Episode 1079 Scott Adams: HollowJoe, Future of Houses, Horses Stop Protestors
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Joe Biden's rapid cognitive decline
Border wall progress and security
People trust media less and less
Biden not even considering any Hispanics for VP?
Evolving protest strategies
Experimental home zones
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What the hell's up with that? Sometimes I use my iPad as a little mirror.
Well, there we go.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking to yourself, what a great morning.
But it's even better than you think.
Starting out slow.
But just getting better all day.
And one of the ways that it's going to get better is to kick it off right.
If you get it started right, well, everything goes well after that.
And what would you need, hypothetically, to start your day off really, really well?
What would it take?
Oh, I don't know, maybe a A cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or jellister's dine, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
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I don't know. Is it my imagination or does it get better every time?
I think it does.
So, story number one, no one cares about athletes kneeling.
Nobody gives a darn.
Do you remember when Kaepernick started off the kneeling thing?
And it was a big national story, and the president weighed in, and we couldn't stop talking about it.
It's really different now, isn't it?
It's almost like those are completely separate things.
Because when Kaepernick did it, I said to myself, you know, if I'm being objective, I always say good things about President Trump's persuasion talents, and I'll say it about the other team as well.
AOC, very good, for example.
And Kaepernick, in my opinion, very, very effective for what he was trying to get done, which was raise attention, etc.
And the fact that it was inappropriate and that it offended the sensibilities of lots of people was what made it a good protest.
Nobody got hurt. There was no physical damage.
There was no violence. No laws got changed.
He simply did an act Which lots of people found gross, which is why he got attention, which is why it worked.
But that was then.
And do you see what's really, really, really different about now?
What's different is that was the worst thing that was happening at the time.
Things were so good Relatively speaking, compared to 2020, things were so good that we had the luxury of arguing and fighting with each other about nothing.
Just nothing. Now, I'm not saying that the issue is nothing.
The issue is a thing. It's certainly worthy of attention and the best resolution we can get to have the safest policing situation that we can have for everybody, of course.
It was also, it just seemed big because life was sort of going along all right.
We just had the luxury of complaining about politics.
It was sort of a sport.
But now we're in the middle of a pandemic and economic calamity of some sort.
I think we'll get over it. But at the moment, when you see everybody kneeling, when you see entire teams do it, it doesn't register a little differently.
At this point, it's moved from this Kaepernick A-plus persuasion thing, even if you didn't like it, To more of a performance art sort of situation, wouldn't you say?
It feels more like theatre.
So when you see all the people kneeling, let me put it in this frame.
When Kaepernick kneeled, or knelt, and a few others did, and it wasn't that many, it was obvious that this was an insult to the flag.
Would you agree? It was obvious that the intention Was to insult the flag to get some attention, for a good cause, I think.
But when everybody does it, it doesn't look like that anymore to me.
And I think that other people would have the same impression.
I don't want to make the universal, what I call the number one problem with understanding reality.
If there's one biggest problem we all have, It's imagining that other people think the way we think, and then the world doesn't make sense.
But people are really different.
So I'm going out on a limb and thinking that most people will have the same impression that I'm describing that I'm having, which is when a few people protest, they are insulting your flag.
And if you take that personally, well, that's the point.
That's the point.
You're supposed to take it personally.
That's why it works.
But when everybody does it, that doesn't feel personal anymore to me.
And it also, and here's the key, it doesn't feel aimed at the flag.
It doesn't. It feels when everybody does it, because they're not activists, they're just people trying to, you know, get along and do what they think is right and the best thing they can do and get along with their teammates and not cause trouble, you know.
It really is more about solidarity with the point that there's something that needs to get fixed.
So I think when you take it from the few people to everybody doing it, it no longer is about the flag.
It's no longer really about the country.
It's really about the problem.
And if you don't see that shift from, I hate your flag, to, all right, we're all on board, let's just look at the problem.
Let's support the thought and the energy behind it.
So I was asked online whether that would be an impact on the election.
And in my opinion, it will have no impact on the election because all of the other things are just so much bigger.
And this morphed from something edgy into something that's more like theater and not really, not important in any way.
The issue is important, but not the way they're doing it.
Alright, the president is claiming that we'll have maybe 400 miles of border fence built by the end of the year.
How long is the border?
Is it border 2,000 miles?
And I don't know how much of that already had fence and how much is a replacement fence, you know, because we live in a world in which all data is wrong.
So I'm not going to apply that just to the other team.
All data is wrong.
So when you hear that there's 400 miles of fence built, well, what's that mean?
How much is replacement?
How much is new? How much is in the places we needed it most?
I mean, really, you just can't trust any data in 2020.
But it's a big number.
