Episode 1053 Scott Adams: Talking With Michael Shellenberger About Apocalypse Never, A Terrific Book
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Special Guest: Environmental activist, Michael Shellenberger
De Blasio paints BLM in front of Trump Tower
Startup Ground News compares multiple news sources
A list of people who have called for boycotts of other companies
Joe Biden's country destroying proposals
Unrestricted immigration and the black community
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Now, I have a special guest, which I'm going to wait for a moment until he gets on here.
If the technology doesn't work today, we'll figure something out.
So, let me just check here.
I'm trying to talk to Michael Schellenberger when he is available, which will be any moment now, about his incredible new book that I Read, and you should be proud of me.
It's kind of a big book and I actually read it.
Whoa! Can you believe it?
Yes, I did. All right.
Michael, if you're having trouble getting on, I will be looking for a message from you, just so as I know.
All right. Michael says he's there.
But, Michael, you say you're there, but when I look at my guest list, you do not appear.
So there's an icon at the bottom of your screen.
Click the Happy Faces icon at bottom.
And once Michael clicks that, I will see him and then I will add him on.
Which I think might be happening right now.
Yes, it is! So, let's see if our technology works.
Michael, can you hear me?
Hey, it worked!
So, let me tell the audience what we've got going here.
So, this is Michael Schellenberger, whose amazing new book, Apocalypse Never, which you can see right here.
It's number seven on Amazon's most read books of the week.
I don't know if all of you know this, but Amazon puts out a lot of books.
If you could be number seven on their most read list, holy cow, it's number one in a bunch of categories that apply to it.
Michael, would you describe yourself as an environmentalist activist still, or is that where you started and you've evolved?
How would you describe yourself for the audience?
I still consider myself an environmentalist and an environmental activist.
I spend a lot of my time making the case for nuclear power, which I think is one of the most important technologies in the world, certainly one of the most important environmental technologies.
Yeah, I guess you can now say I'm a best-selling author too, which is pretty cool.
The thing that I loved about your book, and by the way, I don't usually like books, I have to admit.
Even when I read them, I think, well, maybe I shouldn't have.
But I actually loved every part of your book because your writing is excellent.
It keeps me engaged the whole time because your personal story was woven in with Would you say that if you and Greta Thunberg were ever in the same room, that the matter and the antimatter would make you both explode and disappear?
That would be a very interesting experiment, wouldn't it?
I would want a lot of other people to be present, that's for sure.
It would be quite a show.
Alright, so your book is sort of a tour through The environmental, not only the history and the psychology of it, which I found actually the most interesting part was the psychology of how we got to where we are in various ways.
But when you looked into everything from Solar to wind to, you know, the Amazon rainforest and all this, and you've done deep dives in all of these.
Where were you most surprised and what would be the most surprising to the audience in terms of things that people generally believe to be true that just aren't true?
Oh man, there's so many of them.
I mean, I think one of the most fun, the two most fun chapters in a way were the chapters that on plastic waste and on meat because these are two topics that I had certainly read about but I had never really properly researched much less consider myself an expert on so I mean one of the most surprising things was you know I opened this chapter on plastic by describing this very famous viral YouTube video where a marine biologist pulls a plastic straw out of the nose of a sea turtle And I learned more about the history of these sea turtles and one of the things I learned is that they were being over harvested.
They were being killed for their shells to make tortoise shell glasses.
Tortoise shell glasses, the tortoise shell was misnamed.
It was sea turtle because sea turtle shells were the original plastic, the original bioplastic.
So it turns out that the plastics that we use today made from petroleum products Actually helped to save sea turtles.
They also helped to save elephants because they were substitutes for the ivory in elephant tusks.
So it was stories like that where you discover these things that you're told are super terrible, often had a really important role in protecting the environment, even plastic.
The surprising part about that is that the sea turtle that had the straw up his nose, I didn't even know sea turtles did cocaine.
So that was surprising to me.
No, turtles don't do cocaine.
I just made that up.
Alright, so one of the things I found most powerful about your book is the people who want to save the world seem to be destroying it and they don't know why.
They don't know it.
Can you walk us through what a developing nation needs to do to become a good nation and can they get there with solar power?
I mean, I joke that, because I wrote this book, I dedicated this book to my children who are ages 14 and 21, so I wanted people to be able to read it who were just 14 years old, so I told a lot of really, I tried to make it as simple as possible with a lot of stories, and I talked about how really the process of economic development, unless you're Saudi Arabia, is basically the same everywhere.
You go from having a country where almost everybody is a small farmer, To getting factories, people working in cities.
