All Episodes
Aug. 3, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:01:23
Episode 1080 Scott Adams: Hey, Grab Coffee

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Microsoft may acquire TikTok Mental illness and Antifa Biden's VP Open the schools, accept the casualties COVID19 flare-ups in other countries Teacher Unions kill more Blacks than police ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody!
Come on in. Hope you had a great weekend.
It's time for the kickoff to the week, the thing that's going to make this just an incredible week.
One of the best.
One of the best.
And all you need...
Does anybody know what you need to get this kicked off?
I think you do. All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite coffee or beverage.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure that dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it's happening now.
Go! That was especially good.
Alright, for those of you who have been following me for a long time, I have an update now for something that you've been tracking literally for years, some of you.
And it is just the freakiest thing.
You know, my life is weird in general.
Alright, when you start getting a little bit famous, everything becomes weird.
But on top of that, I have this whole other layer of weirdness, which is this category that I would call things that go my way that really shouldn't.
In other words, my statistical sense of what is possible and what is not is completely broken.
Let me give you an example. Some of you know the story.
Years ago, I had a neurological condition called a spasmodic dysphonia, which rendered me unable to speak.
So that if I tried to speak, it would sound like...
And it would chop off all the words.
And people couldn't understand it in conversation.
I couldn't use the telephone for three years, basically.
So it was about three and a half years of having that problem where I couldn't speak.
And during that time, whenever I drove my car by myself, I did affirmations.
Affirmations is when you just repeat or write down.
In this case, while I'm driving, I just repeated it down loud.
Some objective, some future you that you wanted that was preferred over where you already were.
And I picked the most ridiculous affirmation.
I mean, I picked a ridiculous affirmation, and it was this, that while I had an incurable at the time, it seemed incurable, and it didn't look like it was going to change anytime soon, An incurable voice problem, and my affirmation, which I would struggle to get out while I drove, was that I, Scott Adams, will have a perfect voice.
Now, what is crazy about that is not just that I had an incurable voice problem, right?
I mean, the key word is incurable.
There was nothing you could do about it.
Nothing. I mean, you could do Botox shots in your neck, but that doesn't give you a good voice.
You sound like you're on helium.
But the second part of this impossibility is that I never had a good voice before I had that problem.
I had a very nasally, sort of nasally voice at best.
I'm doing a bad impression of my own voice.
But as you know, recently, this week I had surgery on my Sinus area, and they clear down some polyps.
And I was listening to myself, I was recording something just this morning for the local subscribers, and I recorded it, and I played it back, and I listened to it, and I thought, I think I have a perfect voice.
And it's blowing my frickin' mind, because this wasn't possible.
It's not possible that at age 63, I would have the best voice of my life, not even close.
I mean, I'm talking about levels above the best voice I ever had at age 25, not even close.
And if you told me that any of this was possible in the real world, I just, I really could not have wrapped my head around this.
But this isn't even the big part of the story.
The big part of the story is my sense of what is possible is just completely broken.
And it has been for decades, really.
Because when Dilbert first took off, I mean, the odds of Dilbert succeeding, you probably know, were one in 20,000 or something.
The odds of me writing a book without having any prior experience as a writer and having a number one bestselling book, what were the odds of that?
I mean, the odds are really, really low of that.
And, you know, I just got married to the most beautiful woman in the entire metaverse, and none of it seems possible.
But let me extend this now into the news so it's more about you and less about me.
Have any of you noticed that the things I tend to be persuading toward always seem to happen?
Even weird things.
And today's a good day to talk about that.
How many of you remember it was probably in 2018 That I started saying almost on a regular basis that we should decouple from China.
Take yourself back two years and imagine that you heard this cartoonist saying, we should decouple from China.
What did you think about that?
Didn't you think that was just the craziest thing?
If you could pick one thing that wasn't going to happen, It would be decoupled from China.
I mean, that would be right at the top of anybody's list of things that just couldn't happen.
And now we're doing it.
