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Dec. 31, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:15:52
Episode 773 Scott Adams: Iraq, 2020, China Deal and Your Questions
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Time Text
Hey, you're so fast, all of you people.
How did 300 people hit the button the moment it went live?
You're amazing.
I think you're some of the most gifted and tactically brilliant people in the entire world.
And I'm not just saying that.
But I know why you're here.
You're here for this simultaneous sip, the best thing of the day, the greatest way to end the year.
I think we should drink to an amazing year.
Am I wrong that this is like a really good year?
If we were to look at 2019 from the context of the future, what would we say about it?
Dr. Fung Juice.
DJ Dr. Fung Juice is with us.
Good to see you. Thanks for inviting people.
And thanks for coming to enjoy the Simultaneous Hip.
Do you know what you need to participate in the Simultaneous Hip?
It's not much. No.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a challenge, a stein a tank, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Go. Yep, just as good as I thought it would be.
That, my friends, is the final simultaneous sip of 2019.
Or is it?
Or is it? Now there's another one coming.
I would like to drink a toast to all of you.
I believe that you have served a very valuable patriotic, if not global, service in 2019.
Because of all of you, I get to do this.
And I get to do this and suggest ideas and promote ideas that I think are useful.
Systems are better than goals, talent stacks, things like that.
I think it's useful based on the feedback I get, but I couldn't do any of it without the benefit of an audience.
And so you have been part of something, I think, very important.
If you were not here, if you did not, some of you, buy my books, then people could not read them.
Publishers would not publish them.
And I hear every day now, especially because it's the end of the year, that I hear people thanking me for something that was in my book that helped them in their career or their life, or something that they saw on the Periscope that they found helpful and really changed their life.
And my first reaction, of course, is to take total credit.
It's like, well, if I helped, you're welcome.
Thanks. I'll try to do more of that because I like it.
But if I'm being completely honest and generous, There's nothing I do in public that works unless you're doing what you're doing, which is paying attention.
And so, this is to you.
I lift a special 2019 simultaneous sip to all of you for making the world a better place simply by putting your attention someplace useful.
Here's to all of you. You know, I don't know if it's fully dawned on you what's happening, because when you're in the middle of something, you can't see it from the outside anymore, you're too close to it.
There's something really important happening, like right here, like right now, and every time we do this.
And what's happening is that there's, I would say, a tribe being built around a series of ideas.
So each person that you follow has usually a constellation of ideas, and the reason you follow them or pay attention to them or read their books or whatever, read their articles, is because you like that constellation.
And so it forms people into almost virtual idea tribes.
They're spread around the world, but it's people who have a common vision of things, and they tend to gather around people who communicate that same vision.
So because a complete accident of history put us together, we turned into one of those.
Certainly it's not something I woke up and said, hey, I think I'll have a big audience of 100,000 people or so.
I think about 100,000 people follow each of these periscopes.
If you look at the replays and then it goes to...
Oh, I cracked into the top 100 on iTunes.
So iTunes tracks...
The podcast popularity.
And for about a week, I popped into the top 100.
I think it's 122 last I checked.
But that's pretty good. There are a lot of podcasts in the world.
And collectively, we made it to the top 100.
But where I'm going with this is that I've said this a number of times, that democracy has evolved.
And technically, we're a republic, but with democratic principles.
But our republic has, and I think President Trump is a big part of this, become more of an audience participation thing.
Meaning that if any large tribe of ideas gets formed, it's going to have power and it's going to start influencing Congress and the president directly.
And I don't think anybody has a problem with that because they are supposed to be responsive to the public.
And if there's a big voice that forms in the public, of course they should be responsive.
Doesn't mean they do everything that that group wants, but certainly responsive to it.
Pay attention to it. And so we are somewhat accidentally, but a little bit intentionally, forming a powerful idea amplifier.
I think that's what we mostly are, wouldn't you say?
There's not much That I talk about that isn't an amplification of somebody else's good idea.
And I think that's our best and highest purpose, frankly.
So if I'm boosting, you know, Mark Schneider and Michael Schellenberger on nuclear or Dr.
Ju on what to do about the homeless, addicted, mentally ill part of the world, then I'm doing something useful.
Because I'm boosting good ideas.
All right, enough about that. Let's talk about what's in the news.
I don't know if it's just because it's the end of the year or it's the holiday or what, but I told you yesterday about, it was kind of remarkable that Major Garrett of CBS just had a full-throated support of President Trump's record for minority citizens, especially the black community.
And I thought, well, that's unusual.
To see somebody associated with what you think would be sort of an anti-Trump news outlet and to say with no qualifications whatsoever, no buts, no anything, solid record.
And I thought, that's really remarkable.
You just don't expect to see a solid endorsement of President Trump on race from the people who have been making that the biggest issue from the beginning.
And so easily, Major Garrett could have thrown in there, well, it's, you know, it's slightly compensating for what he said in Charlotte about the fine people.
And he could have repeated the fine people hoax as if the president actually said, that's the hoax part, that is reported that he said the Nazis were fine people, which he didn't.
He said the opposite of that in reality.
But normally, that's how you expect that to go.
Now, here's another one in the same So Peter Bergen, I think he's military slash intelligence analyst, I'm not sure his exact title, but an expert in that field.
Talking about the president's use of force in Iraq.
So apparently U.S. forces attacked some Iranian-backed militia that had caused some injuries among American troops not too far away.
Not too distant past.
And so it was sort of a brushback pitch to make sure that the Iranian military knew to stay away from U.S. forces.
And Peter Bergen on CNN said it was a good use of force without a qualification again.
So it's the without qualification part that I'm finding just remarkable.
And Bergen goes on and explains That the President did not use force, even when Iran shot down, or they do shoot down a drone, did not use force against them when they attacked oil facilities but didn't kill anybody.
And so that created a clear precedent that we're not going to kill your people if you don't kill our people.
But if you injure our people, your people are going to die.
And Peter Bergen, probably no fan of the President, just because he appears on CNN. I don't want to read his mind.