Whatever it is, it's hundreds, hundreds of miles.
And if I had to look at the President's performance toward his, really, I'd say his key campaign promise, Which was border security.
By November, what are you going to think about it?
Because here's my take on it.
The president has done maybe better than any president has ever done at saying, this is what I'm going to do, and then actually doing it.
You could argue that those things should not be done.
That's what the Democrats would argue.
But I think we're actually past the point with this president where people could legitimately say, he promised he would do this, but he didn't do it.
Now, I would say healthcare is still a big looming hole, and he's even done at least something with that, with the pharmaceutical stuff, and that could be huge, actually.
But I think he's a little short on the healthcare stuff.
But did he try to and successfully remove the mandate?
Yeah, he did.
Did he try as hard as he could to end Obamacare to turn it into something else?
I think yes. So even when he maybe didn't get everything that you thought he wanted, such as immigration and healthcare, It does look like he's taking big swings at it.
It does look like the energy is there.
It does look like the intention is there.
There's nothing about any of these things that would suggest they were false promises.
It looks like stuff he meant and stuff he's at least trying to do.
Now, if you're Ann Coulter, you're a bitter critic of his immigration stuff because it hasn't been completed, hasn't been done well enough.
And that's true.
But in November, who would you trust to get it done?
Would you trust to get it done the one who doesn't want to do it, Biden, or would you trust to get it done the one who did some of it and is clearly interested and engaged and cares about it, etc.?
And I think that's Trump.
Now, I don't know if I've ever given my own opinions about immigration.
I'm not sure I actually ever have in public, but let me give it to you this way.
I tend to look at things as systems and not goals.
A goal would be stop immigration, stop illegal immigration, and you can see why somebody would want to do that.
I would see it more as a system, meaning that the United States doesn't currently have a system that puts the citizens of the United States and their government in control of their own border.
So I see it only as a question of who gets to make the decision.
And then secondarily, and separate from that, what should be the right decision?
So I think I'm 100% adamant that only the citizens of the United States should get to decide Who lives in the United States with their government?
And to do that, you need strong border security.
But on top of that, I would modify it, our current situation, and I would say something like this.
I would say, instead of us arguing about what's the right level, let's get our economists to tell us how much of what kind of new immigration we need.
Do we need Do we need more high-trained technical people?
Do we need more workers?
And have the economists, through some kind of process in which they say, you know, the unemployment rate is X, so maybe we should restrict immigration a little bit.
If you don't have a good border security, you don't have that option.
So rather than personalize it and say we like immigrants or we don't like immigrants, which is the dumb way to do it, everybody likes immigrants.
To even argue that somebody doesn't like immigrants is crazy, because as is often noted, we're a country of immigrants.
Everybody likes immigrants, one way or another, you know, however they define it.
So I would depersonalize the question of who gets in, And make that more of an economic health situation because I would argue that all of North America and all of South America can only stay reasonably healthy if the United States is reasonably healthy.
So keeping the United States stable has an entire global benefit and a big part of that is the United States being able to control its economy And we can't control our economy if we can't control the border.
So I would separate the questions of who gets in, let the economists decide that, not the politicians.
Politicians are the wrong ones to decide who gets in and who gets out, because that's just going to look racist, right?
You know, I don't have to tell you that, right?
If the politicians decide who gets in and who gets out, it just looks racist.
Now, I don't think it is.
In my opinion, that's not the motivation.
Obviously, it's some racist motivation.
But in general, it's not the motivation.
And I think we should do a better job of saying, look, let's just turn it over to the economists.
If our unemployment level is this high, Adjust your immigration appropriately.
And then we can tweak it as we go because we're not geniuses who know how the future turns out.
For those of you who subscribe on Locals, the platform in which I've moved some of my other more provocative and or self-help type content, I just put up a post on there that's for subscribers only on how to make conversation.
With a stranger. But also, I had to end a conversation with a stranger.
You ever get trapped in a conversation?
Well, some tips on locals.
You can see the link to it in my Twitter profile.
An article on Fox News titled, Ten Signs a Relationship Will Fail According to a New Study.
And I looked into it and I was like, oh, this could be good.
Wouldn't you like to know the signs of a relationship failing?
Because then you'd know it's coming.
And I'm paraphrasing, but here are some of the signs that your relationship might fail.
One is you're an asshole to your spouse.
One is you don't appreciate your spouse, you treat them poorly, you don't have sex.
Well, those are just a few of the things.
So I'm glad I read that article, because until I found out those 10 signs of a relationship failing, I didn't know that if you mistreat your partner, it might be a bad sign.
But now I know, so I hope I've informed you.
Don't be a jerk, and show some appreciation, and maybe you can have a real relationship.
