Episode 1052 Scott Adams: Single Parent Households, Biden and Beethoven Both Decomposing, Ye Systems, Schools, More
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Who caused the current division in our country?
A new category of FAKE NEWS
BLM acts like 95% of the problem...doesn't matter
Don Lemon talking like a conservative in 2013
Examples of President Trump's impressive leadership
Biden's platform policies...is he a Republican?
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Yeah, all of that.
It's all going to be better in a moment.
Yup. I can feel things heading in the right direction.
It's almost automatic. And it's because of the SIP. It really is.
Let's talk about some things.
So it seems that Twitter is still either intentionally or accidentally shadow banning people.
What I don't know is whether it's limited to one side of the political spectrum.
Since the people I tend to hear from the most are the people that follow me, I don't know that.
But Michael Malice tweeted, I think last night, that one of his friends reliably said that he follows Michael Malice on Twitter, but gets unfollowed automatically.
So Michael asked, has anybody else noticed this?
And he mentioned three names in particular for people to check.
So he said, see if you're getting unfollowed.
From Tim Pool, Michael Tracy, or Scott Adams.
Now, what do you think happened?
What do you think happened?
Yeah, so we got lots of comments of people who checked and found out that they had been unfollowed automatically.
Now, some of them had noticed it before, but the number of people who weighed in and said, yes, it happened to me, I don't think there's any chance anymore that it's confirmation bias.
I don't think there's any chance it's some kind of a pocket situation where it's somehow automatically doing it because you stuck it in your pocket like a pocket dial.
I don't think it's a bug because it would be such a big bug that it would be easy to notice.
I don't know what it is.
Now I've seen some other people speculate, as I add, that it could be third-party apps that you also have on your phone that sometimes they ask you for permission to post on Twitter, which I think gives them permission to do other things as well.
And I don't know if it's TikTok or other apps, but there does seem to be a pretty big problem here.
I just don't know what it is.
And a lot of people reported that they don't see President Trump's tweets.
But I don't know if that's an algorithm issue or something else.
But if you follow somebody or like something and it gets reversed later, especially if it gets reversed months later, you can't really call that a bug.
I mean, it might be, but...
And here's the fun part.
I actually don't know if Twitter knows what's happening.
I don't think they know.
Which means that it's coming from some source, either within the company or outside.
But I don't think it's coming from management.
And by the way, it would be insane for management to do this.
Let me say this as clearly as possible.
Given how obvious it is and how much it has been discussed, if you still think that Twitter management knows about it and is authorizing it, that would be a deep misunderstanding of human beings, I think.
And it wouldn't matter if it was Jack or somebody else that you put into this situation.
I don't know that anybody would risk a billion dollars to do a kind of a behavior that's so obvious.
In other words, if they were doing it intentionally, they would also know that they would be detected easily.
Easily detected. In fact, we just detected it.
So I think that it's coming from some source other than management.
But it's certainly coming from somewhere.
All right. Could be domestic or foreign.
We don't know. One of my favorite things in the world now, and it's just getting more and more fun, is watching Biden supporters pretend they don't notice a problem.
Now, of course, there's a different breed that's saying, yeah, we see it too.
We know Biden's losing it or has lost it, but it's still better than Trump.
And when people say stuff like that, I always wonder, what are they seeing that I'm not seeing?
Is it just the fake news difference?
Because all the things that people were worried about when Trump was first elected, there were lots of concerns.
But now that we're three and a half years into the term, you don't have to wonder what he might do, because you can pretty well see what he does as a president.
It would be unusual to expect that he would be different in a second term.
So I think the first term...
It gives you a pretty good picture of what to expect.
And what went wrong?
If you ask people what was the big disaster of the Trump administration, they will sometimes give you some fake news, such as not quite understanding that there was a surge at the border and that the cages that Obama built had to be used more temporarily.
Nobody was happy.
In other words, they'll give you a story they don't quite understand or they don't know the context.
So that's one thing that Trump did wrong, which is not really Trump doing it wrong.
Now, the kids in cages is a tragic situation, but the whole point of it Was that reasonable, responsible people said it's still better than the only other alternative, which is to let kids go with traffickers and God knows what.
So you have one category of things people say, yeah, look how it all went wrong under Trump, but the things they look at are just sort of fake news and out of context things that they don't quite understand.
But then there's another category that I just laugh out loud when I hear it.
They talk about how Trump has ruined Our country's ability to deal with other countries.
What's that based on?
Have you noticed any of that?
Have you noticed that other countries won't take a call from the United States?
Is there ever a situation where the prime minister of, pick a country, any country, just pick any country, friend or foe country, and the secretary comes in, whoever is the handling calls, and says to the leader of this other country, the president of the United States is on the line.
He wants to talk to you.
Which country doesn't take the call?
Now, I realize that a call from a head of state would be scheduled, so you wouldn't just call out of the blue.
But my point is, does anybody really think that there is a country somewhere who's not taking a call from the United States?
I don't think that happened.
How about, are there any countries that don't want to do a trade deal or at least negotiate with the United States?
I haven't heard of that.