But you expect him to come up with, well, he's made 10 mistakes in the past, but I guess he got lucky this time.
Maybe his advisors won out.
You'd expect some kind of qualified, okay, it turned down okay, but he did it all wrong, just got lucky.
But none of that.
It's Peter Bergen saying that it's unambiguously a proper use of force.
I don't know. Is something changing?
Is it my imagination that something looks different now?
It could be just the holidays.
I'm guessing it's because a lot of people are on vacation.
Maybe there would have been a producer or somebody who would have said, you know, maybe soften this a little bit.
You know, if it had been the regular staff and not the vacation staff.
I don't know. I don't know.
Maybe it's something. Maybe it's nothing.
Here's another story. You probably all remember the Alleged story that turns out to be a hoax.
A surprise that a Kansas police officer said McDonald's employees wrote a derogatory term on his cup.
So on his coffee cup, it was something, you know, blah, blah, blah, pig, he reported.
Completely made it up.
So they investigated and McDonald's said, we don't even know what you're talking about.
We have no idea what you're talking about.
Didn't happen. And I guess the police who investigated it agreed that it didn't happen.
So what does it tell you when some of our biggest stories are literally made up?
In other words, in order to find a story like this that is so grossly unacceptable to most people, it had to be made up.
Yeah, victimhood, people are inventing victimhood Because they don't have enough real problems.
That's actually literally true.
That people don't have enough real problems that they're literally making them up.
How could you pick one thing that would tell you it's a better world than that?
Alright. There's news that just broke, just before I got in here, that President Trump says he will sign phase one trade deal with China.
Now we don't know exactly what's in that deal, but apparently it's just we lower some tariffs.
Maybe not all of them. They buy more food.
Maybe they were going to do that anyway.
I don't know if phase one of the trade deal is too terribly important.
It certainly does not conflict with decoupling.
So you could do phase one of the trade deal at the same time you're decoupling as fast as you can.
Because as fast as you can decouple is going to be kind of slow.
But it doesn't matter how slowly or fast you do it.
It matters the direction.
So the direction of new business going into China, I've got to think it's slowed down and it might reverse.
But, you know, if they want to sell us stuff at a good price and we want to buy stuff at a good price and they want, you know, on the margins, we might as well have a deal.
Even if we're mad at them for other stuff, you know, such as their holocaust that they're perpetrating.
So, I would give you this caution.
I would not assume that that deal will get signed.
Okay? I'm not going to predict that it won't, but I would say if you were going to handicap the odds, And say, all right, China and the United States have both said yes.
They both said yes in public.
They both announced it.
They're setting a date.
That all looks like it's going to be signed, right?
I think maybe 50-50.
If I had to put odds on it, there's about a 50% chance that something will derail it.
I think in the long run something will get signed.
But if you look at any particular announcement, You should always say, well, 50-50.
There's a story from West Virginia in which the governor just agreed to the termination of dozens of Corrections Academy trainees.
So these are people who are trainees to work in the jail, prison corrections world.
And the problem was that they took a group photograph in which all 30 of them Gave the Hitler salute.
It sounds like I'm making that up, right?
That 30 corrections officers in West Virginia who were in the academy training program, all 30 of them, with no dissenters, all 30 of them, as soon as the photographer, presumably the photographer or somebody in the group, said, hey, why don't we all give a Heil Hitler salute in public?
As a group, wearing our uniforms.
And they all did, every one of them.
All 30 of them did it.
There wasn't one person who said, I'll sit this out.
All 30 of them.
Now, let's compare this story to an earlier story.
It's called Jeffrey Epstein.
Do you remember when there were so many errors in the corrections facility that Epstein was in?
Then many of you said, Scott, are you kidding me?
How could you get so many independent corrections officers to be so incompetent at the same time?
Scott, Scott, Scott, this is not realistic.
There's no way all of those corrections officers could make all of those mistakes and be so incompetent all in the same place.
I mean...
What are the odds of that?
Well, in my defense, I give you 30 West Virginia corrections officers.
Not one of them and a 30 thought it was a bad idea to give a Hitler salute on camera in their uniforms.
Not one of them.
Now, is there anybody here who would still like to argue with me?
That a group of corrections officers in one place will generally make good decisions, even if a few of them are bad.
I mean, no.
I think I've made my point.
All right. And that is just about the only things happening.
So I thought I would take some calls right here on Periscope.
I'm going to take some calls and You can either ask me a question, because it's the end of the year, I'm going to open it up to anything.
So you can ask me any question on any topic, but you have to be interesting.
So by interesting, I mean ask me something that you think other people might care about the answer to.
All right.
Terrible take on the Hitler salute.
so Are you saying that I have a terrible take on the Hitler salute?
Now, if you're saying to me, Scott, they were just joking around, of course.
It was the dumbest thing they ever did, whether they were joking around.
Now, I don't believe that any of the West Virginia people are Hitler fans.
If I suggested that, of course not.
I think they were just idiots.
So, that's my take.
Alright, let's see who wants to ask a question.
We'll take Omer.
I hope I'm saying that right.
Is it Omer? Omer, can you hear me?
Omer? Omer?
Can I hear me?
Let's try someone else.
Our technology is a little bit hinky today, but we'll get this.
Let's go with Kimberly Wonder Woman.
Kimberly, can you hear me?
Hi. Do you have a question for me, Kimberly?
Our technology is messing up.
Kimberly, you back or you gone?
Okay. Do you have a question for me?
You know, I was wondering what your take was on this thing that's going down right now at the embassy.
So the thing that's going down at the Iraqi embassy?
Yes, sir. Well, obviously Iran has organized Some protesters to go, you know, surround the U.S. Embassy in Iraq.
If everybody's smart, they'll keep the violence to zero.
Because I don't think Iran wants violence, but they might want to, you know, put enough pressure to encourage the United States to get out of there a little bit.
So I think there's going to be some rinksmanship.