Dan Bongino, who I would say is well plugged into lots of stuff, has lots of sources, both on the right, obviously, but on the left, he tweeted this.
Now, Bongino is one of those guys where If a random person said to you, I've been hearing X or Y say something, wouldn't you say to yourself, did you?
Did somebody really say that?
Your anonymous friend said that?
But I think Bongino is such a notorious straight shooter that when he says he's hearing something from people, that it's real people, that it actually happened.
So he says in a tweet today, not a joke and not hyperbole.
I'm hearing from people close to the situation that Biden's cognitive decline is rapidly worsening and is becoming increasingly difficult to mask.
I think we knew that.
The Democrats are going to have to make a decision soon.
Now, the interesting part about this is we've all been curious what the Democrats themselves are thinking, because they're putting up a pretty good front of pretending they don't see it.
But you know they do see it.
So haven't you had a great curiosity about how they talk about it privately?
And Dan Bongino's reporting that they're talking about it privately exactly the way you'd expect them to.
All right. As David Bartoszko said on Twitter today, yesterday I think, he said, can anyone honestly doubt journalism has lost its way?
He refers to a new poll that showed that the trust in various segments of society has really shifted lately.
So the trust in healthcare has just gone through the roof.
So what the United States citizens think of our healthcare providers is like almost, maybe even beyond, military at this point.
So if you say, what's our most trusted institution?
I think you'd say the military, probably.
But healthcare workers are just looking really good because, I mean, they're frontline in the war.
Why wouldn't they? But at the very bottom of the list of who we trust, the media has gone into deep negative territory to the point where I don't even know if you can call it news anymore, can you? Is it really even news?
It doesn't feel like they're trying to make news anymore.
So I tweeted this today, and this will be your persuasion lesson for the day.
So I'll tell you what I tweeted, and then I'll tell you what the technique is that's in it.
I tweeted, imagine how historians will judge Democrats for deciding that hashtag hollow Joe, that's my new name for him, was their best candidate.
As crazy as it seems now, it will continue bloating and absurdity Until it is one of the great American WTF stories of all time.
So here's the technique, and there's some science behind this, and I'll refer to one study that I heard of long ago.
If you ask people to save for their retirement, they'll do okay, but they won't do as well as they should.
But if you take a person's current photograph and you digitally age it, so it's what you might look like when you're, say, 70 years old, and then you show it to them and say, okay, this is you at age 70, and then you ask them to start saving for their retirement, they will save more.
Because they saw a picture of themselves in the future.
So it is a general persuasion technique that if you can move somebody from the present, what they're looking at and thinking of right now, to an imaginary future, then you can prime them to head toward that future.
And what I'm using is a trick where I'm taking people out of the present Where we're fighting the coronavirus, and we've got our own problems, and we're on lockdown, and there's an election coming, and there's a thousand news stories a day, and there's Joe Biden, and he's running against Trump, and some people are saying he's got some cognitive abilities, but there's so many other things.
What about health care? So at the moment, because the Joe Biden thing has been a slow decay of his abilities, You can kind of get used to anything if it's changing slowly.
So here we are sitting here in August 2020, and Joe Biden is clearly, he's just gone.
His brain has left the building in terms of being anywhere near capable of running the country.
I mean, it's just absurd at this point.
Now, if he had started this way, if the way he is in August 2020 was exactly the way he was one year ago, we wouldn't be here.
You know we wouldn't.
If he had already been a year ago where he is right now, We wouldn't be talking about Joe Biden.
He would have been, you know, nothing in the primaries, and we'd be talking about somebody else.
But it sort of snuck up on us.
You know, it's like, yeah, there's 1% today.
You hardly notice.
Tomorrow, maybe he's 1% worse again, but you hardly notice.
But now fast forward that to 20 years from now, and the historians are writing about it.
What the hell are they going to say about this?
Because if you get some distance from it, and this is another persuasion trick, you can actually ask people, for example, to imagine rising above their situation as if they're leaving their body, and they're getting higher and higher, and they're looking down at the earth until the earth is just a little shrinking ball as they back up.
And what it does is it changes your perspective from your small little problems to some kind of a bigger picture.
If you're looking at Joe Biden, bigger picture, from the future, what the hell is that going to look like?
Because in 20 years, people are going to say, unbelievably, in 2020, one of the candidates was mentally incompetent and the team that ran him knew it.
They knew it, and they did it anyway.
What's that going to look like in 20 years?
Now, I know, to be fair, wouldn't you say that the Democrats would have said something exactly like this about Trump before 2016?
They would have said, ah, what are the historians going to say when you elected a reality TV salesman kind of a guy?
He barely was taking it seriously.