Have you? Well, you know, Iran is obviously a case where we're trying to put pressure on them.
Yeah, so the things that people imagine have already gone wrong are literally just imagination.
It's just imagination.
I'm pretty sure there's nothing you can point to that is a disaster that is not of the making of the news.
So here's the other big point people make.
They say, look at race relations.
To which I say, imagine a world where the news was just reported straight without any opinion.
What would that look like?
Imagine a Trump administration in which there was still a CNN, there's still a Fox News, but all they do is they tell you what happened.
They don't give you any...
Any interpretation. Take any story.
The president called several countries, whole countries.
We'll just take that story as our example.
Suppose they had simply been reported as just a fact.
How would anybody feel about it?
They wouldn't even think about it.
It wouldn't even be on their mind.
They probably wouldn't even know what happened, even if it had been reported, because without the opinion stuff, it's not really a story.
Suppose, you know, so here's the story it reported as fact.
The president called several countries shithole countries, and then nobody on TV adds any commentary.
What would you think of that?
You'd probably think, oh, he swears in meetings.
That's probably all you would think, because you wouldn't even dig in and say, well, how many of the countries were predominantly brown or black, you know, and Of course, it's a fake story in the sense that there's only one person who heard it.
Apparently nobody else heard it.
I think that's the story.
But also the context was changed when it was reported.
So if you're saying that the country has become more racially divided, I would say that's true.
But what's the reason?
The reason isn't the president.
Now, he does play into it.
He does things which makes it easy for them.
To do that.
Excuse me. But I think you have to put the blame where it is primarily.
All right. So I saw Biden in this latest video.
There's yet another video of him speaking somewhat incoherently.
And toward the end of that clip, he does what I call the dementia cover.
So if you had dementia, and you realize that you started a sentence or a thought, and you realize you couldn't complete it because your brain wasn't working, what would you do?
Well, if you wanted to cover your dementia, you would do what Joe Biden does.
Let's say you would ask me a complicated question.
That I might have been able to answer if I were all with it, but that's not the case anymore.
How would I cover it up? The way I'd cover it up is I would say I'd ran out of time.
That's what he does. So he'll be talking on these live streams, and you can tell he just gets lost.
He doesn't know what he's saying, and he'll say something like, well, I don't want to take up all the time.
I don't want to get into the details.
It's totally just a dementia cover.
But we'll all pretend that that's not happening.
I quipped on Twitter that if Biden wins, I look forward to his first state-of-the-you-know-the-thing address.
State-of-the-you-know-the-thing.
Okay, it's pretty clever, you have to admit.
So I told you I'm running this big experiment to see if I can get cancelled, and part of it is I'm expanding my free speech, and...
I'm saying the most provocative things you could possibly say, but I'm saying them with good intentions.
I'm saying them politely.
I'm not putting any hate in anything I'm doing.
And so far I've not been cancelled.
So maybe if you don't show bad intentions and you don't demonstrate hate, you can get away with more free speech.
So that would be useful to know.
And one of the things I've been saying...
And it's my pinned tweet, as I talked about losing two jobs because my bosses told me that because I was white and male, I couldn't be promoted anymore.
So I quit both.
In both cases, I quit.
In one case, I was kind of encouraged to quit.
But it wasn't because of that.
I quit because they told me I couldn't be promoted.
That's my pinned tweet, and then I invited people to give me their similar stories.
So in the comments, there are literally hundreds of stories of people telling me similar things.
Yeah, my boss told me I'm white, I'm male, I can't get promoted, etc., etc., etc.
So a few interesting things happen.
There are some people who believe none of it's true.
The funniest one happened, I guess, two days ago.
I just finished reading the message from somebody who said that their company had just informed them.
This is this week, right?
So this is not ancient history.
This is this week. And I won't give you details, but somebody who had sent a message said, yeah, my company just put the word down that our next person we add to the organization can't be white because they want to improve their diversity.
So I'm just in that conversation, and the very next thing I open up is a Twitter person telling me that they don't think such things happen.
It was literally the immediate conversation before I open up somebody who lives in a country who thinks it doesn't happen, that it's not a thing.
Well, they've got a lot of surprise coming to them.
It turns out one of the biggest surprises is white people don't complain nearly as much as maybe you'd expect.
So there's this massive number of white males who, when we're together, will all tell the same story.
Oh yeah, I was discriminated against.
And it's not my imagination.
They told me directly, in direct terms.
Can't do anything for you, you're white and a male.
I was wondering how the press would handle it, because I figured if somebody as prominent as me, and, you know, that's not egotistical, I'm just saying somebody who has a big Twitter following and is in the public eye, when I say something that is so contrary to the popular view of things, it's going to get picked up.
And sure enough, it was, but mostly by small, obscure things and some local papers.
So I looked at one.
I've got Google Alerts set, so it tells me if anybody's talking about me.
And the only comment from one was somebody wrote a letter to the editor in which they mentioned my situation, and they said, my only complaint is you should say it's alleged.
So there was somebody who believed that I just made up the stories that I was told that I couldn't be promoted because I'm white and male.