I think our people are going to do everything they can to avoid violence while staying safe.
But if it crosses a line and there is some violence at the embassy, I would expect an extreme reaction from the United States.
Extreme meaning a lot of people are going to die.
Because I don't see any way that President Trump does anything that looks like a Benghazi or an after-Benghazi.
I think he would go barbaric if there's any injuries at the embassy.
That's what I think. So, thank you, Kimberly.
You're welcome. Happy New Year.
Happy New Year. Let's take Alex.
Alex, wake up. You're coming at me.
No, Alex disappeared.
Okay. Howard looks like he'll be interesting.
Howard, can you hear me? How are you?
And do you have a question for me?
I'm curious. I think it was earlier this year you had us conduct an experiment on the simulation by pushing a hurricane with our willpower.
Do you think that had any effect?
Remind me what happened with the hurricane.
I don't think anything happened with it, but I'm curious if you did.
So if you remind me of the situation, I told you to use your mental powers to push the hurricane away from the coast of the United States and it succeeded?
Well, I don't think it did.
Well, I don't remember what happened, so if neither of us remember what happened, there's not much to work with here.
All right. All right, but thanks for the call.
Let me answer you generically.
I don't think that that kind of magic exists.
Somebody in the comments, Barbara, is saying it did work.
Well, when we say it works, all we can really say is we did this and that happened.
You can't say there's cause and effect.
But it was a fun experiment.
Maybe we'll do it again. Thank you, Scott.
All right. Take care. All right.
Let's see if...
I think Calvin's got something to say.
Calvin? Calvin failed technology-wise.
Let's try...
Alex. Alex, can you hear me?
Do you have a question for me, Alex?
Just confirmation of, again, my simulation world.
We spoke on...
Christmas Eve, and here we are again.
Here we are again. Do you have a question?
Yep. The question is, what advice would you have for your 30-year-old self?
Oh. You know, that's a tough question because by 30, I had a pretty good plan, and it wouldn't be that different from what I would advise my 30-year-old self.
If I had to go younger...
Yeah, do 20. Yeah, if I have to do 20, you know, one of the reasons that I write about this stuff is that I did it about as cleanly as you could possibly do it,
meaning that I started building my talent stack right away and, you know, in my 20s, I was just massively adding layer after layer because I worked for a big company and they would They would allow you to take training in just about any topic, if it was even indirectly good for the company.
And so I signed up for everything.
I just started taking all kinds of training classes, and I learned to be a hypnotist.
I took the Dale Carnegie course.
So when I give advice, it's almost exactly what I did, which is just build your talent stack, build your network, and become unique.
So that's what I did, and I also tried a lot of stuff.
I'll tell you just one anecdote to sort of answer your question.
So when I was working my corporate jobs, when there was a thing called the Internet that was just being invented, I know this is hard to imagine if you're young, but I worked in a technology lab at the local phone company when the World Wide Web, as it was called, was just being formed.
And we had the first browsers with an internet connection in our little laboratory.
The first, not in the world, but among the few people in the world who actually could make an internet connection, the phone companies were among the first.
So I was in the lab and it was our job to show customers this thing called the internet that they had never seen.
Imagine that. I was showing people the internet for the first time.
People would say, wait, what are you connected to?
And I would say, well, my browser is connected through space to a museum on the other part of the world.
And people would say, what?
You're actually live connected to a web page somewhere else and you can look at it and you can change it and stuff?
And people were just amazed.
And when I saw people's reaction, They would actually get under their chair.
And this is where I developed the rule that you want people's body to move to predict that something is important.
So when I would present all the various products that the phone company had to offer, and people would sit in their chair and they would be like, uh-huh, that's great.
You've got call forwarding.
Yeah, I could use that.
Multiple calls. Yep, that's what phones do.
And they'd be drifting off to sleep.
And then at the end, I'd say, well, we have this one other thing that doesn't do anything useful.
And we would tell them, this doesn't do anything useful.
It doesn't do anything that you want it to do.
But it's kind of cool. Watch this.
And I would say it's called, you know, I think it probably was the Netscape Mosaic browser or something.
But... I would say, watch me connect to this museum.
And I think there were only literally maybe three websites in the world that were actually open and up long enough that you could use them for a demonstration.
And I would say, look, I'm connecting and I'm looking at a picture of a jewel in this museum.
And people would stand up and they would walk over and they'd say, can I do that?
And I'd be like, do what?
You know, use the mouse, control that website on the other side of the world.
And I'd say, sure, if you want to.
I mean, I don't even know why you'd want to.
I'm doing it right in front of you.
But if you want to touch it yourself, go ahead.
So I'd watch person after person have almost exactly the same reaction.
They would stand up.
And that was really amazing.
So I went to the top engineer at...
At Pacific Bell. And I said, if I wanted to invest in this new and growing thing, this thing that would become the internet, is there any company that would be like a good play that I could put my money into?
And the top engineer, his name was Buster, he looks at me and he says, Netscape.
And I said, who?
And he said, wait, yeah, Netscape.
He goes, Netscape.
They make the... The switches and the bridges and stuff that will power the entire Internet, and they make the best one, so they're probably going to be the dominant force.
So you don't need to know which website or application works.
All you need to know is that...
Cisco, I'm sorry.
I said Nescape, but I meant to say Cisco.
So the engineer told me that Cisco makes all the servers for the Internet, and they make the good ones, and so invest in Cisco.
And I said...
Cisco? I've never heard of him.
And he said, well, you're gonna, because he was an engineer.
So he visited there.
He knew exactly. Thanks in the comments for correcting me.
I meant to say Cisco was the company.
And so to answer your question, if I could go back 20 years, I would have trusted my experience.
And my experience was that when people stand up for an idea, an idea, They stand up, and they want to go over and touch it.
That's going to change the world.
And that's the sort of experience you only got from personal computers, early cell phones, and the internet.
I mean, those were quite unique in that they were civilization-changing technologies.
So I said, where should I invest my money?