And that the only way to do that is by moving away from renewables, away from wood and dung, water wheels, towards fossil fuels.
And to some extent, hydroelectric dams are very important.
Hydroelectric dams I consider the highest form of renewables because they provide so much reliable power.
But really it's a story of rising energy consumption.
Increased energy consumption is actually good for the environment because energy is a substitute for matter, which is what we call the natural environment.
So yeah, I mean, this trend I condemn, I criticize here, which is this idea that we should stop funding hydroelectric dams, roads, electrical grids, Modern agriculture.
And instead, the World Bank is giving small farmers a solar panel and a battery and saying, hey, good luck with that.
It's simply not going to work.
So would it be fair to say that environmentalists, if they got their way, would lock all of the poor people into poverty basically forever?
Because nobody's figured out how to get out of poverty without doing it the way you just mentioned.
Yeah, I mean...
Greta would be destroying the lives of poor people forever?
Yeah, I mean, what they would say is, well, we should help them with some charity.
But for sure, the idea, and in fact, they've succeeded.
They've basically persuaded the World Bank, the European Development Bank, all the big international development banks, whose purpose after World War II was to lift everybody out of poverty.
They have diverted basically all of that money from energy that can lift people out of poverty, whether it's a hydroelectric dam, a coal plant, or a nuclear plant, So these little charitable experiments, a solar panel on a hut, they've actually also denied countries the Money they need for irrigation, fertilizer, tractors, which is the basis for...
Because when you have factories in cities, you have to...
Your farmers, you have fewer farmers, and they have to grow more food.
It's just really simple.
So yeah, I mean, it's an agenda that basically...
You know, at the end of the book, I have three chapters about kind of why is everybody so crazy on this environmental issue.
And I look at money, power, and religion, and the power...
Definitely there's an effort by rich...
People in the rich countries, Greta Thunberg herself, Bill McKibben, the other characters in the book, are actively trying to keep poor nations in poverty, and I think it's unconscionable.
So that's the most amazing part about this.
And I've always tried to figure out why people have different opinions on things where science should be the only opinion.
And the environmental one is the most amazing one.
And I don't know anybody who's looked into it I don't know anybody who comes down on a different side when they dig into it as much as you have.
It feels like the environmentalists are in some cases just doing things for money or whatever, but in many cases I think they just don't have as deep a talent stack.
In other words, they're just not capable of looking at the field in its entirety.
They're just seeing part of the field.
Does it feel like that to you?
I mean, I would say yes in some ways.
I mean, what's striking to me, Scott, is that environmentalists, the people who want to control the energy and food production all around the world through the United Nations, this is not some conspiracy theory.
I document all of this in the book.
These are people that have never spent any time in poor countries.
These are people who have really never spent any time in the productive sectors of their own country's energy and food economies.
I always joke that nobody's more alienated from nature than environmentalists.
Environmentalists are people that live in the city.
They want to put huge industrial wind turbines In the air shed of birds, bats, and insects in places where they don't live.
But if you ever get a wind turbine proposed for the coast of California or for the coast of Cape Cod, Those of us in the rich cities and the rich coast shut that down immediately.
So there's a lot of hypocrisy at work.
There's a lot of ignorance. It's hard to pull them apart exactly.
Now, for the benefit of the audience, give us your view of climate change.
Is it man-made?
Is it alarming?
Give us your overview on where you think climate change is heading.
So my view is that climate change is real, but it's not the end of the world.
It's not even our most important environmental problem.
I think it's taken up way more of our attention and money and time than it should.
It's led us to not only neglect what I see as more serious environmental problems, which would be things like the loss of habitat and rainforests and the fragmentation of forests for endangered species, Poverty, the overconsumption of wild animals, including fish. We've basically forgotten about all those problems.
They don't even really get into the newspapers much anymore.
And then it's led people to do things that are clearly harmful.
I mean, the first one, and part of my motivation for writing the book, is that they've contributed to rising anxiety and depression among adolescents.
I'm not saying they're the sole cause, but they're certainly part of it.
Yeah, you know, When I grew up, we were taught that there was going to be a nuclear war in our lifetime and we'd probably all be dead.
It definitely had an effect on my whole mental makeup, probably permanently.
I can't imagine that that's not messing up kids.
You talk about There's a fascinating part toward the end of the book where you're talking about maybe the psychological underpinnings of the death cults.
Can you say something about that?
Well, yeah. I mean, the last chapter in the book, and I think you know I ended up actually hiring somebody from Extinction Rebellion, which is crazy.
But basically, the last part of the book, I'm in London.