So there's actually somebody in the country, a real person who lives among us, who thinks that's not even real.
Or at least that I made it up.
Why would I make that up?
That would be the strangest story in the world to make up.
Because there's not even one story.
It's a series of three of them.
The other one was a TV show, which is a little more complicated, but it comes down to the same thing.
And the fact that I can put that out there, and it's being ignored the same way that Biden's brain is being ignored.
So there seems to be a new category of fake news.
And it's a category of fake news where they simply act like something didn't happen, like it didn't exist.
And it's really effective.
Because if you simply act like something doesn't exist, the news silos prevent your people from ever seeing it.
They'll just never see it.
So I made a most provocative claim, which certainly would be important to the whole Black Lives Matter philosophy theme and protests, and yet it is completely ignored.
By any significant media.
And the reason they do that is because it's a total red pill.
It would just break the whole thing.
All right. Kanye continues to be interesting.
He's mentioned systems and design.
So he's used those words, system and design.
And if he's really a systems...
Kind of a leader instead of a goal-oriented leader.
That would be really strong.
And I've often thought, suppose I were to run for president and It doesn't make sense for me to run for president because there are so many topics that I don't know much about.
You know, I'm just not an expert on, you know, foreign anything or history, anything or politics, anything.
So I thought, how would I do that?
Let's say, you know, in my magical mind, I got appointed to be president.
I wouldn't run, but I mean, I wouldn't campaign.
But suppose somebody appointed me president.
How would I handle things, not being an expert on anything?
Well, you try to hire the right people, right?
That's part of it. But I also think that having a good system would make sense.
For example, I suggested that there should be a system in the country that doesn't exist for helping the citizens sort through what data, which studies are valid, and which are not.
Now, I don't know if you could do that without having that referee, if you will, Also be corrupted by politics and bias.
So maybe you can't do it.
I don't know. But I would like to at least take a try at a system that helps the public understand what's true and reliable and what's not.
Another system would be continuous testing.
Because we keep talking about how to solve these gigantic problems.
How do you solve education?
How do you solve single parents?
How do you solve crime?
And we always treat them like you have to have one solution for the whole country, fix it all at once.
But wouldn't it make more sense to have a whole bunch of small tests and say, we don't know what to do.
Honestly, we just don't know.
But we're going to put some attention into a test in Chicago.
We'll do a test here in Jacksonville.
We'll do a couple tests in some different places, and we'll just find out.
We'll just find out what works.
So, that would be good.
And then I noticed, unrelated to Kanye, or Ye if you prefer, unrelated to his run for president, you may know there was a story where he'd built some experimental housing, and some neighbors complained because there was too much construction noise, and he actually just tore them down.
Did you hear that story?
It was maybe a year ago.
So Kanye, I guess, got some designers or architects or whatever, built these sort of dome-like structures.
I think there were maybe three of them.
And then when the neighbors complained, they just destroyed them.
They just took them away.
But it looks like he's rebuilding in another place, because I saw some pictures that looked newer.
And it looks like he's iterating.
If what Kanye is doing is he's starting with the assumption that the first one won't be it, and it might not be the second one, it might not be the third one, if he's going full Thomas Edison on this, he's one of the most important people in the world.
Let me say that again.
If what Kanye is doing is consciously iterating these shelters, Like Thomas Edison iterated the light bulb until he found a filament that worked.
If that's what he's doing, and so far we've just seen two iterations, I think.
I'm kind of low information here, but it looks like that's what's happening.
If that's what he's doing, it's the most important thing happening in the country.
Because Because it's iteration, a system, if you will, that can get you to knowing how to build inexpensive shelters.
And if that's what Kanye's doing, his argument for being president just gets pretty strong.
So we'll keep an eye on that.
All right, so here's what...
I'm concerned about with Black Lives Matter.
I guess there's lots of stuff to be concerned about.
But it seems to me that they don't have a good sense of priorities.
And I put a little whiteboard graph on Twitter in which I showed a large bubble diagram.
And most of the bubble, you know, 95% of the bubble was labeled schools are racist.
And then little 5% of the bubble, I labeled everything else.
You know, every other problem, basically.
So here's what I mean by that.
While there are lots of things...
Where you would find systemic racism if you looked for it, especially in outcomes.
You'd find it in the judicial system.
You'd find it in employment.
You'd find it all over the place.
But the way I would look at this is in terms of where the biggest impact would be if you could fix it.
Fixing things after people are 35 years old is really hard.
Fixing things when they're first born so that they get a good start in life is going to be a much higher impact.
So if I were Black Lives Matter and I cared about black lives, I would be ignoring the police shootings, which the studies don't really support is even real, Now let me say that again.
The studies do support that black people are killed by police as in a higher percentage than their population, but not a higher percentage than the number of people who were stopped.
It makes complete sense because high-crime areas have a certain characteristic.
So the biggest thing that Black Lives Matter is protesting against probably isn't even real.
But the part that everybody agrees is real Is that school and maybe the family unit, we'll talk about that, are the most important things to get right.
