I said to myself, well, there are guys who maybe they were guilty and maybe they weren't, but you can't tell by looking at them.
You can't tell by listening to them.
There's nothing in their presentation that just screams, I'm lying to you right now.
It could be true, it could be not.
But when Clapper and Brennan were on TV, every time I saw them, I felt like the word lie was like shouting at me.
Lie! Lie! Lie!
Don't know why. So this might be one of those cases where it's just confirmation bias and doesn't mean anything and they've done nothing and nothing will happen.
That's possible. But if I had to trust my hunches, if I had to trust my hunches, they're in for a bad 2020.
But, you know, it's just a feeling.
All right. Do you think Greta Thunberg helped or hurt the whole climate change conversation?
I have a weird feeling that she didn't help the way she wanted to.
I think it's great that she brings attention to it, because bringing attention to it is good.
Even if we determine, no matter what you determine about it, focusing on it makes sense because it's at least potentially a huge problem.
You might believe it's not, but it's certainly potentially one.
So I'm glad she focused on it.
But I think the indirect effect of that is that the topic was associated with children.
Think about it. When you think of climate change, who do you think of?
Who are your first people you think of?
Well, there's AOC. You think of Greta.
You think of Capri...
What's his name?
The actor. So you think of a few actors.
But basically, if Greta becomes the voice of climate change, it makes the topic seem less serious in a way that I don't think people understand.
Now, On the logic level, you'd say, whoa, climate change will hurt children more than it will adults because they have to be around for the aftermath, the children do.
So therefore, it is a children's problem and isn't it great that there's a child, teenager who's a champion of it?
It all makes sense, right?
So on a logical level, it all makes sense.
But on a less than logical level, where we all exist...
It looks like it became a Santa Claus story or a boogeyman or a monster under the bed because when you see a woman, not a woman, but a young girl who's literally still a child and she's the face of this, you merge in your heads those things.
Climate change, a child's issue.
Climate change? Something children worry about.
Climate change? It's not for adults.
It's about children. Now, none of that makes sense because Greta was doing an adult job to fix an adult problem, but I worry that It backfired.
I don't know if that's a worry, but it's just a question.
Because remember, we are just as much influenced by association as we're, in fact, more.
More influenced by associations of things, things that overlap, things that are with other things, people who are photographed with other people, people who said the same thing as somebody else, somebody acts in the way that somebody else acted.
So just associations are very powerful in our mental environment.
Whereas sometimes common sense and rational logic and stuff, not so much.
So I think the net effect of Greta is that she associated this potentially massive problem of climate change with something kids worry about.
May have worked in the opposite direction.
We'll see. No way to really measure that kind of thing.
But I give her credit.
I'm typically...
I'm typically complimentary to anybody who gets in the octagon.
Anybody who's willing to take the slings and arrows to fight for something that they think will make the world a better place, if they really mean it, I tend to be very positive.
So I'm very positive on Greta for stepping up, trying to fix something.
Now, you can argue that she's doing it the right or wrong way, or you could argue that it's not as big a problem, but I think you have to give her respect for stepping up there and trying to do something.
Same as I say with all the anti-Trumpers.
I use Alyssa Milano as my example often.
I have complete respect for Alyssa Milano, even while disagreeing with 80% of the things she says on Twitter.
it's because she's real She cares. She gets involved.
She's trying to make the world a better place.
I might disagree with her on the details, but I think you want more citizens like that, not fewer of them.
All right. Bill Pulte here.
Merry Christmas, Bill.
Trump stole her childhood dreams, somebody's saying.
Somebody says, wow, Scott, turning you off.
You're turning me off for what?
Because I said I liked Alyssa Milano's style?
Well, you just got blocked.
First block on Christmas Day.
Yes, I think we're at the golden age.
I believe we've reached the golden age.
And here's my definition of the golden age.
So the golden age is defined as a time when our biggest problem is not shortages.
That our biggest problem is that we haven't designed systems to get those goods and services to everywhere they get to go.
And that as we design better systems, we'll unlock the golden age.
But also it looks like we're curing a lot of major health problems, etc.
So, I also see that the age of big nuclear countries threatening to go to war with each other just doesn't make any sense anymore.
It just doesn't. We might get to the point where I could easily see in the next five years whoever the president is, let's say it's Trump, sitting down with Putin and Xi and Kim and whoever else and just saying, can any of you think of a reason why we should be pointing our weapons at each other?
Because I can't. Can you?
Can you think of a reason that we should be pointing weapons at Russia and vice versa and China pointing them at both at us and we at them?
Can you think of any reason for that?
I can't. I can't think of any reason.
All the reasons are gone.
So we might have this weird major global shift that says war is economics.
And if you want to have a war, it's going to be an economic war because those are the kinds that work and those are the kinds that, you know, are just better than a military war.
All right. In 1912, people were saying it was a golden age, too.
And then there was World War I. But this time, we're right.
Potential invasion? Yeah, I don't see any of the big countries.
Nobody's going to invade a nuclear country.
Has that ever happened? Are there any historians here?
Has a nuclear power ever been invaded?
I don't think so.
So the only thing we have left to fight over are the non-nuclear countries.
All right.
I think we've said enough for today.
It's time to go open your packages.
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