Episode 816 Scott Adams: Bloomberg's Odds, Mayor Pete's Military Service, Types of Nationalists, Nuclear Families
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Mike Bloomberg "stop and frisk" comments in 2015 audio
Democrat parties future if they pick Bernie
What if they don't pick Bernie?
Pete Buttigieg's military service
Coronavirus and coincidences
Trucks with disinfectant spray cannons in China
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You know, one of those days where stuff happens and we talk about it and we laugh.
Then we go on and have an amazing day.
And how does the day start?
Oh! Look what I did.
I don't know if it looks the same on your screen.
But somehow, magically, I have placed my coffee cup where on my screen it looks like all the hearts are coming out of the coffee cup.
Can you see it or is that just on my author's screen?
How cool is that?
Let's call that a coincidence.
Remember that for later because that's part of my topic today.
Coincidence. But first, before we get to the topic, you know, if you want to enjoy the little thing called the simultaneous sip, I recommend you get a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Look at those hearts coming out of that coffee.
Put it up to your lips and get ready for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
The simultaneous sip.
Go. Oh, so people are saying it's backwards on their screen.
Yeah? How about this?
How about that? On my screen, it looks like the comments are coming out of the cup now.
But if it's backwards, it looks like hearts are coming out of the cup.
In theory. All right.
Let's start with the funniest story of the day.
The funniest story of the day is watching Bloomberg get eaten alive by his own team.
There's a trending hashtag this morning called hashtag BloombergIsRacist.
Now, it turns out that there's an audio has surfaced, an old audio, in which Mike Bloomberg is He's talking about how he concentrated his resources as New York City mayor to fight crime.
And let's just say that it's subject to interpretation.
So there are two legitimate ways that you could take what he said.
Now, I'm not going to give you his exact words.
You can see them on the news everywhere today.
But if you were to put a positive spin on it, And I'm not saying this is my opinion.
I'm just saying it's another one of those situations that's two movies playing simultaneously on one screen.
So the most positive spin you could put on this Bloomberg audio that surfaced is that he was talking about how he wanted to concentrate valuable public resources, something of value, in low-income communities that needed it the most.
Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?
You know, if there's a low-income community and they need a public resource, Mike Bloomberg apparently delivered in the form of law enforcement.
Now, who needs the most law enforcement?
Well, people who have the highest crime rate, right?
So, the positive way to interpret what Mike Bloomberg said on the audio that surfaced is that he was Taking public resources, much of it came from people with money who would pay taxes, transferred it from the rich to the low-income places where it would be the most benefit, and they needed it the most.
That's pretty great. Wow.
Bloomberg is quite the guy.
Well, that's the positive spin.
That would be one of the two movies it's playing.
But that's not the one that inspired the hashtag, hashtag BloombergIsRacist.
Here's the other movie, looking at exactly the same facts, exactly the same audio.
Here's the other movie. He focused on arresting minorities, which is pretty obviously racist.
Cancelled. So you have to follow, if you want a good laugh, follow the hashtag and just see the comments.
It goes without saying that Republicans and Trump supporters are having a lot of fun with this and are really blasting it out there for maximum effect.
But at the same time, the Democrats who are the most likely to be, let's say, offended or most likely to be watching the movie where it's the worst possible interpretation, they're getting pretty mad.
They're pretty mad at their Mike Bloomberg.
Now, if it turned out That all of those people who appear to be Democrats who are mad at Mike Bloomberg for what they would say is racist policies, if it turned out that they were really trolls and that they're actually just Republicans who are pretending to be offended Democrats, we wouldn't know the difference.
And so I don't think you can automatically trust the weight of commenting on social media because you're going to see lots of fake Fake political identities on both sides.
All right. So this made me wonder, how could somebody do what Mike Bloomberg presumably intended to do, which was reduce crime in the places where you needed to reduce it the most?
How could you do that without simultaneously being labeled a racist?
Now, I always talk about systems being better than goals.
The goal is to be fair to everybody and have no racism.
And another goal is to reduce crime.
And apparently we haven't figured out a system where you can get one without offending in the other way.
So here's my suggestion.
For a system, something that you couldn't have done even a few years ago.
But the technology would allow this.
And this is just brainstorming.
Don't imagine necessarily that this is my preferred way to go.
Just brainstorming. Suppose you said that you're the mayor and you're going to assign police resources based on two criteria.