But you don't hear Black Lives Matter talking about school and the family unit too much, do you?
Why is that?
If 95% of the problem is that early life experience, why is Black Lives Matter acting like 95% of the problem for their own people don't matter.
They're literally treating 95% of the problem like it doesn't matter.
They've identified the only thing that doesn't show up in statistics, which is that police are targeting black people for death.
It's the only thing you can't find in the statistics.
And they've targeted that.
I think that tells you That they're not about helping black people.
Now, I'm not saying they don't want to help black people, but it's obvious that whatever their motive is, it's not primarily about helping black people.
There seems to be a political motive because going after the police gets you closer to a revolution, if you know what I mean.
If your objective was to change the nature of the country, I'm going to say that the family situation and the school are kind of blended.
Because it's hard to separate those two things.
But if you fix that stuff, would you have as much trouble in 20 years, shall we say, with anything?
Wouldn't it fix everything?
Now, you're still going to have racism, as I like to say, every 10 minutes.
It can never go away.
It's like rain. But you can buy an umbrella, right?
So the umbrella in this case, in my analogy, would be an education.
Or training. Or staying out of jail.
Or not being on drugs.
Don't join a gang. You know, there's simple things you can do to stay out of the rain.
But you can't make rain die happen.
That's not an option.
You can't make the rain stop.
And you can't make human brains no longer biased.
In a whole variety of ways.
Race is just one of the infinite ways that your brain is biased.
You can't remove bias.
You can teach yourself to overcome it.
You can have laws. You can do a lot of things to reduce it or to make it less important, but you can't get rid of it.
And so even trying to get rid of it shows that maybe there's another motive because it doesn't even make sense.
Let's talk about the biggest question.
Conservatives especially, and even...
I think Don Lemon would agree with this, at least the Don Lemon of years ago.
You've all seen, there's a video of Don Lemon in 2000-whatever, but I think seven years ago.
And he was essentially talking like a conservative, but he was doing it on CNN. So you look at it, you're like, what?
Who is this guy?
So he was criticizing the black community from the perspective of being a black man, And his criticisms were really close to what any conservative would say, which is the shocking point.
It's things that I think he couldn't say in 2020 without being canceled.
But I would like to question this.
Let me tell you what we do know.
We do know that there's a really strong correlation between kids who grew up in single-parent homes And then future propensity for crime.
So we know the correlation is really strong.
If you only have one parent, your odds of going to jail are really high compared to other people.
And we know that it affects economics and grades and drugs and basically everything.
So having one parent is correlated with basically everything bad.
So what do you do with that knowledge?
What do you do with it? So now you've found something that looks like it's important.
What do you do? How do you fix that?
Does anybody have an idea how to fix that?
Well, the way that people want to fix it is simply by talking about it a lot.
Maybe if we talk about it a lot, black people will collectively say, oh, that's the problem.
You should have told us before.
Why didn't you tell us earlier?
Now we know. That's all?
Are you kidding me? We can fix most of our problems just by doing that simple thing?
Thank you, white people, for finally giving us the secret information that helps us fix everything.
I don't think that's going to happen.
Because whatever it is that's causing greater single parenting in some communities, Obviously isn't something that they simply choose to do or choose not to do because they're thinking about the future of their children, etc. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on, and I don't think that we can sort out what it is about having that second parent.
Usually the studies focus on the parent that's missing, being the father, the dad.
Let me ask you this. Why does the presence of a father make a difference?
What is your assumption about why having a father is so highly correlated with better success of the kid?
Well, the things that are obvious would be discipline.
Would the father be a more effective disciplinarian, especially to young boys?
Maybe. I mean, that's a reasonable thing to assume.
How about role models?
Is it that there's a good role model in the father and then the kid picks it up?
Here's what I would like to add to the conversation.
We've been watching in 2020 every study and every expert being wrong about everything.
Can you agree with that so far?
Would you agree so far every expert, every study is either highly questioned Because there are other experts with other studies, or there are critics of those studies.
It's either dead wrong, or at least it's highly questioned by other experts.
Do you take the general statement that in 2020 we have all collectively learned that everything we thought was true because the science and the data told us it was, doesn't mean anything?
So if you're a conservative, you say, Scott, we haven't figured out.
There are all these studies that show this strong correlation with the father not being there being the big problem.
So we've identified the problem.
Have you? Have you?
Because if you have, and I'm not saying you haven't, I'm just giving you some context.
If it's true...
It would be the only thing the experts got right this year.
Is that your belief?
Is it your belief that all the other stuff you watched from probably from climate change to God knows what All of that seemed wrong to you,
and the police shootings numbers, they were looking at the wrong ratios, masks work or they don't, hydroxychloroquine works or it doesn't, the death rate for the virus is either high or low, all of it.
You saw just about everything else being wrong, but is it your belief that on this one point, Science is pretty solid.
Is that what you believe?
Now, you could be right.
I'm not telling you you're wrong.
I'm just telling you that you would have to factor that in.
Why is it you think this is the only thing they got right?
Let me suggest there are some reasons why it might be wrong without claiming it's wrong.