I'm actually advocating for nuclear.
I went to 10 Downing Street.
I went to Parliament. Met with former labor leader Jeremy Corbyn.
And I was making a case for nuclear, but I'm trying to get through Trafalgar Square, and it's just this crazy Extinction Rebellion protest.
Thousands of people are arrested.
And it's very disturbing.
I mean, they have up signs that say things like climate change kills children, which is just ridiculous.
It's like pseudoscience.
And so I spent some time trying to figure out, what's going on here?
Like, what is this?
Well, obviously, you know, or maybe not obviously, but I think it's very clear when I review the research, and I certainly think about my own history, that this is a religious movement.
You could say it's a religious cult.
I quote somebody, one of the best British columnists on this, called the upper middle class death cult, which is not inaccurate.
Right. What's going on?
Apocalyptic environmentalists tend to be people who don't believe in traditional religion, but they still have the need to believe in something.
They still have the need for transcendence, for some sense of immortality.
Do you think that sense of immortality is that they're saving the world?
So that's their legacy?
Our need for immortality or our basic need to feel like we have some lasting effect.
Is that where it is in saving the world?
Yeah, it's really exaggerated, right?
I mean, it's like a Marvel superhero story of yourself You know, I contrast it.
Like, if you think about, if I look at my parents, when my kids and my brothers and sisters' kids, when we're all home for Christmas, my parents are the happiest I ever see them because they see their grandkids.
They are immortal, right?
They see that they are living on through their grandkids.
That's a healthy, normal fantasy or story of immortality that they have.
I think for this idea that I... As a person, I'm going to save the planet from climate change.
I mean, it's identical in structure to a Marvel superhero story.
It's so over the top.
It's so ridiculous. And what we find is that basically a lot of what these apocalyptic environmentalists, the story they're telling is a Judeo-Christian story of saving the whole planet from Armageddon.
But they think they're just talking science.
They think that they're actually describing the world as it is.
They don't know that they're in the grip of a religion.
Yeah. One of the hardest things for anybody is to know what you don't know.
And one of the things that I've noticed is that the environmental movement skews young, wouldn't you say?
That it's a young person's movement?
Is that a fair statement?
Yeah, I mean, I think there's, I see a lot of the leaders and the activists in the apocalyptic climate change movement being adolescents and middle-aged people, which are, is a kind of two existential moments in your life, where you're kind of like, who am I? You know, what am I doing here?
What is my purpose? You have it as an adolescent and you often have a midlife crisis.
So I think it reflects some personal insecurity that people have around their own lives and then they become part of a movement and it gives their lives meaning.
But ultimately, if I could sort of break it down like this, the difference between an environmentalist activist and what you are is that you know more than they do.
I mean, it kind of comes down to that, isn't it?
You've just looked into it in more detail and so you can see the whole field and you can see that, for example, solar isn't going to solve all our problems, but the person who hasn't done the work It's going to say, well, Elon Musk says solar's going to work without realizing that Elon Musk is a competitor to other forms of energy, which is one of the things you talk about.
Can you say something about that?
What is it that's caused people to think that solar could solve their problems when it's so obvious that it can't?
Well, that's right. I mean, when you see people, this incredible love for renewables and the anger that people have at you when you point out all of the obvious problems with it, you know, like the wind turbines are spinning blades that kill a lot of endangered species, or that the solar panels require covering 400 times more land.
Than a natural gas or a nuclear plant require.
When you just point out those problems, advocates of renewables, apocalyptic environmentalists, they get really angry in the same way that a true believer gets mad when you suggest that their god isn't real.
So, you know, I think it's clear.
You see it in all of the literature.
You see it in the advertising.
Renewables have always been viewed as a way to harmonize human society with nature.
So nature ends up playing the role of God and where we used to try to get right by God and by God's laws.
There's now by supposedly secular people.
An effort to get right by nature, and science becomes kind of a new religion.
You know, I've always noticed people always have this need to be part of something that's bigger than themselves, and maybe get approval from something bigger than themselves.
So, as you're talking about, it's like you try to get God's approval if you're a believer, but if you're not a believer, maybe you need nature's approval.
Maybe we're just wired, so we need that approval from the bigger power.
I've got to ask you about nuclear.
Is our country going in the right direction, finally?
I know the President doesn't say much about nuclear, but the Department of Energy does seem to be doing some things.
Is it moving in the right direction, in your opinion?
Not really, unfortunately.
I'm afraid the nuclear industry itself is committed to manage decline.
They announce a lot of R&D projects, but honestly, there is no effort to maintain our existing nuclear plants or build new ones.