Number one, how much crime there is in that neighborhood.
So it's just sort of a formula, right?
If there's this much crime, we'll put this many police officers.
And then, what if you added a second element?
You give everybody a neighborhood app, maybe it already exists, but something that would allow people to say, I live in this neighborhood.
This is my identity.
You'd have to say who you are so you could be verified as a resident.
And you'd have, let's say, three or four choices for how much policing you prefer in your neighborhood.
So if you lived in a pretty safe neighborhood, you'd say, you know, I don't want to see the police unless we call them.
So that would be the lowest level.
If it was a little more dangerous neighborhood, just a little bit more, you might say, you know, it wouldn't hurt to have a A car come by every now and then.
That would be similar to where I live.
Where I live, there's a little bit of crime, and it probably is useful to have a cop car go by every now and then, just to remind us that they exist.
But let's say at the highest level, you'd have the option, if you're a resident of a community, you could say, give me the maximum.
I'm a law-abiding citizen, and all this crime does nothing for me.
Does nothing for me. I'd rather have more police and less crime.
So then that would give the mayor two objective things.
First of all, they'd have to be a higher crime neighborhood to get more police.
That's the only fair thing to do.
You don't want to have a lot of police in a low crime neighborhood just because that's where the rich people live.
And then the second thing is, did they request it?
And you can actually show the community, look, I got two things.
I got a high crime. And here's the community actually requesting it.
By a majority, they've requested the highest level, and the highest level corresponds to this many police officers, roughly.
So I think Mike Bloomberg's instincts, and again, I'm not a mind reader, so I'm not going to say what his private interior thoughts are, but let's say the objective is to reduce crime.
You need to go where the crime is.
Unless they don't want it.
And I would think if a community really had a serious problem with more police presence, there should be an option to have less of it.
And then as long as people have an option of moving, which of course not everybody has.
Here's another trade-off.
Suppose a high crime community Could vote, again, using an app, so you'd have to connect everybody so you've got the will of the people expressed in a way that you can measure.
Suppose they said, we'd like public surveillance cameras with facial recognition so that if criminals come into our neighborhood, police know it.
And maybe that's a trigger.
for how many patrol cars are in the neighborhood.
Let's say the cameras picked up an unusual number of criminal elements.
Suppose you saw two or three criminals on the same street corner or in the same car as they're parked at a light.
Well, maybe the police say, let's take a drive through.
So you could imagine a number of systems that would give you some kind of objective data Some more intrusive than others.
Yes, I know you don't want your privacy violated that way.
But the point is, we could probably come up with systems that would make nobody look like a racist and still would put the law enforcement resources where they would have the most impact.
Anyway, so that's the first idea.
Let's talk about predicting Bloomberg's odds.
You know, there are a million ways to predict what's going to happen.
Everybody's got their own little variable.
This variable is the one that predicts everything.
In truth, there probably is no such thing as one variable that is too predictive, because it's a big soup of variables.
So I don't think anybody's good at predicting any of this stuff, including me.
But let's talk about the theories of predicting for Bloomberg.
One theory that I see Mike Cernovich tweeting about And it's a strong one, is that the amount of money that Bloomberg has is so powerful.
In other words, if he weaponizes his money or a portion of it, we can't really quite even imagine, we probably can't even imagine how much influence that can have.
And we see his poll numbers going up because he's spending enormous amounts of money on that.
Now, working against that, The theory that money can buy you anything, including the nomination and then including winning in the general election.
That's a pretty strong theory.
If you were going to make a prediction that was based on one and only one variable, that would be right up there.
I think a smart person could put some money on that.
But it's not a one-variable world.
We've got other stuff going on.
Will that amount of money be enough to, let's say, legally bribe people in all the ways that our society lets you legally bribe people by opportunities and suggested lack of economic opportunity if you write a bad article about Bloomberg?
So a lot of subtle and indirect ways the money can influence things, but mostly it can brainwash.
You can literally brainwash people with money.
How? You just repeat your message enough until it just becomes truth.
Repetition translates into truth if you do it enough.
And he has the money to do it enough.
Alright, but the other theory, and here would be another example of using one variable to predict.
The issue of whether Bloomberg has a problem with the black vote, let's say, in particular, because of his policies, his crime-fighting policies and his record in New York City, how likely is it that that one variable, especially when it's being promoted by Not only the Republicans, but it's being promoted by anybody on the Democrat side who has a problem with that sort of thing.