So this is not a claim that that causation is wrong.
Simply a question. Just putting it out there.
Number one, are there other countries with other situations in which the single parent does fine?
Do you know that?
Is there, say, some other country where everything just works out fine if you're a single parent?
Probably not.
Because being a single parent almost guarantees that you have less money.
We know that poverty is highly correlated with being a single parent.
Would poverty alone cause less discipline in the child?
I think so.
Because if you put any kid in a poverty community, they're going to start acting like the other kids.
Because the peer pressure overwhelms the parental influence.
Let me say more about that.
Those of you who have raised children, let me ask you this.
You got to witness how much was genetic in the kid.
Because there are things that the kid is doing when they're three years old that tend to be their permanent personality and you can see it early.
So you've got kind of a sense if you've raised kids, oh yeah, this amount of the personality was kind of baked in.
Then you've also seen, all right, we taught them these behaviors.
And then you get to see if they stick.
So, for example, the parents may have taught them good habits, brushing their teeth, etc.
And you can see if those stick.
And then you can say, okay, that was my parenting.
I gave them that a habit.
It's stuck. You could say you caused them to be timely.
I think my mother was a big cause of me being obsessed about being on time for stuff.
So I think that feels to me like something that came directly from a parent and became permanent.
Likewise, I would say that my father and my mother's example of hard work and having multiple jobs and stuff probably had an influence on me.
I feel it. But that could also be genetic as well.
But then the kid goes to school.
So here's the part I'm getting to.
So then your kid goes to school.
You know, they're 8 years old, 9, 10, 11.
By the time your kid is, say, 14 years old, for those of you who have had this experience, what percentage of their personality came from the parent?
And what percentage of the personality came from their peers?
I'm just putting that out there because this is an observation, not a scientific study.
So you should adjust in your head how certain you should be about any of this.
My observation is that the peers are 90% of the influence after they become a certain age.
Once they become friend-centric, Which happens around, I don't know, 10 years old.
Before that, before age 10, they're kind of parent-centric, and they're a little bit more maybe sibling-centric.
But when they hit around 14, it's just friends.
Friends, friends, friends, friends.
And they just become the friends.
That's the influence.
So, if you say to me, these kids with single parents are being...
The problem is because there's no father.
I would say if there's no father, they're in poverty.
If they're in poverty, they're living in a poor place, in all likelihood.
If they're living in a poor place, all of the other peers are going to be in a situation.
And I would think it might be the peers that are a bigger influence than the parents.
But, obviously, the parents have an influence as well.
Let me ask you this.
Does risky behavior get transmitted genetically?
What do you think? I'll just limit it to this.
Does risk-taking, the desire to take a risk, do you think that that's genetic?
Yep, it is.
Yeah, risk-taking has a genetic component.
Now let me ask you this.
Is it risky to get divorced?
It is. Is it risky to have sex without protection?
It is. Would it be reasonable to assume that people who are risk-averse would use protection if they had sex and would be less likely to get divorced because they don't want the risk?
Could it be that people who stay together have in common, among other things, That they don't like risk.
That neither of them want to take the risk of being single.
Because divorce is a really big risk.
Sometimes you have to because the risk of staying married is worse if there's abuse.
But could it be that people who remain single have a higher tolerance for risk?
People who stay married have a low tolerance for risk.
And that low tolerance for risk is a good indicator of somebody who's going to stay in school and do all the low risk things.
Now, did you hear me say anything racial?
Because you should.
Because that risk gene is not limited to one ethnicity.
So it is true that poor white kids born to single parents also have higher crime rates.
So what does every ethnicity that has a single parent likely have in common, you know, on average?
Each situation is different, but on average.
On average, it's people who have made choices, conscious choices, which fall into the category of riskier behavior.
So how much of that is learned by being in an environment where everybody's doing the same thing And how much of that is because you're just a person who can take a little bit more risk.
Alright, now I'm not saying that that explains it all.
What I'm saying is that there may be some simplicity to the you need a father situation.
And I would ask you this.
If you could find out what it is about the father that are the key variables...
Could you reproduce those good effects without the father?
Let me give you an example.
Say you designed a...
I'll simplify this.
Let's say an apartment building comes up with this concept.
I don't know if it's legal, but let's assume it's legal just to work through the thought process.
So somebody takes an apartment building and they say, here are the rules.
80% of the apartments...
80% will be rented to single mothers.
Again, so this is the part, I don't know if that's legal, but just think through it.
80% will be to single mothers.
20% of it will be men who are good role models.
So you might be a police officer, but you're single, so you get to be in that building.
You might be a teacher, But you're single.
I don't know if you have to be single.
Maybe that doesn't matter as much.
But you need to be available as a role model to the others.
In other words, if you created a living situation in which you had role models that actually could even discipline.
Because let's say that the agreement, if you live here, is that any of the adults can discipline any of the kids.
And that's just the agreement in advance.
So, you want to live in this apartment.
Every adult in this apartment is your parent.
A lot of them are adult males.
They're cops. They're educators.
They might be a lawyer.
It might be a doctor. But they're people who are substantial.