Now, at the time, this was pre-Dilbert, pre-money, I maybe could have scraped up $5,000.
But if I had invested $5,000 in Cisco the day that the smartest person in that field told me to do it, I wouldn't have needed Dilber.
So I would have been pretty rich just by gambling in the dot-com market.
So that's my point.
Look for the physical response to predict what will work and what won't.
It's very predictable. All right.
Who else has a question?
I got lots of people on here.
Let's try...
Stefan.
Stefan? If our technology works...
Stefan, are you there? Steven?
Do you have a question for me, Steven?
It used to be that when the fight was going on in healthcare about the ACA, that Republicans wanted insurance companies to define their own list of what's covered.
They don't seem to be doing that anymore.
And I just wonder whether or not the ACA requires too much to be covered.
And one specific thing I want to mention is I read an article in the New York Times that said that 50% of clinical treatments have not been tested.
Well, I know very little about the healthcare field and even less about ACA, so I don't know about that, but I will make a general comment that probably the entire game on healthcare is transparency.
Meaning until you can get to the point where the market can buy things that are better and not buy things that are worse and they can tell the difference, you're not really going to get a lot of improvement, at least not quickly.
So Health and Human Services Secretary Azar and a lot of the Republicans are very much in that camp, I believe, and working on that.
So all I can tell you is that we need to get to that point where we can identify the questions that you're asking, you know, what's covered, what isn't, Compare it to other things.
Yeah, somebody's using my own word here in the comments, a confusopoly.
I coined that word, if anybody doesn't know, I coined that years ago, and it has to do with an industry That confuses the customers to the point where they can't really compare products.
Because then those two companies that are confusing you, they're not really competing against each other.
They're just confusing you so they get part of your buys and randomly the other company gets some.
But they're not directly competing because they don't want to.
If they compete directly, they'll have to lower their prices until they don't make money.
So, the medical field is confusing by intention, and until you unwind that, you don't really have any place to go.
Alright, thanks for the question. Alright, let's see what Huey is up to.
Huey seems to have disappeared.
Huey, are you there? Yes, question please.
All right, so this is sort of a live decision question.
Okay. Yes, I'm here.
Can you hear me? Yes.
What is your question? All right, so my question is a life choice question, and I've been thinking I've been thinking about immigrating to the United States for a long time.
What country are you in?
I'm living in Vietnam.
Okay. And what is your nationality?
My nationality is Vietnamese as well.
I was born and raised in Vietnam.
Okay. And you're thinking of coming to the United States?
and what can I do for you?
All right.
So I'm sorry.
I'm having a bad episode a little bit.
I think my technology is having some problems.
I can hear you pretty well.
Why don't you just try to get the question out and we'll see if we hear it.
By the way, this is literally the moving my pinky moment.
This is the first thing I do about it, by the way.
Right now, I'm You're with friends, so just say it the way you'd say it to a friend.
Alright, so right now I'm having really only two options to go about it that I can think of.
First is to look for a job from LinkedIn or through connection or something like that to Look for an opportunity to relocate to somewhere on the East Coast,
preferably. And the second option is to study, to go to school again in the United States, which can be a financial burden on my part, and I'm not sure which would be the better option in your opinion.
I will give you my answer.
The first thing you need to do is get where you want to go.
Take that as your top priority.
How do you get physically where it is you want to be?
Now, you've looked into it and you said East Coast you prefer.
I would suggest you take a second look at that because the West Coast has pretty good weather.
You know, we got our own problems and high taxes and all that.
But make sure that you've really decided where you want to go.
The first thing I did after college was I said, what's my top priority?
And after college I had the ability to go anywhere I wanted because I didn't have a family, didn't have a job, so I could go wherever I thought I wanted to start.
So I went to San Francisco and that turned down to be one of the smartest decisions of my life because it put me in a world where I was surrounded with opportunity and then I could just ladder up the opportunity because there was plenty of it.
So move where you want to go first.
Now, how you get there might be by getting a job, and you might get a job that's not your first choice as a job.
But if you get a job in a place that will support you going to school and furthering your skills, whether degreed or not, that's your ideal situation.
So I'd say find the place you want to go.
Find the best company that will take you, given whatever skill set you bring.
And then work your way up from there.
So first, get established physically and make sure you can pay your bills and then figure out the next step from there.
How's that? Thank you, Scott.
One more thing.
Should I prioritize a place for having people that I know or a place that is really good for me but I wouldn't know anyone there?
That's a little bit of a personal versus professional trade-off.
If you ask me that question, I'm sort of an introvert, and I'll take the economic opportunity first, because I'll deal with the social stuff, I'll deal with the loneliness, I'll figure out how to make friends, I'll make friends at work, I'll join a club, I'll figure out the social part.
But you want to start from finance first, If you can do that and then build a social, you don't want to start with social first and then try to manage that into some kind of a job.
That's the wrong direction.
That's actually what I thought as well, and I'm glad you agree with me on that one.
Good. Thank you, Scott. That was very helpful.
Stay tough, and by the way, your reference, I can tell you read my book, because your reference to moving your pinky.
The pinky, yeah. You have demonstrated in front of 2.2 thousand people, plus however many watch it, that you have figured out how to make things work.
Interestingly, not many people will get as far as you've already gotten.
Because look what you've done. You've already determined that micro steps are important.
Huge. Huge realization.
Secondly, you did something that requires some guts, which is you called me live.
And I can tell that wasn't easy for you, but you did it perfectly.
And you got a good experience out of it.
So now you've now experienced that taking a risk, a small one, one that wouldn't kill you.
I mean, what's the worst that could happen?
You'd be embarrassed on a periscope.
It's the worst that could happen.
But the best that could happen is you got some good advice.
And maybe it motivated you.
Maybe it would make you do something different.
So you have, first of all, the way you think about it is great.
The amount of risk you're willing to put into it is great.
And the level of change that you're contemplating, I mean moving from Vietnam to the United States, I mean that's an enormous change.
So here's my take.
You have what it takes.