And there are a lot of them. So is that enough that all of the money in the world can't help you?
Which of those would you bet on?
Would you bet on his, I don't know, whatever billions he ends up spending?
You know, a couple billion?
He could if he wants.
Or would you bet on the fact that the Democrats are so predictable with their approach to things, they're going to see another old, rich, white guy, and they're going to see this vulnerability, at least in their point of view, it would look like a vulnerability, and they're just going to tear him apart.
Well, let's say it gets to a brokered convention.
Do you think that the Democrats, if it got to a brokered convention, do they have the option of picking Bloomberg?
Or do they, in other words, could they get away with that?
Or would it rip the party apart?
Because I gotta think two-thirds of the people in the Democratic Party would say, um, we're not exactly the brand That picks the old white billionaire, and why would you pick him to run against an old white billionaire who's got accusations that are going to sound a lot like the Bloomberg ones?
It feels like the worst matchup you could ever have.
So if the Democrats picked the guy who, I think you could make an argument, he's one of the worst matchups.
Because in order to get Mike Bloomberg, you'd have to start with Trump and remove everything that's interesting.
You make him boring, make him shorter, make him more black and white instead of orange.
You just have to remove all the interesting stuff, and then you'd get Mike Bloomberg.
But he's older.
He hasn't quite debated on the national stage with national...
Trump's had a lot of practice.
Bloomberg has never been up against somebody like Trump, who, again, has had a lot of practice by now.
So I would say that the odds of a brokered convention picking Bloomberg, that seems unlikely, because I think it would rip the party apart.
But suppose Bernie didn't get quite enough support to get across the finish line and it's a brokered convention.
What would happen if he didn't get picked?
If Bernie has the most support but it's still not enough and it gets to a brokered convention and they pick anybody else, what are the Bernie supporters going to do?
Well, after they complain and protest and try to rip the party apart, they're not going to show up.
They're not going to go to vote.
And if they don't even show up, they're not going to automatically click for the House of Representatives and the other Democrats.
So, if they don't pick Bernie, they'll probably lose the House.
If they do pick Bernie, in my opinion, He has no chance of winning the presidency, because at least half of the Democrats are going to understand, and certainly Trump would make them understand.
You realize half of you Democrats are going to be worse off, and Bernie's telling you this directly.
You know, he's not even disagreeing with this point.
He's going to raise the taxes on people who have money and transfer it To people who, in some cases, made decisions you think they shouldn't have, let's say, student loan, or didn't work hard enough, in your opinion, to get a job that has health care or whatever.
So I think there's just a ton of Democrats who are not going to give Bernie enough support, no matter what they thought of the president.
So if they do pick Bernie, they can't win the presidency.
But They might get enough people to, well, yeah, they still might get enough people to show up to vote.
So it might not be so bad for the House of Representatives.
All right. So we'll see what happens.
And I wonder if Bloomberg would be a good match with Kamala Harris because Bloomberg has the, you know, the same problem.
But then that would be sort of, you know, two people who are tough on crime.
Yeah, I don't know if that would work.
That would be probably a bad matchup.
All right. There was a Wall Street Journal article that was kind of critical of P. Buttigieg and his military service in the sense, not critical of the service per se, but critical of the fact that he may be, let's say, explaining it in a more hyperbolic way.
So the reality apparently is that he got commissioned in through some special way that you don't have to go through boot camp and you get, I think maybe it guarantees you cushier assignments, mostly work behind a desk.
But he did spend seven months in Afghanistan, including leaving the compound and vehicles and stuff, and it's a pretty dangerous place.
So some people say, uh-oh, that will take one of the main things about the Buttigieg argument away.
It'll take away the great respect that his military service automatically gets if you imagine that he just sort of snuck in the side door and didn't do what other people did and got an easy assignment.
That's what some people say.
I'm not sure that's going to...
I don't think that's going to make a difference.
Because the vast majority of people did not serve themselves.
And if you didn't serve at all, you're still pretty impressed by somebody who spent seven months in Afghanistan, and I don't care what they were doing.
If you were to compare how much service I've given the country...
Compared to Buttigieg, who actually went to Afghanistan and was there for seven months and doing useful things, just as it turns out, not that close to the bullets.