What are they going to say? But of course they were wrong because Trump actually got a whole bunch of stuff done, you know, judges and progress on the border and fighting ISIS and, you know, decoupling with China, which is where it needed to end up.
And it looked like he, you know, I think he's going to end up as one of the most The most solid presidents of all time, I think, especially if he gets a second term.
I think he could be in the top five, but it's going to take 20 years before anybody is objective enough to say anything like that.
And of course, you'd have to have a great next four years, but I think you might.
So that's your persuasion trick.
Take people into the imaginary future, So that they can get some kind of a change in frame and perspective and then ask them to look back at it and what's it look like from the future.
It's a good technique. I've noticed this morning that President Trump retweeted something that I tweeted yesterday and it's always There's some things that you can't actually get used to, and one of them is that you wake up and the President of the United States just retweeted you.
It has happened a number of times now, but you never really get used to it.
I don't think I want to.
It's always just shocking to see how technology has made this big old planet so small.
That, you know, I can see here in my room, you know, in California, just tapping away with my thumbs on this little device.
And next thing you know, the President of the United States in the White House or Air Force One or wherever the heck he is, is looking at it.
And then, you know, he's typing.
It's just, it's so wild to see how big the world is and how small it is at the same time.
At least, you know, in my experience.
Anyway, so here's the tweet that he retweeted.
It was the one made by some outside group, and it seemed to be some kind of pro-Hispanic American group that was pro-Trump, or maybe they just made the commercial, I'm not sure.
But it was the one in which they talk about Biden being essentially a racist for not considering an Hispanic vice president.
Now, technically, technically, Biden has never said That he would only pick a black vice president.
He has said he would pick a woman.
And I think he's talked about, you know, preference for a person of color or something like that.
But he has not, I don't think he's ever specified, I'm going to pick, obviously he has not specified he would pick a black vice president.
But, don't you think he kind of cornered himself into it?
Because, imagine if you will, in the midst of Black Lives Matter and Biden being pretty solidly on that team, imagine if he didn't.
What the heck would that look like?
I mean, seriously, is there any chance that Biden could not pick a black vice president and that that would be okay with his base?
I don't think so. I think that although he has not specifically said he's going to do that, I don't know that he has an option.
So whoever he picks, you know, the smart money still says Kamala Harris.
But I'm pretty sure it's going to be a woman, and I'm pretty sure that woman will be black.
I don't know that he has an option at this point.
He sort of limited himself.
But anyway, the tweet is devastating, not the campaign ad about him being racist against Hispanics.
It's not the ad itself that's going to make that much difference.
It was the idea.
And here's the key.
President Trump would be on shaky ground if he had said, just on his own, hey, Joe Biden, you're being kind of racist for excluding Hispanics or anybody else from your possible vice president picks.
Imagine how that would come if it had just been Trump out of his own Just saying, hey, I've got an idea.
Why don't I say Joe is a racist because of how he's constrained his VP choices?
It wouldn't really work because it's coming from the wrong source.
And people would just throw it back at him and say, well, you're a racist.
Why'd you pick Mike Pence? And also, I couldn't do it.
It wouldn't be something that I could just say, hey, I think I'll try to make this a thing and I'll talk about it.
Same reason. People would just say, well, you know, hey, white guy, how about you stay out of this?
But if a group that at least allegedly looks like an Hispanic American group is talking about themselves, that's pretty powerful.
Because it speaks to feelings and these are kind of deep ones.
If you feel that you're excluded, From any kind of consideration, that's pretty powerful.
And that is the sort of thing that moves the vote.
Athletes kneeling before a game, that's not going to move a vote.
We're just so over that, and like I said, it's just theater.
But if somebody tells you there's something about you that you can't change, let's say your ethnicity, and we're going to limit your access because of it, I can tell you from experience that it doesn't make you feel good, and it would definitely change your vote.
Why is it that I was so anti-Hillary Clinton?
Was it because I was so pro-Trump?
No. It was because Hillary Clinton said specifically that women were better than men at leadership.
She said it directly.
She also, you know, the deplorables thing.
So the way I felt about her was intense dislike, which I don't have for Biden.
Not even a little bit.
I have only concern for Biden.
Honestly, I have just concern for him.
So, yeah, when you insult a group by something they can't change, don't expect them to get over that.
I'm fascinated by the protest strategies, both as how the protesters themselves are organizing and adjusting and they're bringing their leaf blowers and they've got a whole bunch of umbrella-coordinated things.
And even though it's all evil and unproductive, I'm still kind of impressed by anybody who's working on a system that works better.
By analogy, whenever I hear a story about a serial killer who built an elaborate underground bunker and operated for years before getting caught, I always have two thoughts.