You don't know it yet.
But you do. You've just demonstrated in front of a whole bunch of people.
So your future looks good, and I hope to see you sometime in the United States.
Thank you, Scott. I'll talk to you later.
All right. Now, wouldn't you love another immigrant like him?
Let's get lots of him.
Gary. Let's see what Gary has to say.
Gary, are you there? Not.
Good morning. Universal Basic Income.
Yeah, Universal Basic Income.
So, I love that Andrew Yang is introducing us to the future, meaning that he's actually thinking years in advance and he's thinking exactly the right kind of way about it.
Now, that doesn't mean that Universal Basic Income is the answer.
But by having people of his intellect and his charisma and his energy, putting that out there is unambiguously a benefit to society.
So a big thank you from society to Andrew Yang, no matter what happens with the presidency.
He moved the needle, changed the conversation, and caused you to ask this question.
Very good stuff. And here's my take.
I don't know if we could ever know if universal basic income is good or bad unless it's tested.
But it's uniquely easy to test because you could just say, all right, this state, this county, this length of time, let's just see what happens.
And I think that could be useful.
Now, I think that the universal basic income Might someday be paired with, you know, I talk too much about it, but bringing down the cost of a high-quality life.
In other words, what does it cost for everything from your energy to your shelter to your Wi-Fi, etc.?
Insurance, that kind of stuff.
So I think that the future is that we'll have models where people can live very inexpensively and And they'll have a high-quality life, not even just a low-quality, inexpensive life, but like a really, really good life if it's just designed correctly with community and things to do and people like you around you and that sort of thing.
Do you think it would be more acceptable if there was some kind of work requirement?
Like, for instance, what if...
You had to go to a kiosk every day and got $40.
Well, certainly in terms of public perception, it would be more palatable if the people receiving money had to do something in return, just something.
And you can also imagine lots of different models of that.
So let me give you one example.
Suppose I said to you, you can get $1,000 a month, But there's one requirement, which is you have to give up maybe not all of, but a lot of your privacy.
So let's say, in return for that, you have to document your lifestyle, meaning what do you eat, do you exercise, do you smoke cigarettes, you know, the lifestyle kind of stuff.
And then that would create at least a way to gather massive amounts of data that could be used to improve healthcare outcomes, etc.
Even maybe social policies, that sort of thing.
So, now whenever I say, give up your privacy, everybody's hair goes on fire.
So what I'm saying is, let's suppose it's optional.
Let's suppose you don't have to get $1,000 a month, but if you want it, you have to give something back.
And maybe one of the things you could give back is your privacy, because it has a value.
It's part of learning what works and what doesn't.
And maybe another model is what you said.
Maybe there's some small amount of public service Doesn't have to be much.
I mean, it could be as... Imagine, if you will, that your only job is to watch video images from a high-crime neighborhood and call somebody if you see something going down.
I mean, you can imagine lots of jobs that are really just sort of hanging out with your screen.
So you can imagine every model, but the short answer is you'd have to test a bunch of things to see what works.
That's my answer. Thank you.
Thank you. Let's see what Super Badass has to say.
I'm totally influenced by the picture.
Super Badass, are you there?
Do you have a question for me?
Absolutely. My first question.
So, Christina, she strikes me as a very smart person.
You are correct. Yes, because, you know, you picked her.
That was the first thing.
And second, you know, I watched her play and watched Revolution on the last, on the Kings, on C minor.
And that was absolutely amazing.
So my question is, did you surprise her when you proposed to her?
Did you really surprise her?
Because I think it will be so hard to surprise her.
And another thing, I'm a wedding photographer.
If you want to have a photographer for free at your wedding, I'm there, sir.
And so that's my question.
Did you surprise Cristina? Well, thank you for that offer.
The answer is she says she wasn't surprised, but let's put surprise into two categories.
She wasn't surprised, I don't think, that I ever asked, because we talked about it.
You know, it is 2019.
You don't really just spring a wedding offer on somebody with a ring, unless you're pretty sure.
Well, she says no, but...
But we had talked about it.
So we had both said it is our future intention and that hadn't changed.
So I think she was maybe cautiously, you know, I don't think she wanted in her mind to think of it as a done deal.
So I think that was more of a mental choice, if you will.
Does that make sense? It does, it does.
There's a moment, a second, where she knows, and if you did it at that second, you know, that's great.
Let's put it this way. It was something we both knew we wanted and had expressly stated, but it would be completely reasonable for the person who is the one to be asked to not be 100% sure.
So I think maybe that's the best way to describe it is like, well, you can't really know.
And so to answer your question, she certainly did not know it was going to happen at Christmas.
So that part was a surprise.
And the way it happened, because it didn't happen in a necessarily romantic Saturday.
It just happened, you know, when we were alone at my place.
So that's the answer.
I'll tell her, I'll pass on your compliments about the piano play.
Thank you very much, sir. And Happy New Year.
Thanks. Happy New Year.
All right.
Let's see who else we got here.
here.
Let's see if silence do good is got something for us.
Hello, silence do good.
Is that you? Hey, Scott, Happy New Year, first thing.
Happy New Year. Yeah, second is nuclear.
The persuasion that I think you can, you know, we can lay down on nuclear going forward is just huge.
I mean, I think that's one thing we could all do in 2020.
Yeah, yeah, this is the perfect example.
Because we do have some problems that have evolved into...
Psychological problems that may have at one point been economic problems, may have been we don't know how to solve it problems at one point, sometimes political, but they've evolved into just psychological problems.
And the nuclear power question is right at the top of the list because there isn't anybody who actually learns about it who disagrees, which is weird.
Normally people can study all the details of something and they'll still disagree.
Nuclear is the one weird category where the people who are against it are just a little bit on a date about the information.
As soon as you fill them in with the new information, it's not even telling them they're wrong.
It's just saying, oh, there's new information.
There's new stuff coming.
As soon as they hear that, Almost everybody says at least, well, maybe.