What was the first person you heard tweet or say that TikTok, this enormous platform that's one of the most, if not the most popular thing among kids in the United States, and I said it should be banned in the United States.
Did you think that was possible?
Really? Did you think it was possible that TikTok would be banned when you first heard it?
I mean, after a while, maybe it started sounding a little bit feasible.
And then when the president started talking about it, you were like, yeah, probably, probably so.
But that didn't look possible to you, did it?
If you're honest with yourself, that probably didn't look possible.
And I have to admit that In the beginning, it looked impossible to me, but I've had so many experiences where things that looked impossible eventually fell if I just kept pushing on them long enough.
In the case of my voice, 63 years.
It took me 63 years of pushing on the same rock to get it to the top of the hill.
But damn it, I don't give up.
I've told you this story before.
I have a, let's say, an operating system within my brain that's always running.
Regardless of what apps are running, there's always also an operating system below that.
And the operating system, you all get to program yourself to some extent.
Some of it you're born with, but you can reprogram yourself through persuasion and experience and education, etc.
And One of the things that I've programmed myself for, and I've told you this, is Prisoner Island.
And it's a story that's not a real story, but I hold it in my head as my operating system.
And it goes like this, some of you have heard this, that if I were, let's say, convicted for some crime, and I were taken to the island of prisoners where there's no law, you know, it's just the prisoner's rule on this island, and they can't get off, and you drop me on the island...
On day one, they beat me nearly to death.
On day two, they beat me up again, nearly to death.
Day three, day four, first several months, it's looking bad for Scott.
Beaten up almost to death every single day.
But if you come back in a year, maybe three, I'll be running the island and everybody who touched me will be dead.
And that's my operating system.
So when I see a problem like an incurable voice problem, I don't say to myself, well, it looks like the prisoners beat me up.
I guess I'm done. I wake up the next day and the prisoners beat me up again, and the next day they beat me up again.
And every day, the operating system is running.
It's like, I'm gonna get you.
I am gonna get you.
Enjoy today, because it's coming back.
I am gonna get you.
And today, It was just a special day for me because I chased this thing 63 frickin' years, and never once did I give up.
Not even once.
Not once did I think that I really can't do it.
I mean, I certainly had a conscious understanding of what's possible and statistically likely in the real world.
But I never gave up. And that's because of the operating system.
And I think that some of that might be just born with it.
I don't know. But I've certainly spent a lot of time trying to enhance it.
So maybe if you have a little bit of something that you're born with, you can beef it up a little bit.
But I would suggest that you find your own operating systems that work for you.
Sort of a story.
And it's good to put it in a story.
Because stories are so powerful.
That's... You can actually program your brain with stories.
That's why they're so powerful.
Anecdotes are so powerful in the news.
You don't want the George Floyd story to dominate your understanding of a big complicated situation because it's just one situation tragic as it was.
But it does.
Because stories are what program your brain.
So you can put your own story in there.
And the beauty is you can just make it up.
You know, Prisoner Island is completely made up.
But because I see it so clearly, I've held it in my operating system for my entire life, that it's as real to me as if I had experienced it, you know, at least mentally.
So the president's looking at banning TikTok, which looks like what that might be is that Microsoft would acquire it.
Very interesting. Which I think is also a fairly brilliant workaround so that the kids still get their TikTok.
And it probably would be an election problem if TikTok got killed before election day, because there are so many kids who would be mad and complaining to their parents about Trump.
It might actually make a difference.
So it's good that Microsoft is looking at at least taking that over.
And I think Facebook's WeChat is also on the table, maybe for banning.
And when you think about the fact that Facebook is banned in China, I don't know if I'd ever really paid much attention to this area, but the fact that China bans Facebook, but we had not banned their version of Facebook, what's up with that?
To use the President's phrase, what's up with that?
That's obviously something that had to be fixed.
Either China needs to loosen up on Facebook, Or WeChat's just got to go.
You can't live in a world where a country will ban your stuff and you're not banning their stuff.
You can't live in that world.
That's just not a well-balanced world.
It's got to be both or none.
So WeChat has to go.