So what we've got is a lot of demonstration projects, I think, that are attempted to kind of make us feel better about Now, is that not, at least in part, because there's some desire to get to so-called Generation 4 that we don't know how to do yet exactly?
So there's some iteration and testing and the government, they built some kind of a test facility to do that, didn't they?
Or they're building it? Yeah, that's the idea.
I mean, the problem is I've just done so much, I just know so much about the history of this that we see this repeatedly where, you know, there's all these demonstration efforts, there's been so many prototypes and demonstration reactors made and they don't ever go anywhere.
I mean, what really gets nuclear plants built is when utilities decide to build plants and they usually end up building the same kind of plant or a very similar kind of plant to one that's been operating.
So, you know, my concern is not that – I have no problem with the demonstration efforts.
My problem is that we're not doing the things that the Russians and the Chinese And the French and the people that are serious about having a nuclear expansion are doing, which is to build full-size light water reactors.
That's why I'm so obsessed with Britain right now.
Britain's considering building six full-size light water reactors.
It's got two under construction.
That's what it looks like when countries are going seriously on nuclear, and unfortunately we're not doing that.
And for our audience that's not up to date, the types of nuclear that other countries are looking at building Would all be Type 3?
Would you call it a third generation which has never had a meltdown that killed anybody yet?
Is that true? Oh, yeah, of course.
I mean, really, we haven't had...
I mean, even Fukushima's radiation didn't kill anybody, and that was Gen 2.
So, yeah, it's Gen 3.
These are, in some ways, honestly, they're just over-engineered.
In the book, I talk about the fear of nuclear and deep irrationality and ideological nature of the fears.
But my view has always been on nuclear that we too often make the perfect enemy of the good and really what works is to just build, get practice building, have the same guys building the same reactors over time.
That's how costs come down. So if you were to say, you know, you were the president of the United States instantly and you were going to say, all right, I'm going to fix nuclear energy in this country, would you look at forced standardization Would you just get out of the way and remove regulations if some of them are unnecessary?
I don't even know if they are.
Where's the lever? What would you focus on to change first to fix it?
I mean, the most important thing is to have a national consensus on a long-term plan for taking nuclear from 20% To 50% of our electricity by 2050.
I mean, I think that's a pretty reasonable goal.
You would then work with the utilities and the states because we do have a fragmented utility system.
You know, most countries, it's a single utility or a couple of them.
We have so many utilities because we're such a big country.
The most important thing is to have a goal and work towards it.
And yeah, I think standardization would be the obvious way.
But I thought the real problem is that the economics don't work because it just takes so long to get it approved.
If you don't fix that, it doesn't matter how much leadership you have, does it?
If you're doing unapproved designs, sure, but we have a perfectly great, I mean, it's really great, advanced pressurized water-cooled reactor called the AP1000. They're building two of them in Georgia.
Those workers are literally a national asset.
I mean, I go, those construction workers, because they know how to pour cement and make rebar, and weld at nuclear grade standards.
After they're done, they should move up the road to South Carolina and build two more nuclear reactors there.
They would then, you would basically, if they have a national building program, it would just spread Because the key is that the workers themselves, there's so much specialized skills involved, speaking of skill stacking, that they are...
These workers, I mean, it's tragic.
If we don't build more nuclear plants after those two AP1000s, we're going to lose so much valuable asset in those workers.
It's scary to me.
Is this the same kind of skill?
I know pouring concrete is not the same skill you'd need to make a nuclear engine for...
You know, for a submarine or later for a space force.
But we have the same problem, right?
Because space will be nuclear powered.
That's a guarantee, isn't it?
Oh, yeah. I mean, if you're serious.
So if we don't have a big nuclear energy capability, you know, a robust, full industry in the United States, we're not going to own space.
And whoever owns space owns the Earth.
That's pretty much a guarantee, wouldn't you say?
Absolutely. I think I haven't done enough with this question.
I'm very interested in space.
I'm very interested in In national security implications of space.
I mean, and you're right.
I mean, really, nuclear, the innovation on nuclear has really come from the military.
That's how we got our existing lightwater designs.
And the left has, the pro-nuclear left, has often condemned our existing lightwater technology by saying it came from the military.
But that's the strength of it.
I mean, that's where our microchips came from.
That's where personal computers came from.
That's where the Internet came from.
Yeah, right. Why are we embarrassed about the military roots of these technologies?
That's why they're so great. Right.
Yeah, that's a weird thing to be angry at.
So, well, Michael, is there anything you want to leave us with?
I'm going to go on to some other topics here.