You know, you can give somebody to, well, maybe, almost immediately just by hearing the argument.
And that's unique.
So yeah, that's going to be a big thrust for me going into the new year.
And I feel as though the momentum is all in the right direction, don't you?
I do. I mean, this is going to be the weirdest thing you're going to hear, but I actually went to the Molten Salt Reactor Workshop Down at Oak Ridge Labs.
And, you know, it was a two-day workshop just to get a sense of what was going on in the industry.
And we're really there.
I mean, it's the government labs are doing all the materials testing, the fuel cycles.
I mean, it's really just as much money as we want to throw at it.
And, you know, the government being able to set up the regulations.
Yeah, you know. I'm no expert at this, but from the outside, it's starting to look like one of the greatest stories of civilization is being untold, and that is that especially the United States government has been working very productively with private industry to take nuclear to the whole new level where all the problems that we worry about just don't exist, where they're so minimum that we don't worry about them.
And it feels like that's happening.
I feel like the government private association is kind of working really well.
I mean, that's what I'm hearing. I'm not hearing the opposite.
So I feel it's like one of the greatest stories, especially if you think climate change is going to destroy the world, or even if you don't.
It's still one of the greatest stories of all time, I think.
They'll get rid of Greta.
Put Greta back to school.
Do nuclear, Greta goes back to school.
That could be the nuclear campaign.
Put Greta back in school.
I like it. Happy New Year.
All right. I'll take a few more until you guys decide you don't want me to.
Let's see what Brendan has to say.
Brendan, can you hear me?
What is your question, Brendan?
You were talking about how can we get people who learn how to just design systems.
And that's something that you see in courses about sustainability and a little bit about engineering.
But there's not really jobs available if you studied that.
So I actually studied a little bit about sustainable design in my last year at UC Davis.
And there's just such a high level position for you to go into.
How would someone who had that skill How do you connect the fact that they have ideas but no experience with the money?
So, I don't know enough about sustainable design, so let me ask this question.
Sustainable design, would that include designing an entire city from scratch with everything from how the houses look and how they respond and where they're placed and how the sewage and the transportation works?
Is that what that field learns or am I saying too much there?
Yeah, well, so that's actually part of the problem is that it's so ill-defined.
I mean, part of that, when I studied it, was a whole month on just how do you define sustainability.
But generally, yes, that is the sort of thing that would fall under.
And the whole concept is, well, why don't you design for the system overall instead of just this one innovation?
One part. So then you're saying that there are people who are graduating with that major, right?
Who probably are not entering even that field because it's hard to find a job that is that.
Is that what you're saying? Yeah, exactly.
Well, and it isn't even a field.
It's almost an offshoot lately off of environmental engineering.
And so my name is actually civil engineering.
So that's the key word there was sustainability.
So really it's sort of pigeonholed a little bit into the green world.
Is that what's happening? Yeah.
Yeah. So it sounds like there needs to be some other job that's not so green focused.
It's not the sustainability.
That should just be one variable in a much larger conversation about what a whole city looks like and how to design it.
So I guess the answer is there's probably somebody or some people Who through an accident of history have developed the kinds of skills that are exactly right?
So it's probably somebody who maybe is a little bit of some kind of an engineer who also has worked in local politics, maybe somebody with real estate experience and construction experience.
There's somebody out there.
We've seen a little bit of all of these things, and if we could ever identify that person, and should they be excited about working on putting something together, the normal way these things go is you put together a proposal, and then you find somebody rich to fund it, and then you project manage it, and you figure out, well, all right, how do I get from here to there?
I guess I need to make this connection.
I need this law to be changed, so I need to find a congressperson.
So you've got to crawl your way through it, but first you've got to get that person.
And if you think you have that skills, maybe put together a proposal and say, if I could get this funded, I will be the project manager for this.
I have these skills. So the thing that I think would surprise people, and I'll use an analogy, when I talk about how to break into the field of writing, people are always surprised that it's easy.
The hard part is writing.
But actually getting published is actually easy because there's more demand for good writing than there is good writing.
People don't realize that. They assume it would be hard.
But it's not hard to break into writing.
It's hard to write. That's the hard part.
So likewise, it's not hard to get funding even for really expensive stuff if you have a good idea and you can back it up with some kind of skill that people would recognize.
Like, oh, this person is a real person.
So there are billionaires who would actually, they have almost a demand to give their money away, if that makes sense.
In other words, they have more money to give away that they want to give away in a productive way, but they just want to do it in smart ways, and there aren't enough smart ways that they can identify as smart ways.
So find me a plan, and a person who's qualified, and it's some big national benefit, you know, We're good to go.
Well, I've never spent any time looking for them, but one of the things that you can do with social media and the internet that you couldn't do before is that you can do what I call the moth to the flame.
And I'm actually doing it right now.
So Moth to Flame acts like this.
I don't know how to go out and search for and find the people who could make these big system designs.
But if I keep talking about it in public, somebody's going to find me.
And I'm sort of waiting for that to happen.
I'm waiting for somebody to text me and say, you know, I have exactly these talents and I have this proposal.
And the only thing I need is a little attention because maybe some billionaire will say, yeah, I like that.
I'll give that a little funding.
So I'm doing moths to flame right now.
And if anybody contacts me and says, yeah, I have a design for a city or a neighborhood, I'm going to be all over that.
Okay? All right.
Thanks for the call. Thanks.
Let's do one more. Helen?
Helen, can you hear me?
Happy New Year. Do you have a question for me?
I do. First of all, I'm not an artist.
My background is business economics, so I just want to let you know where I stand.
But my question, I want to circle back to what's going on with the media and why they might be changing and bounce this idea off of you.
And you had already mentioned that at the end of the year, That we would be seeing wrap-ups on the news, what happened in 2019 or the past decade.
And along with that, we're seeing a lot of the mistakes that the media has made.
They're showing how they laughed at Trump.
He would never be president, etc.