There's just no... I would say that's not on the table for serious discussion.
It has to go.
That's a no-brainer.
It might be difficult, but it has to go.
It really does. So MSNBC pundit, can I call him that?
Ali Velji, he might not call himself a pundit, so I won't label him.
I'll just say he's a MSNBC person.
A host, would you call him a host of a show?
I'm not sure if he has a show or he's a regular guest.
But anyway... He says in a tweet, imagine being president and knowing that discussions are actively underway about whether it's going to fall to the Marines or the Secret Service agents who surround you to remove you from office if you refuse to leave after losing the election.
It's hard to believe that a serious public figure would send this tweet.
I suppose we're in a world where nothing is off the table.
I tweeted back that this sounds like a mental health problem.
Not specifically about Ali Velshi, but he's talking about other people talking about it.
Whoever is talking about President Trump not leaving office willingly doesn't understand anything.
That is such a basic misunderstanding of the world we live in.
Now certainly there's a question of, let's say the election is genuinely just messed up.
So I can imagine a scenario in which the election is just unambiguously, it's just messed up, and nobody even doubts it.
You know, the left is sure it was rigged, the right is sure it was rigged, foreign countries are sure it was rigged.
So there is a scenario in which the election just doesn't work.
So yeah, I can imagine some scenario where the president would have to, I don't know, stay on for six months until we have another election, see if we can do it right.
I don't know what that would look like, but even that would be temporary.
There's no scenario where the president's going to just try to stay and install Ivanka as his heir or Don Jr.
or something. That's not going to happen.
Let me tell you why that's not going to happen.
Because there's this thing called conservatives.
Have you heard of them?
Have you heard of conservatives?
They like this thing called the Constitution.
And the Constitution's pretty, pretty clear about this election business.
And if you think that conservatives, there are crazy people everywhere, but as a whole, if you think conservatives would be okay with a president, even their own president, Losing an election and staying in office?
I don't think you understand what a conservative is.
That's the opposite of his party.
Now, of course, they'd be sad.
They might put up an argument for why he should stay there.
But I'll tell you what's not going to happen.
What's not going to happen is somebody having to militarily remove the president from the White House.
There's no adult scenario in which that can happen.
Anyway, so that does feel to me, and I mean this literally, that anyone who is thinking seriously along those lines may have a mental health issue that they need to deal with.
And let me expand that point.
Expand that point.
We're dealing with Antifa like it's a semi-political movement.
I don't know if anarchists are considered political, I guess, in their own way, or anti-political.
You've got the Black Lives Matter movement, etc.
And I would argue this, that especially among the violent protesters, you've seen a lot of pictures of the mugshots of the ones that are causing the trouble.
Not the peaceful people, because there are lots of protesters who just really want a better world.
They genuinely do. And they should be respected for their freedom of speech as well as their intentions.
But when you see the people who got caught, is it my imagination that they all look like they have mental illness?
I don't think it's drugs.
I mean, there might be some drugs too.
But it looks like that we're treating a mental illness problem as some kind of a political movement.
Antifa is about 80% mental illness, in my opinion.
Now, Black Lives Matter is not.
Black Lives Matter, in my opinion, shows not even a trace of mental illness.
Would you agree? You could say their priorities are different or what they want is reasonable or unreasonable.
Those are all fair questions.
But I've never seen anything come out of Black Lives Matter from an actual black citizen of this United States that looked even slightly crazy.
Right? It just seems like different priorities, different understanding maybe than you have about whatever, what needs to be done.
But none of it looks crazy.
It looks completely reasonable for their point of view.
Antifa doesn't register that way to me.
Because first of all, what the hell is anarchy?
What is anarchy?
Exactly. If you were to sit down, and I don't recommend it, but if you were to sit down with one of the Antifa, let's say a leader or even a member, and say, all right, all right, I get what you're trying to do, but can you describe how that works out for you in the long run?
Describe your life after you get what you want.
What's it look like?
Because I think the government is gone, right?
That's the whole point of anarchy.