But you're always close to something dangerous if you're in Afghanistan.
So I think the average person is going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, if you're in the military, if you are a Marine or somebody in your family is a Marine, I get that you're going to rank people by the level of honor.
But I think people are going to leave that to the military and military families.
And everybody else is going to say, you know, that's not my opinion to make.
Because he did more than I did.
So I just don't think that's going to count against him too much.
But it was interesting to learn exactly what the situation was there.
And of course, if he ended up getting the nomination and he ran against Trump, his military service...
No matter where it ranked in the valor and bravery category, it's going to look good compared to anybody who didn't serve.
But Buttigieg's big problem is that I didn't know if it was just a fluke.
That he had that extended debate performance in which he talked nothing but jargon.
It was just all this empty consultant talk.
And I thought to myself, oh, he just had a bad moment and he was trying to catch himself but never quite caught himself.
But he's so good, you know, verbally he's just so good that he, you know, did a good job of covering given that he had no ideas apparently to answer.
At least, nothing useful to say to that question.
And I think that's fatal.
Can you imagine, and I said this before, but can you imagine somebody animating an empty suit and then just putting over at the audio of his jargon talking?
It would just be devastating.
You'd see a little suit with no hands and no head.
It would just be like this, and then you hear the audio of him talking.
It would be pretty bad.
All right. Speaking of coincidences, here are two stories that happened recently.
There was a man who broke into a Budweiser brewery and got arrested in St.
Louis. It was a Budweiser brewery.
The man who was arrested...
For breaking into the Budweiser brewery, his actual name is Bud Weiser.
That's right.
Somebody named Bud Weiser got arrested for breaking into the Bud Weiser brewery.
In other news, I saw a An article, it doesn't matter what it's about, but it referenced the CIA. So it was an article about the CIA doing some stuff.
And it referenced somebody who was commenting on the CIA's activity, and the person commenting was a historian.
His name, his last name, is Covert.
C-O-V-E-R-T. That's right.
A guy named Covert was talking about the CIA. Now, both of these coincidences were just today.
Or at least I saw them today.
They didn't occur today. And I point that out because we're so easily fooled by coincidence.
And let me give you this example.
What are the odds that you will win the lottery?
Very, very low, right?
One in, I don't know, 10 million or 100 million or something.
So the odds that you would win are infinitesimally small.
What are the odds that someone will win the lottery?
Pretty high. Depending on what kind of lottery it is, you're either guaranteed or it won't take too many iterations before you get a winner.
So the odds of somebody winning are close to 100%.
The odds of you winning are close to zero.
Now let's talk about the coronavirus, which seems to be released, coincidentally, Near a bioweapon facility in China.
Coincidence? Well, we don't know.
It's certainly enough to raise a flag.
It's certainly enough for you to get suspicious.
It's definitely enough to ask more questions.
Certainly enough not to trust whatever China's official answer is, no matter what it is, unless they say it did come from the bioweapons lab.
So your suspicion is well-founded, but keep it in perspective.
Any complicated situation is going to have coincidences.
There's probably somebody working on that whose last name is Virus or something.
It doesn't matter what it is. So you are guaranteed to have coincidences in the news But there was a very low chance it would be the specific one.
But don't over-interpret a coincidence, is my point.
There will always be coincidences.
They're very common.
Here's a question that I haven't seen answered yet about the coronavirus.
Wouldn't it be a terrible weapon?
If you had a bioweapon lab, and you were trying to make some serious weapons, You've heard of anthrax, haven't you?
I mean, you've heard of, you know, aren't there more dangerous viruses?
It just seems to be that unless this was sort of one that they tested and discarded, or one that they were maybe taking some DNA out of it to make some other kind of virus, there's just something that isn't quite explained.
It could be explained.
I'm not saying there's no way to explain it.
But I'd like to know why it seems likely that it's a weapon when it doesn't look like a weapon.
It looks like the worst weapon you would ever build.
Anyway. People told me that there is some precedent for this, and at least one person pointed me to an article about some anthrax that got out of some lab.
I forget. I don't even remember what country it was.
But apparently we know that some anthrax once got out of a bioweapon lab.
But that was anthrax.
If you see anthrax, you're kind of thinking, well, somebody knew how to make a weapon.
That's a weapon. But if I see something that gives you the flu 99% of the time, and that's it, I don't know.
I'm not thinking weapon. But maybe there's something, I don't know.