Number one, oh my God, that's horrible for the victims, and you think about the victims and their family.
But then the second thought I have very quickly is, wow, that guy is really industrious.
That guy knows how to do his serial killing.
Let me see a picture of that bunker.
It seems pretty well designed.
And I'm not proud of this.
It's just that I can't not look at technique.
So I look at it when the protesters were being, let's say, effective in terms of the evil they were trying to perpetuate.
But I also am impressed when the law enforcement adjusts their tactics.
And what I saw today was really interesting, which is the video of an Austin There were some protesters.
I don't think it got violent in Austin, but the protesters needed to be moved or disbanded, and the police used horses.
So they mounted police officers on horses.
Now, your first thought might be, well, Antifa will just spook the horses or slap the horses, and then you've got, what kind of trouble does that cause?
Why is a horse going to work when a person doesn't work?
And I realized, Antifa probably really likes animals.
Think about it.
Don't you think that a whole lot of Antifa and a lot of the protesters in general, don't you think there are a lot of animal rights people in that group, just as a normal overlap with their politics?
And I've got a feeling That the things the protesters would be willing to do to, let's say, federal agents, which might be a lot, what they would be willing to do with uniformed police officers might be pretty brutal, and not might be, it is. We've witnessed all the damage.
But would they hurt a horse?
And when I watched how easily the horses, you know, because they came as a group, when I watched how easily they moved the protesters back, I had to ask myself, is this one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen in my life?
Is this so smart that the protesters, if they turned on the horses, you know, if any one of them tried to hurt a horse, what would the other protesters do to that protester?
I feel like they'd stop them in a way that they wouldn't necessarily stop somebody from trying to hurt a police officer.
But I think they would try to stop somebody from hurting a horse.
I don't know. And I also don't know how well trained those horses are.
I assume they have a lot of training.
I can't say that it's the best idea and that it could be expanded and used other places.
That's to be determined.
But I love the thought of it, and I love the changing, shifting techniques.
Way better than pepper spray, if it works.
I tweeted it yesterday.
That there's this enormous, enormous economic opportunity for the United States that is completely unexploited.
And I've been pushing on this for a while, but I like the way I finally came up with the way to frame it.
And it goes like this.
The cost to build a home and then to live in it, because there are ongoing costs of living in a home, those costs are crazy.
In a world in which half of the country can't afford it.
So I'm thinking half of the country is probably a bigger number.
Either it has trouble affording a single-family home, or they can't.
It's one of the biggest problems in the country, which could also be one of the biggest economic opportunities.
So the economic opportunity would be to figure out how to make homes that are affordable and way better.
And the way better part, It is at the top, right?
The affordable is necessary, but I wouldn't stop with let's make tiny homes or let's make the same homes we're making but use cheaper materials.
Nothing like that.
I'm talking about a change that's as fundamental as moving from a landline phone to a smartphone.
Just skipping the flip phone phase entirely.
So our entire building industry You know, the residential building sort of evolved and I think it was mostly contractors and engineers and craftsmen and that sort of people.
And it sort of evolved to be versions of what it's always been with just small improvements.
And of course that just gets more complicated, more building codes, more materials, more design, and it's just this crazy expensive stuff.
But imagine, if you will, some company like Amazon or Google or Apple, whoever's really good at design, spending a lot of time just designing, designing, testing, testing, testing, the way they would test a consumer product.
You don't really do that with a house.
Nobody builds a house Puts a family in it, checks in with them every week to see what worked and what didn't work, how happy they are, how they sleep, how productive they are, all the things that make you a happy person.
There's nobody doing that.
But with a consumer item like a phone or a lot of other items, there's plenty of testing.
But I don't think, in the housing industry, I think it's zero.
And it shows. So we have this big, poorly made Poorly made in terms of how well it could be done in 2020 compared to how well it is being done.
So, we do an excellent job of building an old technology, the old kind of house.
What would happen if you said, and this was the nature of the tweet, suppose the government said, we're going to make it a lot easier to rapidly prototype.
And rapidly test.
And so if somebody wants to propose an area that they want to make, and I called it an experimental home zone, let's call it that, that in that zone, that all of the building codes and regulations would be temporarily suspended.
And any company that applied could then build a home, but they would still have to get it signed off by real engineers.
So you don't want anybody, you know, some entrepreneur building a house on hay bales and the family moves in and it smothers them.
So you need real engineers to say, yeah, as far as we can tell, this looks pretty safe.
If you keep it to single-family dwellings, and especially if it's one story, There's not really much risk of anybody moving in and getting hurt.
And if it's entrepreneurs who want to try new building techniques, etc., there's a little more risk, but that's how anything moves forward with risk.