And I think law and order are gone, which means the food supply is gone, which means the anarchist dies.
So the anarchists in Antifa, in my opinion, have mental illness, and they are suicidal, but they're not very brave, or they're not brave enough, or they don't have whatever it takes.
Let me withdraw brave, because I don't want anybody listening to this to think that this would be brave to end their own life.
That's not the message I'm trying to tell.
I'm saying that the Antifa people look like they want to end themselves, but the way they're doing it is by playing out like they're ending the United States.
There's nothing on the end of that process that they would want.
They're not saying, when we get this, it'll be a good world.
It really is just, let's break everything and maybe I'll get killed in the process.
It looks like that to me.
So, I think maybe it would help us to imagine the Antifa is more of a mental health issue mixed in with some domestic terrorists and some people who have actual plans for power, I suppose.
What do you think of the hollow Joe, as I call him, #hollowJoe, what do you think about him debating?
And I tweeted yesterday that I think Democrats are slowly waking up to this realization that there are two things that Biden could do debate-wise.
He could actually have a debate, in which case I think most people think that would be the end, right?
Because Biden seems pretty good when he stays on script and he has friendly people asking him easy questions and he's got his notepad.
But what happens if you put him in a debate with Trump and Trump throws him off the path?
And how long would that take?
It would take one second For Trump to push him off his game, because his game is very narrow now.
He can only talk about the things he's sort of ready for, prepared for.
If you give him anything he didn't prepare for, it's going to be a disaster.
And Trump is just going to show up on stage and give him nothing but things he didn't prepare for.
It's going to be the most unpredictable situation in the world.
So if you're Biden's advisers, Do you want to see Hollow Joe, with his very narrow game that's narrowing every day, get on stage with the person in the world who has the biggest game, probably the biggest game we've ever seen, with the most variety, the most The most provocation, the most maddening, just everything.
The most energy that anybody's ever brought to this job is Trump.
It's literally the worst matchup I could even imagine for Biden.
Biden actually could do well against a standard Republican.
You just put a boring Republican up there, And have him talk, and the boring Republican says predictable things.
Joe is ready because it's predictable things.
Might look okay.
The audience might not know if there's anything wrong with it.
But you put Trump up there, and the first thing he's going to do is throw him off his game.
Make him angry, get him flustered, brain shuts down.
It's not going to be pretty.
But what if he doesn't?
Suppose Joe Biden doesn't debate.
What happens then? Well, then he loses the other way.
Because if you don't debate, I think that's essentially admitting you can't do the job.
If you don't debate, and you're running for president, you have admitted that you can't do the job of president.
I don't think there's any way around that.
And it's hilarious to watch Joe Lockhart, who used to be the spokesperson for, was it Bush?
And he's writing opinion pieces on probably CNN, I think, and his opinion was that Joe Biden should not debate, but here's the reason.
Oh, not because Joe Biden is incapable of debating, but rather because President Trump lies so much.
Why would you give attention to a liar?
And I'm thinking to myself, Well, that's trying a little too hard, Joe.
It sounds like the Democrats were just desperate for some kind of a narrative where it makes sense that Biden doesn't debate.
Because if he just doesn't do it, that's really the end of his chances.
But if he could find some BS kind of reason why he wouldn't do it that has nothing to do with not being good at it, And that's what Lockhart was trying to present.
If that was their best play, was that their best play, what Lockhart said, that why would you debate somebody who doesn't pass the fact-checking?
And I'm thinking, that's sort of exactly who you want to debate.
If I told you, hey, you're going to go into a debate, and your opponent is known for not passing the fact-checking, do you say, ho ho ho ho?
I'm bringing the facts.
Or do you say, oh, I can't deal with that.
I'd better quit. I don't want to debate somebody who says things that aren't true and can be proven to be not true, and the next day the news will only cover all the lies that he told.
I don't want that.
Of course you want that.
That's exactly the person you want to debate.
So that is the most transparently ridiculous excuse for getting a weak candidate out of a debate.
It was kind of funny because it was so weak.