So now I'm wondering if they're starting to change their tune because Trump will more than likely be re-elected unless something drastic happens and they don't want to have egg on their face for another year or you know another election year and so you just one more thought there you and others are kind of busting through the veil of deceit that the media has put on us since the beginning of television because truth seekers like yourself are coming out you're teaching us How to be thinkers,
how to do research, how not to follow hoaxes.
And I think they're starting to see that.
What do you think? I will agree with you in the general statement that there are productive people on social media Or people trying to be productive.
Who changed the conversation in a way that if all we had was the competing news and their pundits, you'd have these two views and they wouldn't be as useful as if you had multiple views.
So I think I'm one of the useful people in terms of allowing you to look in a different window at the same information.
So that's sort of what I try to do.
But in terms of why people are, I don't know if people are thinking of it that way in terms of, oh, I better get ahead of this because it's just going to be embarrassing that I'm so wrong about everything being bad, yet everything keeps turning out well.
I don't know that they have that kind of recognition.
Because I think it was even just today on CNN, there was a story about how all the bad things that happened in 2019.
And I thought to myself, all the bad things that happened in 2019, was 2019 a bad year?
Because I lived a whole different year.
I lived a year when it was like one of the greatest years in human history, maybe.
I mean, it was like a record kind of a year.
So I think some of it might just be the holiday season, and some of it might be that people are willing to grant this president a little bit of flexibility because he's had real results.
And it's hard to ignore the results.
I want to run something by you.
Stay on the line here. I'm going to give you, I guess, an analogy.
I tend to think of...
Life and reality in machine terms, meaning I actually translate in my mind, in order to understand it better, the things that are happening with people in psychology and systems, I translate it into like a physical form to imagine them.
And one of the physical forms that I imagine is capitalism.
Now, if you imagine capitalism as a tube in which inputs go in the top and then money falls out the bottom, that would be capitalism.
But what's interesting is that the inputs that go in the top are all bad stuff.
But then the stuff that comes out the bottom is money.
It's good stuff. How can you have a system that can turn bad stuff, let's say human, Selfishness, stupidity, human greed.
I mean, basically, every bad characteristic of a human being gets put into this capitalism funnel.
But because the system is designed for transparency and for reporting on people if they rob you, it works.
So it's a system that scrubs people of their bad impulses and produces money at the bottom.
It's amazing. You put bad stuff in.
You know, you hear the old...
The old saying, garbage in, garbage out.
That doesn't work with capitalism.
With capitalism, it's garbage in and money out.
That's the best system you could ever have.
But there's another system like that.
It's called the office of the president, subset of the constitution.
The constitution and democracy is the same thing.
Imagine it as a tube.
What goes into the tube of democracy, let's call it a republic, It's stupidity, ignorance, greed, selfishness, crime.
And what comes down to the bottom?
Pretty good world.
Pretty good year, right?
So capitalism and our republic, the way it's formed, are like two machines that turn garbage into gold.
And we watch it every day, and yet we're not amazed by it.
And here's where I'm going with this.
The people who have been Most concerned about President Trump destroying the planet in any one of a dozen ways don't understand that he's being put in the same funnel as everything else.
The funnel makes it impossible, you know, the machine of the office of the president It makes it almost impossible for him to do any of the things, even if he wanted to, that people imagined were so bad.
Because people are watching.
There's an amazing amount of transparency.
There are great implications for everything.
You've got the news, the lobbyists, the Congress, all the competing forces.
And they're sort of held in balance so that you could put into that funnel a president with the best, let's say, character you've ever seen.
But you could also put in a president with the worst character you've ever seen.
Now, in my opinion, President Trump does not have a bad character.
I'm just using the other people's impression of him to make my point.
So the point is that if they were worried that a garbage in, meaning they thought that President Trump's character was rotten and corrosive, they think garbage in is going to give you a garbage result.
But that's a complete misunderstanding of what the machine is.
The machine is the office of the presidency.
And the office of the presidency turns garbage into gold by design.
It's built that way.
Exactly. Yeah.
So when you're looking at President Trump and you're looking at his internal thoughts, what you imagine are his intentions, what you think he's thinking, none of it matters.
What matters is there's all kinds of stuff going in at the top.
Right. Can I just go one step with that too?
Sure. Go ahead. Think back to World War II when our rubber supplies were cut off in the South Pacific and we came up with synthetic rubber.
The ingenuity of entrepreneurs, it was garbage going into the funnel.
We were cut off, but we figured out a way.
So between the government, the office of the president, and entrepreneurs, we turned garbage into gold.
Yeah, and you see that over and over again.
And it's easy to imagine...
We're not doing that for a moment, and then you get the wrong prediction.
Take a look at all the presidents we've put through the funnel, the machine of the office of the presidency.
Every president we've had, they've been really different.
You could make an argument any two of them are kind of similar, but if you look at the range of presidents from lefties to righties to every personality, And they've pretty much all got a good result.
You know, you could say Jimmy Carter, maybe not so much, but I suspect any other president in that situation would have had a tough few years, too.
So anyway, thanks for the question.
You bet. All right.
K-Shots, you keep asking to be on here, and let's see if you have S to join.
I'm looking for you, but I do not see you.
Maybe you show up as a different name.
So, K-Shots, I would try to add you, but you're not showing up here as a guest.
Let's see what Reggie has to say.
Reggie, can you hear me?
Do you have a question for me, Reggie?
Well, thank you.
What's your question for me?
Well, I guess you caught me a little off guard, but let me hit you with this.
We had a rough Christmas.
We have some people that lean pretty far left in our family.
And I'm not so sure I did the best job in the world getting through this past holiday.
Moving forward, what can you give...
Right-thinking people like me, and I'm not just talking on the political side of things, but someone that disdains LoserThink, if you will.
What advice can you give us in this new year going forward?
Well, I would say, for those of you who've read my book LoserThink in particular, it gives you a bunch of tools for dispatching the worst of the arguments on the other side.
And I think that can be useful because they're also not attacking tools.
They're just reframing tools.