You've probably seen the videos by now of the super scary trucks spraying some kind of fog-like spray, I think it's a combination of bleach and water, maybe something else, that the Chinese are doing in the Wuhan district that's the most hit by the virus.
And when you see that, you probably have the same reaction I did And Jack Posobiec tweeted this, and Hugh Riley commented, I think his tweet said, it's just a virus, people.
But you see them dealing with it like it's the worst plague.
They're all wearing the hazmat suits and these trucks that you wonder where they came from.
Where did they get all these?
Where would you go to get devices that you can fill with this combination of Bleach and water, and then it will spray in the right amounts to spray your streets.
If you wanted to find one of those in the United States, could you do it?
Do we have those?
Do we? I mean, if I went down to City Hall and I said, can I borrow your gigantic truck with a spray cannon on it?
And they say, well, what do you want to put in it?
And I'd say, I don't know.
I just want one that sprays anything.
And they'd say, sure. You can just rent this truck down at the Home Depot.
All right. So I got questions about that.
Now, I think the interpretation is that the government of China is putting on a show.
Some experts seem to suggest that it wouldn't make any difference, at least anything that you could measure.
To spray this.
The bleach apparently is really watered down, so I don't think the bleach itself is dangerous.
But I don't think it helps.
In other words, it just doesn't make that much difference.
So it looks like it's just theater for domestic consumption.
But how does it feel to you if you're not in China right now?
It's really scary because it just makes it look like it's a sci-fi movie.
And there's something that hasn't been explained yet, and it's not good.
But it could be just theater.
That's my guess. All right.
Did you see the creepy, creepy, creepy story of the woman who was reunited with her deceased daughter?
A young daughter, I don't know how old she was, she looked maybe nine years old, just guessing, who died young, and a virtual reality company worked to build a little virtual reality replica so the mother could meet and interact with her deceased daughter.
And they did a documentary about it, apparently.
And, oh my God, is it creepy!
It is so creepy.
Only because a deceased child is sort of everybody's worst nightmare.
And I have real questions whether this is good for the mental health of the people doing something like that.
But I think people who are smarter than I am will figure that out.
I'm just saying that's a big red flag of I'm not sure our psychology is meant to take that kind of a hit.
I don't know that our brains are sufficiently wired to see somebody come back from the dead because we didn't evolve to ever see that.
Millions of years of evolution, we never saw it.
It's the most emotionally damaging thing that you can imagine, death of a child.
So what's it do to your head when that person appears and you can interact with it?
So I've got questions.
I don't know if it's bad, but I've got questions.
But my comment on this It's not so much about that specific application.
That just gets our attention.
But the fact that this virtual reality technology, which I've sampled enough to really have lived inside it for a while, it's going to change everything.
In your lifetimes, people are just going to be living in that augmented reality, virtual reality.
There's nothing that's going to stop that.
Because it's so good.
Now, they have to solve a problem with the headaches.
A lot of people get headaches wearing the 3D goggles.
And when I say a lot, I think most, actually.
I do. And I rarely get headaches.
I don't have any motion sickness problems.
But virtual reality just kicks my ass.
And I've got motion sickness after 15 minutes of that.
But they'll solve that, I'm guessing.
And... At that point, our social interactions, our education, our work, every single part of that is going to move into the virtual reality world, because it's better.
You could go to work without combing your hair and putting on your work clothes, because it might be a virtual office.
And if all you need to do is interact with other people, otherwise you're just as good working at home, Well, people are going to have virtual reality offices so they can do all their interacting and casual contact.
Anyway, that's coming.
100% that's coming.
That's one of those predictions that you can say with complete confidence.
I don't know how long. All right.
Here's a tricky little topic.
I'm going to try to navigate this.
I only had about three hours of sleep last night, so if I seem like I'm a little slow this morning, it's true.
There are several types of nationalists.
And in the political realm, people like to conflate things so that they can damn you with words.
And they can read into you opinions that you don't have so that they can criticize them.
And the word nationalist is one of those.
It gets used in a lot of ways.
And I would like to suggest that there are several flavors of nationalists and that it's useful to know the difference.
And I would put it this way.
You've got your white nationalists who want the United States to stay as white as possible.
Now, I've never met that person.
I believe they exist because people say they exist and it's a big world and there's somebody who believes anything.