Here's my prediction. I believe that the polls will tighten before the Election Day and not because of anything the candidates are doing.
So that's my prediction.
The polls will narrow right before Election Day, maybe sooner, but it won't have much to do with what the candidates are actually doing.
It'll have more to do with the fact that the polls were rigged in the first place.
And it looks like it's just a repeat of 2016, where the primary polls are showing a gigantic gap, and that's the message they want to send, apparently.
But they also still want to be in business as legitimate pollsters, so they're going to have to get rid of the rigging toward Election Day, so that it looks like, well, we only missed it by 2%.
That's not bad. Something like that.
So that's the prediction.
I saw that there were at least two polls that seem like they're already turning in the President's favor, but they were the lesser-known polls, and I'm not going to mention them.
I'll just say that there are at least two polls, just in the last 24 hours, that would indicate a dramatic shift toward Trump.
But it could be just a difference in the way they measure it.
Because the question of whether or not there are so-called shy Trump supporters out there is now getting ridiculously obvious that there are.
Now, in 2016, you could be forgiven if you were a Democrat and you did not believe there was such a thing as a shy Trump supporter.
But, now that you saw Trump win unexpectedly, is it only because the polls were not exactly as precise as they could have been, especially in the Midwest?
Is that the only reason we were surprised?
Or were there some hidden Trump supporters?
So here are the conditions to create a massive amount of Trump hidden supporters that the polls are not catching at the moment.
The first condition is that everybody has to have that model in their head.
In other words, if you're a Trump supporter, you have to have it in your head that there's an option.
The option is to be a hidden Trump supporter.
So just saying something's an option and talking about it makes it more likely to happen.
It's just the way we're wired.
We are mimics, and if anybody is doing anything, it will cause probably more people to do that thing just because we imitate.
So you should expect that all things being equal, there would be more shy supporters this time just because 2016 proved it's a thing.
And if it's a thing, it's an option.
And if it's an option, and it's in the front of your mind, when the pollster calls, it's a little more likely that you'll say, oh, a lot of people are doing this.
I think I, too, will be a little cagey when I answer the poll questions.
So then add to that three and a half or more years of the supporters of the president being beaten up on camera.
How many videos do you have Of a MAGA hat-wearing person being slapped around and abused on camera.
You've seen it a lot.
Now, maybe the left has not seen it, but that's not relevant to this question, because the shy Trump supporters have all seen it.
Everybody who's a Trump supporter has seen plenty of video, if they're on social media, plenty of video of Trump supporters getting abused and physically.
Does that make you, and we all know the stories of people being fired, fired from the Wall Street Journal, or quitting in that case, and we've seen how much social pressure there is.
So if there are not, if it turns out, I don't know if we'll ever be able to measure it, but if it turned out in the future that we learned that there were no such thing as shy Trump supporters for this election, or that it was minimal, I would be amazed because every condition to create a lot of them is in place and strongly in place and has been in place for a while.
It's dangerous to your career.
It's dangerous to your health.
You know it's a thing.
You know you can easily do it by lying to the pollsters.
It's a thing. Trust me, it's a thing.
And I believe that the folks supporting Biden are slowly worrying that it's a thing.
I don't know that they're convinced.
They still might believe the polls, but you know they're worrying about it.
It's starting to get in their head, and I'll bet you'll see a lot more about this from people trying to deny it or whatever.
But it's definitely in their head.
And they also know that Biden can't survive either the debate or the skipping of the debate.
So they basically have a dead man candidate walking.
Now, let's get to the vice president pick.
My certainty that it would be Kamala Harris has been challenged recently.
But not for the reason you think.
Now, I do know that there's a lot of buzz about Susan Rice, etc.
I have trouble thinking it's going to be Susan Rice as Vice President.
And the problem is that she's got the worst case of RBF any politician ever had.
And you know what I mean, right?
You can Google RBF, which is basically a resting face that looks unpleasant.
Now, when she smiles, she looks very pleasant, and apparently I saw a report that she's smiling more, maybe because she's jockeying for the VP job.