So, for example, you will see people say, I know what the president is thinking and his inner thoughts are bad.
I find it very powerful to say we're not mind readers and you wouldn't want to live in a world in which you were judged by what other people think you're thinking.
And you shouldn't judge anybody else that way.
Almost everybody will go to that higher level.
So that's the first thing.
So mind reading and bad analogies.
If you focus on those two things, and then if somebody gives you the laundry list of all the reasons that you're wrong, do the trick of just picking the top one and say, can we agree?
Just give me your strongest one.
What's your very best reason on your whole laundry list?
And then debunk that.
If you stick with those three things, insist that mind reading isn't a thing, don't reason by analogies, that's not a thing, and only deal with their best argument and not the weaker ones because then they're just playing whack-a-mole.
If you do those three things, you're going to make people rethink their position.
Maybe not change overnight, but that's the strongest things you can do that are non-confrontational.
That's really why I suggest them.
They allow you to engage, but with reasons and not arguing so much about facts and who saw the right facts.
I hope that helps. Oh, it does.
Thank you very much.
All right. Now let's see.
K-Shots, I saw you try to join...
And you said something provocative there.
You don't show up on my list of people who have asked to join.
So, I don't know what that's all about.
But I tried. Let's try.
Caller. Can you hear me?
I can hear you.
What's your question? Awesome.
Hi, Scott. I'm from Holland.
Sorry, it may be a bit noisy out here, because the end of the year is coming nearer.
I've got a question.
So, I'm one of the few Europeans, actually, who have a pretty positive stance regarding Donald Trump, and actually maybe the United States in general.
Because what I noticed is that many, so I'm from Holland, but I have many international friends, They think, oh, Americans always go haywire at the smallest thing.
They go crazy about stuff.
And I always try to explain to them, like, maybe you don't actually understand what's happening in the U.S. Like, they've got a system that gives stability and, well, what you said, garbage in, useful stuff out.
And I'm wondering, do you, in your view, Will, with the United States with such a system and China with more hierarchical, big scale system, will Europe in the future be able to compete and kind of stay like a big important force in the world?
You know, I'm going to be honest, I sold I had an index fund that was a bunch of European stocks and not too long ago I sold it all because it's hard for me to imagine Europe being a competing force with China and the United States, so very much to your question.
I feel like the two big countries have just such an advantage over a collection of small countries trying to act as one country.
You can see with Brexit that it's kind of hard.
So my guess is, and I don't give financial advice, so you do not assume this is financial advice, but if I had to predict, I would predict that the best place to own stocks would be the United States for the next 10 or 20 years.
But Europe will be fine.
I mean, I don't think Europe is going to go down the drain.
I just don't think Europe will keep up with the United States.
I don't think it will even be close.
Does that answer your question?
Yes, it actually does.
That kind of confirms the feelings I was having actually.
Of course, in a way, it was an easy question because Warren Buffett says the same thing anytime anybody asks.
Warren Buffett, what should I do with my money?
American stocks. But what about in five years?
American stocks. What if something changes?
Put it in American stocks.
What if something happens in China?
Put your money in American stocks.
He hasn't been wrong yet, right?
The smartest investor in the world gives the same damn advice For like 50 years in a row and it's been right for 50 years.
So that's my advice too.
I won't disagree with Warren.
Let's say that we were to have a term.
Would that be anything he or we could do to actually turn that around?
Well, certainly technological development would do it or something that gives you an edge.
But I'm not seeing a tremendous amount of technological innovation coming out of Europe versus Asia and the United States.
So there might be something...
Maybe I just don't know.
It could be also just an information gap on my part.
But it seems like if it's not a technological step, that it probably isn't big enough.
So I would look for that.
Is there any kind of emerging technologies that are somehow...
Unique or special to Europe that could be meaningful, but if it's just business as usual and the US and Asia are pumping out new technologies, I would look at the new technologies as the things that are predictive.
All right, that's all I got for you.
Thanks for the question.
All right, I'm going to take one more quick check to see if there's somebody I need to talk to here and Sure enough, there is.
I have to talk to Diane.
Diane or Diana?
I didn't read it fast enough.
Diane, Diana? Which is it?
Is it Diane or Diana?
Diana, do you have a question for me?
Yeah, my question is, you're solving the world, Diana?
Diana? Yes.
I'm sorry, yes. Go ahead and ask your question.
How do you solve the fake news media problem?
Well, the first thing you have to ask yourself is, is it new?
Because we assume that the news used to be real and now it's not.
But was it ever real?
I don't know the answer to that question.
So it may have been unreal in different ways, maybe just more exaggerated now.
Now, it could be that it's a self-solving problem.
And what I mean by that is if the public sees enough examples where their news was wrong, over time it's got to have an impact.
You know, I think we're still at the shock Point in history where people are just realizing, hey, all the news on the other side is all wrong.
That's like halfway there.
Once they realize that the news on the other side is all wrong, and so is theirs, Then everybody goes to the next level of awareness.
Now, of course, I'm talking in absolutes.
It's not absolutely true that all the news is wrong on either side.
But you can recognize it fairly quickly.
And there are patterns that form.
So, for example, I think the society will get to the point Where maybe the first two days of any kind of crisis, we will all hold our fire and say, alright, alright, the first two days, all the reports are misleading.
So let's just hold our opinions.
Could we get to the point where we could learn to do that as a society?
Maybe. If we see enough examples in enough rapid fashion where it was a good idea to wait, and we certainly saw a lot of them.
In the last year or so, we saw a lot of them.
So I think the public has to get educated, and it's going to happen automatically.
Just by repetition and experience, the public will stop trusting their news sources, except they'll pretend to agree with them when they agree with them politically.
So I think it's the public that will make the change.
It's not the industry, because the industry is chasing clicks and money, and there's nothing that looks like that's going to change.
But I think the public will...
Force the product to change because they will care about it less as they trust it less.
So that's the best answer I could give you.
And I think we've done enough for today.
Thank you, Diana. And thank you to the rest of you.
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