So here's the idea.
Somebody says, have you talked about Joe Rogan moving to Texas?
That's an old story. So here's the idea.
I'm not pitching a specific kind of house.
I'm not pitching that we should design it or build it with certain materials to any certain kind of standards.
So I'm not talking about what the house looks like when it's done, although that's fun and needs to be done.
I'm talking about a system.
At the moment, we don't have a system to rapidly iterate and test house designs.
And one of the reasons we don't have that is that local building codes and local politicians would make that almost impossible.
No, they have made it impossible.
So imagine, if you will, there are a bunch of experimental dwelling zones An entrepreneur can say, all right, I'll take this acre, I'll make sure engineers sign off on it, but I'm going to build my little prototype.
A few other people build some prototypes, you put some people in it, you say, live here for six months, we won't charge you rent, but you have to tell us your experience.
If you went to get a broom, Were you angry because you had to walk downstairs, because that's where the broom closet was?
When you tried to do your homework, could you find a place that was quiet, that the rest of the family wouldn't bother you, and you could also sit upright and have some space?
Really basic stuff.
You break down what are the tasks, and how does the house handle those tasks?
Then what is your happiness, your health, Have you slept enough?
Have you gained weight, lost weight?
I mean, really basic health-related things because your house programs you.
And by the way, one of the reasons that I'm obsessed by house design and design in general is that persuasion and design are really deeply overlapping fields.
So my interest in persuasion It overlaps with my interest in architecture and building because persuasion is largely ignored in that field and it's the single biggest thing they should take care of other than safety and cost maybe, which is that you want to build it with the right light.
How important is light?
If you've got a little vitamin D coming in and you've got some brightness, what does that do to your mood?
I mean, it's completely transformational and probably doesn't add a lot to your house.
You just have to orient it right, make sure that the sun is part of your solution.
What about the feng shui, the size of the rooms, the shape of the rooms, the furniture arrangement?
You know, we are, on a scale of one to ten, we're at about a two in design.
We could get that to a 10.
If you say that an Apple smartphone, for example, is a 10 in design, we're at about a 2 with houses, and the opportunity is enormous, especially if you're building where there have not been houses before, so you can actually just get going.
So I'd like to see some kind of government action To make it possible for the entrepreneurs and the home building business to iterate.
So that, the golden ratio.
There's somebody there who knows their The golden ratio is in your kitchen.
If you're designing a kitchen, no matter how you design it, you need to maintain the golden ratio.
And the golden ratio, if you can imagine it as a triangle, in which, if I have this right, it's your refrigerator, Your sink, and I think your oven, your oven and cooktop.
And I think those three things have to be in a well-designed space in terms of distance from each other.
And if you get the golden ratio right, then a lot of the other kitchen is more aesthetic.
So, those are the types of things that are just insanely, insanely important.
In my opinion, you could get the cost of a single family house down to $20,000 and it would be better than a house that would cost, let's say, $300,000 in a standard economy.
So, that's the size of the opportunity, I think.
That a $20,000 house designed correctly would be way better, just way better than a standard $300,000 house.
In the same way, well, forget the analogy.
Likewise, I think that the ongoing expense of living could be reduced from I don't know.
What does an average family spend every month for electricity and gas and that stuff?
I don't know. Insurance.
Imagine if your insurance, your house insurance, your electricity, your gas, your Wi-Fi, and all that stuff was $100 a month.
Could you get A single-family house that had $100 a month of ongoing expense from everything from maintenance, Wi-Fi, heating and cooling, insurance, I think you actually could.
I actually think you could.
So, I think that the future demands That the people who want to be go-getters and get three college degrees and become engineers and build products, well, those people can live in their normal, regular world and pay full price for their mansions and cars and stuff.
And you want people to be able to do that because that's how economies get built.
But I think we have to realize that we're heading into a future in which, I'll say half, just to pick a number for argument, half of the population, especially when the robots take over, about half of the population is going to have to figure out how to have a quality life with a relatively low-paying job.
Now, that low-paying job is still going to be important.
It will still have dignity.
It will still have meaning. It just won't be your half a million dollar a year job.
And we want everybody who has the willingness to work, the willingness to contribute in any way to the country, to have a good life.
Somebody says defund obesity.
I'm also going to put on Locals, my subscription-based service.
I'm also going to do a mini lesson on how to wean yourself off of sugar.
I'm working on that right now.
So, you got that going.
Somebody's mentioning 3D printed houses.
3D printed houses are one of many different possibilities.
I'm personally a little negative on 3D printed houses because I don't know how you change them.
They're kind of, once they're done, they're done.
I would be much more interested in some kind of building system That even one person could build their own house with Lego-like blocks.