But she has an unfriendly look that is, frankly, scary.
I saw Karen Bass recently on an interview, and I think the Cuba stuff is pretty bad.
I don't think she can get past that.
So my guess would be Well, let me give you the big picture.
There are two things happening.
One is we think that the vice president pick for Biden will be important because Biden may not be a two-term president.
Well, actually, he said he would not be a two-term president.
And that puts that person in the first spot to be considered as, you know, to run for president next time.
But here's what's different.
I think Biden is failing faster than maybe even we know, and that his advisers may be calculating this.
They may want to pick a vice president that is not Kamala Harris, wait for it, so that when Biden is replaced before Election Day, they can bring in a top-tier candidate who's more like the presidential candidate.
Because the thing about Kamala Harris is she always looked like she could be the president, which is what makes her a strong candidate for vice president.
When you think of Karen Bass, do you think, oh, she's already ready to be president?
You don't think that.
You're not familiar with her enough.
How about Susan Rice?
Do you say to yourself, she's ready to be president?
I don't think she's been elected to anything.
Before. We don't know much about her.
Haven't seen her campaign.
So it seems to me that there's at least a small possibility.
Now, I'll put this in the anything's possible category.
This is not a prediction. In the anything possible category, one of the reasons that the Biden VP choice might be delayed, which is what we heard, it's going to be delayed again.
It could be That they want to put in a strong vice president, but not one who's too strong.
Because they might want to save their strongest candidate, which in my opinion is Harris, to replace Biden himself at the top of the ticket before the election.
Nobody else has told you that, have they?
Which would really blow your mind, wouldn't it?
And Harris is still unpredicted as a possible top of the ticket.
I don't suggest betting on the basis of what you just heard, but I just put it out there.
She's still unpredicted. All right.
Did you see the new Trump campaign ad?
It's really good.
It's really, really good.
One of the things that people were complaining about is that it's one thing to say bad things about Joe Biden, but what's your positive image, you know, positive message for the country?
And the Trump campaign just turned out a really inspirational feeling, you know, pro- Optimism, pro-America, everything's going to get better and better.
And I think they nailed it, just in terms of the skill that went into the ad.
I'd say A+. It's one of the better ads I've seen.
You actually feel something when you watch the ad.
And that's kind of hard to hit, right?
Not every political ad makes you actually feel something, but that ad, literally, you just feel it, and it feels good, which is the point.
Speaking of optimism and feeling good, so when you see the ad, you see a version of Trump that's his best self, in my opinion.
Optimistic Trump Trump is the best Trump, which is also my explanation for why he did not get the messaging as perfectly as he could have during the coronavirus.
Because the coronavirus situation, the pandemic, absolutely requires something closer to pessimism.
The pessimism, or a little bit, just a slight pessimism, was exactly the right note to sound for leadership in a pandemic.
It's like, I've got to tell you it's going to be bad, but we'll get through it, but I've got to tell you it's going to be bad.
So that's the message people, I guess, they wanted to hear.
A lot of people said that. And President Trump is not really the one He's just not optimized for bad news.
He's optimized for what this campaign ad shows, which is, hey, let's get on board and rebuild this thing.
So let me put it in a larger context.
I don't believe there's any such thing as a good president or a bad president.
I believe that what you need is a president whose talents are the right match for the times.
And that's why I was more pro-Obama than probably just about anybody who's watching this right now, because I thought he was a good match for the times.
And I think Trump is a better match for these times, with the exception of the pandemic.
He was not a good match to that.
So if you say the president is good or bad, I think you're missing the larger picture, that they're all good.
I mean, by the time you become president of the United States, You're a high-functioning person.
You're smart.
You care about the country.
They're all in that category of smart, capable, successful, care about the country.
I think that's all about equal.
But they are different in how they fit.
So in my opinion, President Trump was not the best messenger.
And I'm talking only about the message part.
He was not the best messenger for the coronavirus stuff.
But as we're getting closer to the other side of it, I don't know when that's going to come, but we're certainly getting closer to the end of it.