And is there anything that we need to know that I didn't ask?
I just wanted to say, first of all, thank you, Scott, for plugging the book.
I hope people get it. You should know that I've been now censored twice.
I was censored by Forbes, who took down my original column announcing the book.
And then I was censored by Facebook after an absolutely outrageous, unscientific attack on my book by a sort of star chamber of climate apocalyptic jerks who basically got my article censored on Facebook.
So please sign up at Environmental Progress to get updates directly from me.
Please buy the book.
I would love to hear from readers.
It's really exciting to have the conversation.
All right.
It's Apocalypse Never.
Michael Schellenberger.
It's a bestseller written all over it, and it's already a bestseller.
Congratulations on the book.
This is a really good book.
I mean, it really is. You did a great job on this.
Thank you, Michael. Thanks, Scott.
All right. Take care. Take care.
All right. That was very interesting.
Let's talk about some other things.
For example, Trump's taxes.
Let me summarize the entire situation about Trump's taxes.
Blah blah blah some legal stuff.
Blah blah lawyers disagree.
Blah blah blah court.
Blah blah blah will be appealed.
Blah blah blah will take a long time.
Blah blah blah may not make any difference for the election because it may be delayed until after that.
Blah blah blah precedent.
There you go. That's everything you need to know about Trump's taxes.
I am loving the story about Mayor de Blasio and the protesters painting this giant Black Lives Matter, I don't know what you'd call it, a sign or a message, on the road directly in front of Trump Tower.
And here's what I love about it.
I always put myself in the story and say, well, what if I were Trump?
If I were Trump, and I knew that the city was mocking me by putting Black Lives Matter on my Right in front of my high-end building.
What would I think about that?
I had the following feeling.
When I first saw the workers doing their thing, their painting, you can't see what they're doing yet.
You just see that people are doing something.
My first thought was, it's going to be an eyesore.
I wish we wouldn't waste our time on such things.
Then you see the aerial view of it.
I'm thinking to myself, They're actually pretty good at making stuff.
Whoever mapped out the letters in Black Lives Matter and picked the color and the font did a really good job.
I'm looking at this thing and I'm thinking, I kind of like it.
Just artistically.
Let me give some context.
I also like tattoos and scars because they tell you a story about a moment in time.
The Black Lives Matter thing not only looks good in the same sense that Mount Rushmore just looks good.
If Mount Rushmore were done poorly, would you go to see it?
Just because it's big and there were presidents' heads on it?
If they didn't quite look like the presidents, would you bother going to see it?
No. It matters that it's done well.
That's what makes Mount Rushmore so impressive.
It's done well, plus it's big.
So this Black Lives Matter thing, I'm looking at it and thinking, I kind of like it.
If I were the president, I'd say, thank you.
I would just say, you know, I didn't love it, the idea, but when I saw it, you did a good job on it.
I think I like it.
Imagine if the president said, you know, it kind of looks good there.
Let's keep it maintained.
Let's make sure that nobody ruins it.
What would that do to people's heads?
Would they explode? Now, of course, I don't think the president can do that, because Black Lives Matter refers to not only the idea, but also the organization.
He's not so pro the organization, but of course, he, like everybody in the world, would agree with the concept.
So if I were him, I'd just say, I would call it a concept, not an organization.
I'd say, it's kind of cool.
Let's leave it there. That's how I treat it, because I actually do like it.
This was interesting.
Yesterday, I got a direct message from a small, I guess you'd call them a startup, they're kind of new, called Ground News.
Ground like the ground you stand on, news.
And what they do is they take all the news stories on a topic and they see if the left-leaning news sites or the middle or the right-leaning news sites are focusing on it more and then you can see how it's covered differently by the left and the right.
So it's a really good idea to give you more of a landscape of the bias in the news industry.
So they sent me one that they thought I might be interested in yesterday, which was the story about Trump-signed executive order expanding educational and economic opportunities to Hispanics.
And it's funny because you look at the Grounded News chart, and it shows that the people on the left, the media on the left, just ignored the story like it didn't exist.
But the outlets on the right and the middle are like, well, it's a story.
The president's doing it.
It's a national story. Of course we're going to write about it.
But the left? Crickets.
Now think about that.
Think how important the Hispanic American vote will be.
And here's Trump signing, I don't know what the details are, but he's expanding educational and economic opportunity for Hispanics.
And you would think that that would be a big deal.
Now here's the fun part.
So this little start-up I think calling them a startup is correct.
Ground News sends me this thing because I think I'd be interested and I was.
It was pretty interesting.
Now, by the way, there are also stories which show like a big crickets on the right.