But as much time as I've spent in the last several years talking to Trump supporters, Republicans, conservatives, I mean a lot.
I've never actually met one.
Who, in a private conversation, would say, yeah, you know what I want.
I'm a white nationalist.
I've never heard that. But I believe they exist.
So that's one flavor. There's another flavor that gets confused with the first type that I would call, and this is just my own word for it, let's call them IQ nationalists.
Now, the IQ nationalists have a belief that IQ is really predictive of Of how a person will do in their life, how well a business will be run, how well your country will be run.
So if you focused on that and said, let's bring in the smartest people.
So let's have some kind of a system where we're getting the programmers, the STEM people, the medical people, the scientists.
So we won't measure their IQs, but we'll make sure we get the people who have passed some kind of Test of college or education or training.
So that's another group.
Now in that group, they of course are accused of being racist, but they are open to just talent.
So there are people who say, I don't care where they come from, but if you're bringing in people from other countries, you're going to get more brown people than anything else, because that's what the world looks like.
So the IQ Nationalists would probably, if they got their way, Increase the number of minorities coming into the country, minorities meaning non-white, just because that's what the world looks like, and they only care if you're smart.
Then there's another group, and again this is my label, I'll call them selfish nationalists, who their main thing is, remind me why I'm giving my money to some other country, or people from another country, they're just selfish. Now, I don't mean that in a bad way.
Being selfish is what makes capitalism work.
It's what makes democracies work.
People get to vote and act on their self-interest, and if you built the right kind of system, it all works out, and we have.
So the selfish naturalists are completely respectable, and they would just say, it doesn't matter who you're talking about, Sorry, my cat's going to make an entrance.
If you see a tail go by, yeah, that was boo.
So the selfish nationalists don't care who their money is going to.
It doesn't matter if it went to British people or went to Chinese immigrants.
It doesn't matter who it goes to.
They just would rather keep their money.
So they would rather not give it to people coming from other countries.
But again, that's not about race.
It wouldn't matter who it was.
Why would I give my money to anybody?
Why can't I keep it?
And then this last category I would put myself in.
I would call it a system nationalist, as opposed to a goal.
Systems are where you've developed a system that gets you the best result, but you don't know exactly where that ends up.
But if it's a good system, like capitalism, like a democratic system, it will get you to a good place.
And a system nationalist, that's what I would call myself, would say that you need a good immigration border control, but that's just the first question.
What you do with it, once...
Once you have good control of your own borders, all you've really done is taken control away from the people who are coming in illegally and given the control to the people who live in the nation, the other people who are already citizens.
Now that's a good system.
In my opinion, if everybody had a good system where they get to control internally how much immigration and what type, that would be good.
I would love to see Immigration controlled by an algorithm that's based on economics.
So let's say you had a board of economists who come up with a set of rules, and they say, now that we've built good border security, so there aren't that many people who can get through illegally, we kind of have control over our own borders, then separately you say to yourself, What kind of people do we need to fuel our economy?
And you can crank it up when you need more workers.
You can crank it down when you need fewer of them because we're suffering in this country.
So if you see it as a system, it's more about what works best.
And it should work best in the long run for everybody.
So I would say that's what I am.
I like good systems. The President talks about being in friendly competition with other countries being a good system.
And I would agree with that. Sort of what makes capitalism work.
All right. President Trump has floated the idea of having the death penalty for drug dealers in this country.
And he talked again about China having the death penalty, etc., I'm still skeptical that China is really cracking down on fentanyl.
Really, really skeptical.
Because, as I said too many times, we know the top guy, the top dealer.
We know his name, his picture, and therefore, of course, China can find him.
If 60 Minutes could find him in China and interview him, yeah, the Chinese government can find him.
That guy, as far as I know, is still walking around free.
As long as that's happening, they're not taking it too seriously.
All right, David Brooks, writer, David Brooks, wrote a big article.
Was it in The Atlantic or Vanity Fair or someplace?
Some high-tone magazine in which he talks about the nuclear family not being good for everybody, which I agree with.
I agree with that.
I've been saying it for a while, but I like the fact that somebody else wrote an article about it because I can deflect blame on somebody else because I know how much you hate that idea.
Now his explanation and framing, if you will, is pretty identical to my own.
And the idea is this, that the nuclear family is a great idea for some types of people.
Mostly people with money.
Because he noted that the old family structure was more extended.