They're people you would look to as role models.
It's people that would be, you know, who you wanted to be.
Now, let me give you an example from my life.
My father had a lot of good qualities.
But he was not what you would call a role model.
I think my siblings are both watching this, and I know you're both laughing right now.
And when I say that, I mean, I didn't want to grow up to be like him.
I wanted to grow up to be very much not like him.
Now, unfortunately, I got a lot of his qualities...
Yeah, but I couldn't help that.
But let's say he was not the most ambitious person in the world, and I was born just sort of naturally ambitious, so I wanted a different upbringing.
I found that I just looked at other people as my role models.
I just decided, well, okay, I'm not going to be exactly like my father.
I think I'd like to be the lawyer in town.
And I didn't even know him. I just knew he was a lawyer.
So I said, alright, I'll be like that guy.
Because that guy is ambitious and knows how to make money and stuff.
So, I will simply raise the question, and it goes like this.
Even if you believe, and I think there's a good chance that this is true, that the lack of an adult male in the upbringing of a child has bad consequences.
I'm willing to accept that that's true.
But you might be able to find out what it is about that That makes it work, and just reproduce it in a non-parental way.
I think the worst approach is to say, this is the problem, and all you have to do is, hey, you guys, just decide to act like us.
Just go act like us.
And then everybody, I think, everything will be fine.
I don't see that working.
I just don't see it working.
You could sort of wish it happens, but that's the end of it.
There's no process. There's no system.
It's just wishing. And wishing, I sure wish, people in poor communities would get married and stay together.
I sure wish it would happen.
That's not anything.
That's nothing. You can't wish it to happen.
All right. I wrote a piece, I didn't know how controversial it would be, a Twitter thread, in which I said that President Trump is showing the...
Strongest, and maybe best, leadership that I've ever seen in my adult life.
Now, of course, I make it a big claim, so it gets more attention that way.
But here's my claim.
Leadership is different from following the expert's advice.
If the only thing you're doing is following the expert's advice, well, you're not really a leader.
You're more like a manager.
You know, a manager...
Listens to the experts and then implements it.
And a manager is a different word from a leader.
In order to be a leader, in my opinion, you have to do something that the experts are not recommending or you're not leading.
If all you're doing is taking expert advice, did we need you?
Really? I mean, do you even need a president?
Because the experts come to a consensus, other people implement it, So if you've got experts and you've got implementers, and the only thing is there's a president in the middle with a rubber stamp saying, okay, boop, send your idea over to the implementers.
If that's all that's happening, what kind of leadership is that?
That's nothing. So you look for cases where the leader has done something that is opposed to the experts.
Here are some examples. Trump closed travel from China before the experts said it was a good idea.
In fact, they said don't do it.
He did it anyway.
He has been proved correct.
That is clean, clear leadership.
Very unusual.
It stands out because you can't think of other examples, right?
Quickly, think of an example where Obama...
Did something the experts all said don't do, like just universally said don't do it, and it turned out to be right.
There might be examples, but I can't think of one, so you can help me out if you can think of one.
Trump is now pushing to reopen schools.
He also pushed to reopen the economy before the experts were comfortable with it.
I think that's going to work out.
Because we don't doubt that there will be deaths and infections.
Everybody is clear-eyed about that.
The reopening of the economy guarantees more people get infected.
We're all aware of it.
But the experts are saying, you know, don't open the schools, don't open the economy too soon, you know, be more cautious.
And Trump is saying very clearly And unambiguously.
Gotta open the economy.
Gotta open the schools. Now the first thing I like about it, leadership-wise, is that he's totally unambiguous about it.
You don't wonder where he stands.
Open the schools.
Open the economy. Now, a president has to see the entire field.
So while the experts are the medical experts and they're saying, if you open up, we medical experts will see medical problems, that's only part of the question.
Because there will also be social problems which translate into medical problems in ways that nobody can quite understand, but we all know it's a big problem.
So the leader has to look at the entire field, and he did, and he's going against the experts again.
Is he right?
I don't know.
We don't know. My guess is that he's right.
If I were in his position, I think I would be doing about the same thing.
Maybe not as aggressively, which is what makes it more impressive.
I think he's going to be right on closing travel.
I think he's going to be right about opening schools, about opening the economy.
I think history will show him right.
Those are amazing, amazing examples of leadership.
And here's the thing. Suppose he's wrong.
Suppose he's wrong.
And And it turns out that opening things too early and going back to school killed 50,000 people that didn't need to be killed.
What would you say about that?
I think you would still say it's amazing leadership.
Because nobody really knows what's going to happen.
If the thing you're saying is, how often does he get it right?
I don't know if that's the right standard.
Because the whole point of a leader is that you don't know what the right answer is, but somebody's got to make the decision.
You don't know, and you still have to make a decision.
So do you ding the leader for getting it wrong?
In the real world, you do, but you have to ask yourself, well, it's not really leadership if you know what the right answer is.
It's sort of the not knowing that makes it impressive.
Likewise, when Trump was leading on negotiating with China, all the experts said, don't start a trade war.