There may be a hundred other models, but I think the 3D printed one, I just don't know, unless there's also an industry for modifying them after they're done.
So it could be that maybe you just have to knock down the 3D printed wall, bring in your 3D printer, and it builds a new room.
I don't know if we're there yet, but maybe if we could get there.
I was also wondering, here's a question for you.
The 3D printers that make entire houses, you know, it's this giant arm.
They put a device in the middle of what the house will be, and it has this giant arm that swings around in a circle, and it prints The walls.
Now when I say print, I mean it basically is dropping a gloop of some kind of concrete-like substance that hardens into the wall as it builds up over time.
And I ask myself, will there ever be a time when the 3D printed home could use as its ink, if you will, instead of a concrete substance, could it use plastic?
That's recycled. I mean, could you take all the wasted plastic, grind it up into granules, turn it into some kind of cement-like thing, run it through a 3D printer, the industrial size that builds houses, and just make walls out of our used plastic?
Probably not. I'm just sort of wondering.
Somebody says they can help me get off vegetables.
You probably could.
Somebody says graphene.
Is that part of it? Plastic?
Ceramics? Yeah.
Somebody says no plastic.
The gas is Oh, okay.
Yeah, the plastic might off-gas, and I would worry about how long it lasts, etc.
Somebody in the comments is saying, or rubber.
I was also thinking about tires, but I don't know.
Somebody says it's not scalable.
That I don't know.
Oh, let me give you a little architectural tip here.
So when I'm riding my bike around I like to look at the architecture of all the homes, and I especially like the smaller homes, the lower cost homes that look good.
Because there are a number of homes where I live where there'll be two homes right next to each other.
They look about the same home value.
You'd probably pay about the same.
But one of them has figured out how to put, let's say, some veneers on the front of their home.
So they've added something that looks like, let's say, a rock, a rock accent, or I'm seeing in some cases like a nice redwood stained accent on some part of it.
And those little accents could easily be attached to the outside of any structure.
So you could use, let's say, a base Structure to make your walls, whether they're 3D printed or something else, but then make it easy to just stick to without a craftsman.
I mean, maybe it's just plug and play, and you just take, say, red bricks, not a full brick, but like just a veneer of a red brick, and you could just attach it to the outside of your house and make a little accent wall or, you know, some kind of basically an accent.
So in theory, All of the basic rooms of some new future home could be standardized as whatever's the best design for human living.
But they would all look different from the outdoors and maybe the indoors too, because the homeowners would have the option of just tricking them out with a certain set of things that snap to the front.
So yours would look different from mine.
Yours might look way better.
And it would just be real easy because you're just changing the outside and you're just snapping it on.
So those are the sorts of...
Somebody says they already have brick rock panels.
That is correct. If you've ever tried to install any of those brick rock panels, you know it takes a craftsman.
I mean, you have to know how to do it.
You look at the YouTube for that, and it's like you've got to prep the wall, and you've got to...
There's a whole bunch of stuff you've got to do to stick those to the wall.
But what if the wall just had two holes in it that were made for that, and you just walk up to it and go...
Just stick the brick on.
Maybe you have to fix it in some way that can be unaffixed, but what if you could change it?
What if in the fall, you could walk outside, remove all your brick accents from your, let's say, your accent wall, and put it on rocks?
I think I want rocks now.
Why not? Somebody says the brick rock panels are now much easier.
Yeah. But they're not as easy as snap-on, snap-off.
But I think they could be.
Alright, that is, somebody says not waterproof.
It could be waterproof if the hole that you're sticking it into does not penetrate to the inside.
So it could be like a bowling ball hole where it doesn't go all the way through the bowling ball.
You just stick it in the hole. Now, somebody's saying Frank Lloyd Wright.
Yeah, I just saw on YouTube the other day that Frank Lloyd Wright also tried to build some standardized designs.
And I think he built some standardized designs that were meant for very low-cost homes.
So there are definitely a lot of people who have looked into it.
All right. I know that the building stuff is not of interest to all of you.
Some of you like the politics better, but I would argue that the building industry is such a big part, or could be, even bigger part of our economy, that it's sort of all politics, and that it would require politics to clear out the codes, the building codes, etc., so that something like this could be built.
And that is my Idea for the day.
Anybody else have anything to say?
Tankless water heaters?
Yeah, at one point I did a project called the Dilbert Ultimate House.
This was years ago before I built my own house.
And I solicited the public to tell me ideas for inclusion in the house.
And then I built a number of those ideas into my house.
For example, when I built my house, because I got to design it myself, I built a special closet for my cat, and it's off the laundry room.
So if you know you're going to have pets, why not build a house that's optimized for a pet?