So the story about Trump's southern district of New York legal stuff That was covered mostly by the left and Fox News.
And that was about it. So it works both ways.
But I will note that Fox News is a little bit more likely to cover all the stories than other outlets.
At least that's what it looked like.
But here's the fun part.
So I tweeted the little story about the executive order.
And I woke up this morning and President Trump had retweeted it.
So this little startup, Ground News, woke up to something like 60 times the amount of traffic they normally get.
Their site's blowing up.
So that was fun.
Anyway, well, let's see.
You know, I tweeted this as a prediction.
Let's see what you think.
So I predicted this.
That someday somebody's going to compile a list of companies That employ people who have publicly called for boycotts on other companies.
So wouldn't you like to know, when you see somebody on Twitter calling for a boycott, wouldn't you like to know where they work?
Because that's just fair, right?
The whole point of a boycott, the point of this cancellation culture, is that the cancelers are safe Because you don't know much about them, but they found out something about whatever their target is, whoever they're going to boycott or cancel, they know something extra about that person that causes them trouble.
Is it not fair that we just have a little more transparency?
Wouldn't you like to know who accuses you?
In the legal system, you have a right to know who your accuser is.
What kind of world would it be if you didn't know who your accuser was?
But I think you should also know where they work.
You know, what's their job?
Because if somebody goes after somebody else's job, I think that person has a right to know, where do you work?
Where do you work?
Right, so if you were calling for a boycott on this company, Goya, G-O-Y-A, I guess they're a food company, the CEO said some nice things about President Trump, and now the left wants to cancel him.
Wouldn't you like to know where all those cancelers work?
Or where they'll work in the future?
Because I think that it needs to be mutually assured destruction.
You know, we need to probably, in order to have free speech in this country in a way that, let's say, the market allows as well as the Constitution.
Right now, the Constitution says yes, but the free market says no.
Well, maybe you can't say those things without losing your job.
So without some sense of mutually assured destruction that's somewhat immediate and personal, I don't see any of it ever changing.
Because in my opinion, it's completely fair to complain about somebody's opinion.
Completely fair, of course.
That's freedom of speech.
But when you go after somebody's job because of their opinion, your own job should be at risk.
That feels like the minimum, right?
If you punch somebody in public, If you punch somebody in public, the reason you don't do that is you think you'll get punched back.
Even more so than you're worried about going to jail, you'll immediately be punched back.
There's a reason people don't punch people in public, but right now there's no reason you can't try to cancel somebody in public.
Now, in my case, since I'm a public figure and everybody knows my job, If I say something negative about somebody, they usually say, boycott Dilbert.
We're going to call all your newspapers and cancel you.
To which I say, isn't that fair?
Isn't it fair that if I were to criticize somebody on social media, that they know who I am and where I work?
I think that is fair.
I would also like to know who they are and where they work.
Just so we have full transparency.
I don't think you can solve this otherwise.
So, hey, here's some fun news.
Cartoonist Gary Larson has decided to come out of retirement and draw some new comics.
So you can Google Gary Larson, the far side, you'll see his site.
It'll pop up. So that was just announced.
I knew about this for a while because we have the same syndication company.
But it's exciting, and he's actually got some new comics.
Now, what's fun about this is that Gary Larson, when he retired, he had still been drawing with paper and pen, and that was part of his frustration, is it's just really hard and not that fun to draw with pencil and paper and pen.
And so for his new stuff, he's teaching himself to use a digital...
Something like what I use.
I imagine he's using the same thing.
This is my drawing surface.
It's just a computer screen that you can also draw on with a stylus from Wacom.
W-A-C-O-M. So you'll see some of his new digital art.
Some of you will be very interested in that.
All right. Biden is coming out with some specific proposals.
That looked like they would destroy the country completely.
And I've never had that feeling before.
I've never actually had that feeling.
Have you? In the past when there have been presidents that were candidates that maybe I liked more than the other, I never really thought that the other candidate would destroy the world.
When Gore and Bush were running, didn't you think, well, it's not going to be that different no matter who gets elected?
It turns out it was quite different because we got a couple of wars out of Bush.
I didn't think in advance it was the end of the world if one got elected versus the other.
Generally speaking, that's what I think.
I don't think it would have been the end of the world if Hillary Clinton had been elected because she's sort of moderate.
You might not have liked it, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.
But when I look at the Biden situation and I see that, first of all, he's not the guy in control, that's obvious.
So you don't know who's in control, which is pretty scary.
Wouldn't you like to know who the president is?
We have a situation where you won't actually know who's in control if Biden gets elected.