Who would you rather have as president to rebuild the economy?
I mean, think about it.
Seriously. If you could pick any president, of all the presidents from the beginning of time, you know, you'd have to adjust to make them modern thinking.
Can you think of a better president?
To rebuild us from a pandemic, which basically kept all our assets in place, largely.
But we had to think our way through it.
You had to try harder.
You had to be optimistic.
That's what drives the economy, optimism.
You couldn't come up with a better president for this moment.
Oh, no, not this moment.
The next moment.
So the next moment we're getting into, that's Trumpville.
You are entering Trumpville.
You're not in it, because the pandemic is just not his strong part.
But man, you don't want Joe Biden to be running the next phase.
If you asked me, would Joe Biden have been a good pick for the current pandemic?
I don't think so, because I don't think he would have closed China as soon.
I think he would have done some other things wrong.
But it wouldn't have been a disaster, probably, except for the closing China part, maybe.
But you don't want him rebuilding America.
That's just the wrong guy for the job.
I keep reading on CNN that Trump has no plan for the pandemic.
And I keep asking myself what's wrong with me that I think he does.
Let me tell you what I think is the plan.
For the pandemic, which seems crystal clear to me.
And I don't know why it's not crystal clear to everyone, because we're all watching the same news.
I didn't go research it.
I just watched the news.
Completely clear plan of how the United States is handling the pandemic.
Now, do you think it's clear?
I'm going to go through it, what I think is the plan.
But is there anybody here who would say they don't understand the plan?
I want to see your comments when they catch up to real time.
So here's what I think the plan is.
They were always very clear from day one that keeping our healthcare system intact was going to be, and keeping people fed, were the top priorities.
Everybody's on board, right?
It was very clear, we're going to make sure we feed everybody, and we're going to make sure that the healthcare doesn't collapse.
And then we executed that plan.
Did it work? Yeah, yeah.
Not only did it work when things were far more uncertain, but it looks like it's going to continue working.
So that's the first part of the plan.
Hospitals and food, and nailed it.
I would give our country as a whole, you know, more credit to the healthcare workers, of course, but the country as a whole for that part of the plan?
A plus. A plus.
For all of you, not just the President.
Trump is very clear about wanting to open the schools.
How much clearer could the president be that he wants the schools open?
How is that not completely clear?
Now, the states, of course, have individual powers that they can do what they need to do, but it's also clear that the president has acknowledged that the states are the ones to make those individual decisions.
But he's giving very clear guidance.
About the federal priorities and I believe that that is correct because states have a slightly different mission than the federal government.
The states are not responsible for national defense.
President Trump is responsible for national defense in addition to everything else.
States don't have a national defense They're more about making sure you've got food and medicine and stuff.
And I would argue that Trump, from the national defense phase, trying to keep schools open, keeping the economy as open as we can, with some pullbacks as needed, those things go right to national defense.
And the president's completely clear about him.
Got to get kids in school, got to keep the economy humming, which helps to have kids in school, and that the economy is sort of the lifeblood that makes everything else possible.
And if you break the economy more than it is, then nothing works.
Nothing works. So for me, keeping the whole country intact, it makes complete sense that the president's Preference for opening the economy, opening the schools, with casualties.
With casualties.
Nobody's kidding themselves.
There will be casualties, but also casualties no matter what you do.
So, I think that's clear, and it also makes, as I said, perfect sense that the federal government has a different view of it than the states, and they have exactly the views you'd want them to have.
You want the states Focusing on the people.
You want the president to focus on the people, but also national defense.
So there's your difference.
The president has said forever, as have the experts, that we're going to rapidly adjust.
We're going to try it, adjust, try it, adjust.
Have you seen that happen?
Yeah. Yeah.
We've tried things and we've adjusted.
Tried things and adjusted.
Still doing it. Is that smart?
Is that a good plan? Yeah.
That's not just a good plan.
That's like the best plan. You could come up with a better plan in the face of complete unknowns.
Come up with a better plan than trying things and quickly adjusting.
There isn't one. That's the plan.