There were basically, I don't think I saw one expert who agreed with him.
Do you remember that? He was basically all alone, except for people he hired who would boost his signal.
But basically, people were saying, no, no, trade wars are bad, blah, blah, blah, China's good.
And now, months have gone by, and what do we know for sure?
We know for sure that China will not do its part.
It might make agreements but not keep them.
We know it's going to continue sending fentanyl.
We know it's going to continue stealing IP. We know that their apps like TikTok are built as spy equipment.
Basically, Trump proved By being a leader and by pushing them hard, he proved that you can't deal with them.
So there were two possibilities and strong leadership was the only way to get to them.
One was maybe China wanted to make a deal and then you get a good trade deal and that would be a good outcome.
The other is that you prove that you can't work with them, which is what happened.
So China proved that they're not a credible partner for anything.
And once you know that, then you can start decoupling, which is happening.
So we will get to the point where we're bringing our supply chains home, which is one of the best things that's ever happened to this country.
And we only could get to that because Trump defied every expert and pushed through on a very critical issue.
You know, our relationship with China is one of the biggest things in the world.
And again, it seems like it worked.
Take North Korea. How many experts told him to meet with Kim Jong-un when he didn't have a deal already?
None. Maybe none.
Maybe there were no experts who said it was a good idea to meet with Kim Jong-un because the experts said that he's not going to make a deal.
And sure enough, Kim Jong-un did not make a deal.
But don't you feel safer?
Does Kim Jong-un see the United States as a military threat and therefore he's preparing to strike back?
No. Trump took the threat of North Korea basically right off the table.
And he did it by defying all the experts.
He just created a personal relationship.
And I think that, plus other activities, Have proven to Kim Jong Un, and especially getting rid of John Bolton recently, I think Kim Jong Un is looking at the United States and saying, you know, it just sort of doesn't look like that big a threat at the moment.
So, are you safer?
Guaranteed. I would say it's guaranteed that you're safer, because he violated what the experts wanted him to do.
So, my theory, and I've had this for a while, I think history is going to be very kind to Trump.
Because all of the little personality stuff that dominates the news coverage and social media will sort of melt away with history.
History is going to look at the big things he did, and it's going to forget about the personality stuff.
It's going to forget about the tweets and the little fights, and it's going to forget about the fact-checking.
It's going to forget all of that. But it's going to remember about China.
It's going to remember coronavirus.
It's going to remember that ISIS used to hold territory, and now it doesn't.
So I believe that Trump will be viewed by history as maybe...
One of the top five, for sure, leaders we've ever had.
Because you have to throw Washington and Lincoln and Truman.
There's people who made really big decisions.
So they were good leaders as well.
But I think you'll be in the top five presidents easily.
Does that get you on Mount Rushmore?
Top five? Can they make another space?
All right. We're still confused about why fatalities are dropping despite infections going up.
Now, the obvious explanation is that it's young people who are getting infected, but the second explanation is we're getting better at treating it.
And maybe a third explanation is that it might be mutating or has already infected the people most likely to be infected or there's some kind of herd immunity from other coronaviruses that has an impact.
The fact is we don't know.
We just don't know.
We just don't know exactly why the The death rate is falling while the infection rate is skyrocketing.
Probably most of that has to do with young people.
That's my guess. Because they get infected but they don't die.
You may be aware that there are two complete worlds that have formed around face masks.
In one world, you can see lots of references to studies that show that face masks don't work, meaning that they don't have any effect.
Then you'd be better off without them.
And then there's another world where, duh, it's obvious they work, and all the science proves it, and here it is, we can show you right here.
Those are existing simultaneously, and they're both referring to science.
What good is science if reasonable people, and I'm talking about educated people, doctors, you know, people who know their stuff, what good is the science If it's opposite, you can pick your science and find out that it has no impact, and then you can pick your science and find out, oh, it totally has impact.
Now, I think the reason that it's allowed to exist, in other words, the reason these two worlds can exist, is because the world that says face masks don't work They inject a little clause in there that if you don't look closely, you don't find it.
And it looks like this.
It has not been proven that face masks work in terms of coronavirus and maybe other things.
Now, is that the same as saying face masks don't work?
It's not.
Because nobody's really done a test Of face masks, you know, different ones used for the coronavirus in this specific situation, etc.
Hasn't been tested. But does it make sense that having a barrier that slows down how far the droplets go, assuming that it might be airborne or at the very least it's getting on surfaces, does common sense tell you it's got to work a little bit?
Yes. But what good is science if you've got all this science and smart people still take opposite sides?
And they're both looking at science.
What's that tell you about science?
Alright. There's a professor at Stony Brook, you've heard of him before, Helmut Norpoth.
And apparently he's been the most accurate predictor.
He's got a model that predicts who's going to be president.
And it's correctly predicted five out of the past six elections.
And every single election but two in the last 108 years.
And the technique he uses is he ignores the polls and he looks at primary results.
And his theory goes roughly like this.
Somebody who dominated in the primaries shows that there's a lot of base enthusiasm, and that's a good predictor of who wins.