You'd have cousins and grandparents.
You might have the hired hand working on the farm.
So you'd have like this almost a tribe within a family, very extended, lots of kids, etc.
It was mostly an economic support system.
And then you also had lots of family units connected to other families and sort of networks of families.
So the family unit, when it worked best, was also really connected and a lot of people were involved.
So it was the number of people involved that made it work.
You could always find somebody to help you with this or that.
But the way it's evolved is that families get smaller.
It might be two parents and a kid.
There are two parents and two kids.
So once you get small and isolated, you're not really connected to your other families necessarily, it doesn't work as well.
And it doesn't work as well for people who don't have money because they can't get nannies and tutors and drive the kids everywhere they need to go, etc.
So, and I don't know if you suggested a better situation, but I think it's worth looking at.
I think that any time you say one size fits all, you're probably wrong when it comes to human beings.
I'm completely willing to believe that the nuclear family is a great solution for a lot of people.
And maybe we'd even be better off with more of it.
I accept that.
But there's still going to be a big chunk of the public, maybe a third, you know, a big chunk, that is just never going to be the best solution.
For a variety of reasons.
Alright. Here's an update on my YouTube demonetization.
So some of you know I take these videos and they're uploaded later to YouTube.
And they get demonetized.
In the past they've been instantly demonetized.
Which causes them not to recommend it automatically.
So it doesn't get the visibility.
And then by day two, it's no longer today's news, which is what I usually talk about.
So I was getting killed that way.
Now, it isn't just because I say things about Trump.
Apparently, people on the left and the right were having the same problem.
But I have made contact with Google's team that deals with this, and they now have me sort of on a test program where I self-rate The content, which is diabolical.
Because the way it works is that instead of being sort of automatically banned because you talked about some keywords that get flagged, that's the old way, and that guaranteed I would get flagged every time.
Instead of that, you're on the automatically not flagged, but you have to self-report, and they check on you to make sure you're not Fudge in the system.
So I ended up self-reporting myself, and I think I'll probably self-report this one as well, to partially demonetize it.
Because there's something honest about that, which is, even though I think I would love a world in which I could say whatever I want as long as I meant well, you know, I'm not trying to hurt anybody, I mean well, that I could talk about any content I want and not get demonetized.
But I sort of understand That advertisers want to associate with certain types of content.
It's a free world.
If the advertiser says, don't associate me with these keywords, what's Google going to do?
So, it's a work in progress, but I wanted you to know that Google is working with creators who are having this problem.
And right now they're just doing some tests, but you might see more of this.
Alright, have you seen the broom challenge?
I don't know if you'd call it a challenge, but there's this viral thing where apparently, and I hate to tell you, it's a prank, that there's one day of the year the prank goes where you could set your broom, just set it up, and then let go, and it'll stay up.
And the prank goes that's because the gravitational pull is different on this one special day of the year.
It's the only time your broom will stand up.
Now, of course, you hear this And you say, it's today?
I'd better go test this today because this isn't going to work tomorrow.
So you run and you grab your broom and you stick it in the floor and you go, ah!
Ah! It works!
Because it turns out it works every other day.
It works every day.
But you've only tried it once because people told you it's only going to work today.
So all day long you're trying it and it's like, ah, they're right.
This thing's working. It's incredible.
So as pranks go...
Very good. A-plus.
Prank. All right.
That's about all I wanted to talk about today.
We will be watching New Hampshire, and if there's one thing I can tell you about New Hampshire, and you can take this to the bank about the primaries there, whoever wins New Hampshire or doesn't win, in other words, the results from New Hampshire will be Terribly important to the total outcome in the end.
And it won't.
Those are the two things you're going to learn today.
It totally matters, unless it doesn't.
Unless it doesn't.
It's the most important thing in the world, except, well, it might not be.
So everybody, all the pundits, are going to have to give their opinions because that's what they do to sell advertisement.
So you're going to see lots of opinions, but people are just guessing.
We've never had a situation where you've got a Biden who you know isn't going to do well in the first few, but he's leading the polls.
That's weird. Well, maybe we've had that situation, but it's less common.
And then have we ever had a situation where somebody with, what, $60 billion or whatever Bloomberg has is waiting out the first four?
We've never seen that.
So anybody who says that the New Hampshire results are somehow determining the winner, except it might eliminate a few people, that's possible.