But he's got some ideas that could actually destroy the whole civilization.
Let me give you an example.
I'd like to see somebody who's in favor of relaxing borders describe what it looks like in their mind.
Like, what does the world look like in a year or two years or whatever?
If they get exactly what they want, what happens?
How does it look? Now if you say, if the president says, you know, I want to close borders, He can draw a picture of what that looks like pretty well.
There's still immigration, but we're trying to fit the employees to the jobs without burdening employment in this country.
You kind of know what that looks like, right?
It looks a lot like now, but with better border control.
Maybe a little less crime coming in, but who knows if you'd even notice.
But what does it look like if you don't have border control?
And you've got more sanctuary cities that Biden is suggesting.
Is there any world in which that would not attract the cartels, for example?
Is there any world in which the United States would not eventually be run by Mexican cartels, for all practical purposes?
I can't imagine any way that wouldn't happen.
If we have enough people coming across the border.
It's a question of numbers.
I'd like to see people ask that question of what that looks like.
It's the same question with the Green New Deal, which seems to be pushed into the back burner for the moment.
As I was talking with Michael Schellenberger, what do people think it looks like for poor countries if the Green New Deal happens?
Fast forward that.
What happens with your solar panels and your windmills in some African country that's trying to develop and that just doesn't work?
Where are they in 20 years?
They're still where they were, right?
They haven't gone anywhere. All right.
So Biden's new campaign slogan is build back better.
Build back better.
Biden says build back better.
What do you think of that? Build back better.
On one hand, it's sort of catchy because you are encouraged to repeat it in your head.
Build back better. Hey, it's got a lot of B's in it.
Biden build back better. So that part's good.
But I don't find it easy to remember.
Build back better.
I feel as if there will be a point where he won't remember his own slogan.
Whereas, make America great again, You kind of hear that once and you'll remember it forever, right?
So let me give you a writing tip.
Listen to the percussion of these two things.
Make America great again.
Just listen to the percussion.
Imagine that it was an instrument.
Make America great again.
Now listen to Build Back Better.
One of them is more musical, right?
If you had to listen to something forever, you know, only one slogan and it just had to play forever, would you rather hear Build Back Better?
Build Back Better? Or would you rather hear Make America Great Again?
There's a big difference.
So I would say that Build Back Better was probably designed by a political operative and not an expert on persuasion.
So that if this had been designed by, let's say, a Cialdini or somebody with that kind of level of knowledge of persuasion, it wouldn't look like this.
This is sort of a tell for a political slogan, as opposed to President Trump, who is the brander himself, and so you see he got a whole different level of goodness in his slogan because he knows how to do that.
All right. I didn't hear anything about nuclear energy from Biden, so that would be interesting to hear him answer to that.
And I guess Biden says he's taking, or at least it's reported, he took a firm tone, they say, towards China, and he wants aggressive trade enforcement actions.
That sort of sounds like nothing, doesn't it?
It's kind of come down to this.
It seems that the Republicans are, and this is just a relative thing, right?
Relatively open to working with Russia, but tough on China.
The Biden proposition seems to be not open to working with Russia, but very friendly to China.
So it's almost as if our election has become, do you pick China or Russia?
You can ignore the candidates and say, which world do you want to live in?
The one where we're nice to China, and China abuses us as they have, or the one in which we're nice to Russia, and maybe they try to abuse us the way they have.
So you've got two choices there that don't feel domestic.
He wants to put a bunch of money into Building and investing and buying America, etc.
Pretty ordinary stuff.
Alright. At this point, it seems that the Biden campaign is getting more complicated.
There's some more meat on the bones.
But it also should doom Biden.
Because one advantage that Biden has had, and it's a pretty big advantage, is that until he said what his own policies are, with some detail, as is coming out now, until that happened, he didn't have to talk about anything complicated.
Let me ask you this.
So, part of his campaign is putting money into 5G, artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and 5G, into research, mostly, I guess.
Now, if Biden were to take a question on 5G, how would that go?
If Biden were to take a question on nuclear energy and his plan for that or the climate, how would that go?
Just consider that now Biden has a whole new bunch of new information he has to speak to if anybody ever gets to ask a question.
So his complexity is just going through the roof while his capability continues to plunge as we see.
So I think he's getting in increasingly dangerous territory.
And we'll see if that works out for him.
Now, the president said recently that he had taken a cognitive test and everybody was surprised he did so well.
What? What's up with that?
But what was missing in the story is the timing of it.
I think the president was talking about when he took the test a while ago.