So I've got an automatic dog door that goes out to a fenced area with artificial turf, so my dog can let herself out anytime she wants, do her business.
It's on artificial turf in a place that I don't have to look at too much.
And I go clean it up at my leisure.
And if my cat wants to use her cat box, she has her own special closet.
The cat box itself is on a raised platform, so that when I change the litter, I'm standing.
I don't have to bend over to do it.
And in there, I've got all my cat supplies and stuff.
And it's also off of the laundry room, so I've got venting and everything else.
That's a very small example, but if you imagine how much people's lives are enhanced by pets, why wouldn't you build your house to accommodate your pet?
It's such a big part of your experience.
It's just obvious. I toured a house once that had a A dog washing station, some upscale house, and off of one of the rooms, I think it was outside the garage, was sort of a special shower area just to wash your dog.
And I thought, well, I don't know if I need that, but imagine if you did have some kind of a washing area in your garage.
It wouldn't have to be a big garage, but just a little outdoor sink or washing area.
How amazingly useful would that be?
All right. Maybe I'll do a special periscope on just home stuff.
I'm actually thinking of going around my home with my video camera and just photographing things that worked and things that didn't work to get people thinking about this stuff.
All right. Does Snickers have her own smoking lounge?
Not yet. Somebody says, crazy white folks.
You're not wrong.
Yeah, we're not going to talk about hydroxychloroquine today.
When is Christina going to take you up for a flight?
So, my wife, Christina, is taking acrobatic flying lessons.
So, last several days and she'll be up there today.
She'll be up there and she'll be in the air in about two hours.
She's literally doing, you know, barrel rolls and figure eights over the house here.
So she's having a great time learning to fly the small planes for now.
Let's talk about why you won't have Kent Heck and Lively on or why I wouldn't have Shiva on.
Yes, let me talk about that.
So I've developed a rule and it goes like this.
I don't want to have, ever, Ever.
Anybody on my Periscopes who is an expert without the counter-expert.
Unless, and there's only one exception, the exception is I think I know enough that I can ask the right questions.
What you don't want and what would serve you really, really poorly and would be a great disservice is for me to put Kent Heck and Lively on just by himself.
Now, that has nothing to do with what he says.
It has nothing to do with whether he's right.
It has nothing to do with whether he's wrong.
It has only to do with the fact that if you wanted to mislead people, that's the way you'd do it.
You would bring on one expert, let them talk, and that's it.
There's nothing that could be less healthy For understanding and educating and seeing the big picture than me bringing on one expert whose expertise I can't penetrate enough to ask the right questions.
So Dr. Shiva is one of those.
Is he right? Is he wrong?
How would I know? I don't have any expertise that would guide me in that area.
You do not want me Or anybody else to have one expert on, unless you could also ask the right questions, and I can't.
So the heckin' lively stuff, suppose he came on, suppose he said a bunch of things that sounded true to you and true to me.
Is that good? No.
That would be very, very bad, because you wouldn't know if there's another argument, you know, a counterpoint.
Without that, I'm not going to do that, all right?
And I'm going to try to Be really, really strict about that.
Because it's one of the biggest problems in the world, and I don't want to be perpetuating it.
Every time you turn on the television, you're seeing that one expert giving you a bunch of BS. If it's on CNN, they're spinning it one way.
If it's on Fox, they're spinning it the other way.
But you don't see both.
You don't see the two of them with enough time to have them work it out.
So I'm just not going to be...
Oh, my God.
Somebody just said in the comments, have Dr.
Simone Gold on. Listen to me, please.
Does this not make sense?
Am I not clear?
That I'm not going to have one expert on that I don't know enough to ask the right questions.
Now you could argue that maybe with hydroxychloroquine I could ask the right questions, but I already know what she said, and I've already, you know, I've tweeted things like that a million times.
So while I believe that she would be a compelling Guest.
I will not have her on without the counterpoint.
Period. All right.
The last thing I'm going to leave you with is I cannot tell you how happy I am about my recent surgery on my sinuses.
Completely life-altering improvement.
I just wake up happy, you know, just feeling good about the world.
I've never felt this good, actually.
Can I have Greg Guff held on?
Well, you know, I do want to have him on.
I need to schedule that.
I need to have him on to talk about his book, The Plus, which apparently was just screaming up the bestseller charts.
I think he had number five or something.
Just crazy.
President Trump tweeted it.
So I'll try to get Greg on whenever he's available, you know, based on his schedule.
By the way, Greg is working on for his book tour, since you can't do the in-person thing that you normally would do.
I believe he's actually working on an outdoor drive-in theater event where people will drive up.
He'll be up on some stage or presented on screen as well, I guess.