If somebody limps through the primaries and manages to get nominated, They're going to lose.
So that's basically the idea, is that if you limped through the primaries, that's not a strong enough show of grassroots support, so you're almost certainly going to lose.
How accurate is this model?
Well, as I said, it's been wrong twice, but look at the two times it was wrong.
One of them was the Kennedy election.
If you know your history, what was unusual about the Kennedy election?
The Kennedy election was rigged.
The Kennedy senior literally got the mafia to rig elections in some of the places that made the difference.
So the Kennedy election, the model didn't get right, but it would have gotten it right if it had not been a rigged election.
Think about that. The other one it got wrong is it said that Gore would beat Bush.
And do you remember what happened?
The Gore versus Bush?
It went to the Supreme Court and it still looked like it was stolen?
Right. So the two times his model didn't work, it kind of did work.
It's just that there was something that was a little suspicious about the election process itself.
So his model is close to 100% effective.
And he says you can completely ignore the polls even this close to election.
You know, historically, The polls this close to election are just random.
They're actually just random.
So, that's his prediction.
What's interesting is that we have three people running for president, if you count Kanye West, and all three of them are running as Republicans.
What? What, Scott?
What are you talking about?
Biden's not a Republican.
Obviously. Duh.
Or is he?
As of today...
Apparently he had a little committee set up to negotiate with the progressives in his party to see if they could come up with something that the less progressive people and the progressives would get behind.
So some of that's been done, and here's what's happened.
Biden is not in favor of Medicare for All.
So Biden is not in favor of Probably, in my opinion, the single most important thing that the left wanted, which was health care for everybody.
And Biden is not on board.
And that's the best they can negotiate with him.
So whoever is doing the negotiating, they've decided on something that apparently is better for winning elections.
Because if Biden had come out with full health care for everybody, Pretty much he would have been done.
He had to come up with something a little more closer to a Republican thing so it doesn't become a negative for him when he's running.
Here's the one that's more interesting though.
Remember the Green New Deal was going to transform the economy?
Well, apparently that's off the table now.
So Biden will not be putting in the platform.
So the Democratic platform And the presidential candidate at this point become one in the same, for the most part.
And at this point, it doesn't look like the Green New Deal is even going to be in the Democratic platform.
Now, when I say the Green New Deal, I mean the one where airplanes are grounded and And fossil fuels are phased out really soon, and all the stuff that would be the most dangerous.
So that stuff's just not in the plan anymore.
Now he's going for something that is better described as more aggressive goals to get to net zero carbon emissions.
What does that tell you?
Huh. Read between the lines.
Let's see. So it's not the Green New Deal, which is...
Telling you to get rid of fossil fuels and all that stuff.
So it's not that.
But he wants to go for a more aggressive net zero carbon emissions.
Huh. What would be the only way you could do that effectively?
Is it by lots of solar panels?
Eh. Is it by windmills?
Eh. Is it by nuclear energy?
I think that it's silent on nuclear energy, but I think Biden just became a Republican.
Because it's looking to me like Biden's health care plan is indistinguishable from the Republican plan.
Let's keep things the way they are and try to improve it.
Basically a Republican plan.
And if he's trying to get to net zero carbon emissions at a more More aggressive rate.
There's sort of only one way to do it.
There's just one way.
The Republican way.
So I think Biden is just becoming a Republican.
Weirdly. So that would mean Kanye's a Republican.
He says he would run as a Republican if Trump were not already.
Trump's a Republican, sort of.
We've got three Republicans running for president.
Has that ever happened? I don't think so.
Alright, that's his best chance for winning, though.
Biden is to be a little more moderate.
Alright, that's all I've got for now.
Biden wants to defund the police?
No, he doesn't. Biden does not want to defund them.
He may want to improve them in some way.
Even Republicans would be in favor of improving policing.
Just show them a proposal.
That's worth testing. And again, you don't have to be in favor of any of this defund the police stuff.
You could be in favor of testing.
Just say, let's try it.
If you've got an idea for taking some of that budget and moving it to some other kind of thing that you might get a better result, let's try that in Cleveland and see what happens.
All right. Somebody says, why is Trump not pushing nuclear?
I would say that's just a mistake.
You don't need a reason for a mistake, right?
So I would say that Trump not pushing nuclear, probably he's not fully informed on it, is my guess.
Probably he doesn't have the best information.
But it's also possible that it's one of those single-issue topics that can cause you to lose an election.
There might be people who don't care about anything, except they don't want nuclear energy.
Maybe. I don't know.
There can't be that many people who would be single-issue voters on that.
So there might be a political motive that I don't know of, but it looks like it's a politically losing position, and it's scientifically losing, and it's planet losing.
So if you ask me why would Trump not be promoting nuclear energy when it seems to be good on every way that anything can be good, literally every way that something can be good, It just looks like a mistake.
Now, the energy department under Trump is actually very aggressive.
So if you look what the administration is doing, it looks like the right stuff.
I mean, it really looks like they are going energetically after figuring out how to test the newer devices and stuff like that.
But why he doesn't personally talk about it, I don't know.