But the way it was reported, because he didn't talk about the timing of when it happened, they reported it as if it happened recently.
I don't know if that did happen recently.
I don't know if it did.
So we'll need to fact check in on that.
Build bigger basement, somebody says.
Yeah, basement Biden is going to build back better.
Now the word back is not exactly a good word to have in your slogan.
Because back literally suggests going backwards.
So I don't think anybody likes back.
But what's interesting, think of the slogan, build back better.
Does your brain see the word black instead of back?
Build back better.
So you're in the middle of this Black Lives Matter, you know, protest.
So your brain has been primed for Black Lives Matter, black, black, black, black, black.
So you're primed for that. Now you hear the slogan, build back better.
That back ends up in your brain turning into black.
I don't know if that's...
I don't know if that works in their favor or against them.
Actually, I'm just pointing it out that your brain will make that translation.
So if it was intentional, I don't know, it's kind of clever if they've somehow calculated that that will be a plus.
But here's something that it feels to me is true.
I believe that Biden is very clearly saying that his future lies with the Hispanic community.
It feels like the Democrats have chosen the Hispanic community as being a higher priority to them, politically, than the black community.
Do you know why that is?
Because they already have the black vote.
They don't have to do anything for the black community.
Nothing. In fact, did Biden even suggest anything for the black community?
Maybe he did. I don't remember seeing it.
He probably did. I just don't remember seeing it, so it wasn't featured, obviously.
You see President Trump talking about black employment a few months ago when it was good, and you see him doing the opportunity zones and the jail, the prison reform, etc. So you see that Trump is literally doing things for the black community.
Then you see Kanye saying that he would run as a Republican if he ran.
Now if he doesn't run, he still sort of moves votes a little bit just because his influence moves things.
So it's starting to look like, and I said this like five years ago, I think I said this the first time, that The black community is the most natural ally with Republicans.
Because Republicans have a system and a way of thinking of things that the black community would just fold into easily.
Here's what I mean. The black community is religious.
The conservative community also religious.
So they start with that same religious base.
There are a lot more conservative black citizens than you hear about, so you got that going for you.
But more importantly, it looks like the Democrat plan is to give citizenship to, Biden says, 11 million people in this country.
Now, I'm not giving you my opinion whether this is good or bad.
I'm not sure I even have complete opinions on the whole immigration stuff.
I'm just describing.
It seems that the Democrats have decided that their primary focus is going to be the Hispanic community.
If you were a Democrat and you were black, how would you feel about being demoted in your own party?
Because it's going to feel like that.
It feels like, yeah, the black community problems are important, But we're going to bring in 11 million Hispanic voters.
Are those 11 million Hispanic voters going to vote for more things for black people, or maybe more things for themselves?
For example, whatever the president was signing out as executive order was for the Hispanic community.
If you add 11 million more Hispanic voters, are you likely to get more good things for the black public?
Or more good things for the Hispanic public.
Kind of obvious, right? So there seems to be a power shift on the Democrat side toward the Hispanic power base.
The black Democrats are a little bit abandoned.
And the Republicans are saying, you know, we got a lot in common.
We're pretty proud of bringing down the employment rate.
And by the way, Republicans think you should have good schools.
How about that? Republicans are for school choice.
Biden wants to get rid of that.
Biden wants to get rid of school choice.
Let me tell you two things that Black Lives Matter are not in favor of.
You ready? When I say Black Lives Matter, I don't mean the few organizers.
I mean the people who would consider themselves members who are also black.
Here are a few things they're not super enthusiastic about, and you can find this out yourself.
Just talk to anybody in Black Lives Matter and ask, who is also black?
Don't talk to a white person who is supporting Black Lives Matter.
Talk to a black citizen who is in Black Lives Matter and privately ask these two questions.
What do you think of unrestricted immigration?
What will the Black Lives Matter person, who's just a member of Black Lives Matter, say about unrestricted immigration?
Don't love it.
Not big fans, right?
They may not come out against it, but they're not big fans, because it sort of works against their interests.
It creates more competition.
What about charter schools and just school choice?
What do you think they'd say about that?
Kind of like it. Because if you don't fix schools, you're basically doomed.
There's nothing else. There's nothing you can do after that that makes a big difference.
You've got to fix schools.
That's where all the big improvements could be.
And the Democrats want to reduce those options.
So I feel like there's sort of a trend building where the Republicans just have a better package.
We'll see. We shall see.
I'm going to predict that President Trump will get more of the black vote than the experts assume.
And I think it's going to be because those two issues are pretty big ones.
And I don't think that the black community will completely trust their own team when they see a different power base emerging.