It's the best plan. It's the only plan.
But there's this bigger question about sort of an end point.
How does this get resolved?
Is any of what I've talked about getting us to something that could be described as an end point we're trying to get?
Because I think that's where the disconnect is.
And here's my take.
Although this may not have been said explicitly, it seems obvious to me that the priority is to keep the economy alive As long as it takes to get to any combination of herd immunity, therapeutics that really kick butt, or a vaccine that really works.
But the therapeutics and the vaccine are optional.
You get that, right?
So the plan is to get all three of those things in a good place.
Get some herd immunity, some therapeutics, some vaccines.
We don't know what that mix will be or exactly the timing, but it's very clear that with this warp speed process that the president put together, that's crystal clear that we're rushing, I don't want to say rushing, we're speeding The vaccine thing, trying every therapy, funding everything that looks promising, just throwing the kitchen sink at anything that could work.
But if none of it works any better than what we already have, if we never get a better therapeutic than we have, if we never get a vaccine, it's still the same plan.
We just get there through herd immunity.
We get there the hard way. So I don't see how this could be any more clear.
Is there any part of this that isn't, number one, exactly what you'd want your government to be doing, and number two, working, In the sense that it's being executed just the way it's described.
And number three, it has an endpoint, a very specific endpoint.
We don't know the day, but that's the real world, right?
You don't know when it's going to end, but it has to have an end.
Herd immunity will get there if the vaccines and the therapeutics and everything else does not.
Now, here's a prediction that I made that you're already seeing come true in a small sense.
We'll see if it's a trend.
I predict it will be.
In what world can some other country get this under control and keep it there?
There is no world, there is no rational, logical way that some other country from the United States Let's say Australia is going to get the virus under control and keep it that way under current conditions.
It's not even a thing.
So every time I hear the news talk about some country who did well, I just shake my head and I say, They didn't do well.
They did not do well, because they're going to have a flare-up.
All they did is tamp it down and hurt their economy more than they needed to.
We did the opposite.
We kept our economy a little more open.
We could have tamped it down further, but that was a rational choice, because all the countries that hurt their economy And close down to get rid of the flare-ups, it's all coming back.
Everybody who closed their economy completely to try to get something like zero infections in their country was a complete waste of time, because it's coming back.
Until you have some technological breakthrough or something, I don't think it's going to happen.
Quickly enough. So you're going to see flare-ups in other countries that by election day will make the president's performance look better by comparison.
Because remember, the curves are not timed with each other.
So at the moment, Australia is having a pretty bad flare-up.
And they have somewhat draconian measures.
Apparently only one of your members of your household can leave the house once a day.
What? Somebody says apologist.
You must be new here.
Miles Carney.
So somebody's calling me an apologist.
All right, you get blocked for that, but...
I decided that the lowest level of political understanding is calling somebody an apologist.
Well, calling me an apologist would be the lowest level of understanding.
All right. So are you following the AI stuff?
There's an artificial intelligence program, I guess you could call it, called GPT-3.
I think this is Elon Musk's and other people's.
And it's available to some people who are playing with it, and you get to see the results.
So I've seen the results of a number of experiments.
And the idea is that the AI is now so smart That you can ask it to do a lot of different things and you don't know exactly what's going to come out of it, which is the freaky part, that you don't quite know what it's going to do because it's sort of making up its own mind how to deal with your request.
And it can do some amazing things.
One of the things that was demonstrated is it was writing its own ad copy for a product, to which I say, To which I say, that's pretty freaky, isn't it?
Writing advertising copy with AI. Now what it did was, I guess they seeded it with one statement about their product, And then the AI gave it a variety of different options that say the same meaning, but they use different words and different emphasis.
And there's a second part of that, which is that the AI can then rapidly test it in the public.
So now that you know that it can give you different advertisements, you could arrange them on a page differently, you could change the words, it can go test that with a thousand people while you're sitting in front of it.
So you could be sitting there saying, all right, AI, fix my advertising.
And you'd watch the screen change until there's several different options and maybe photos and arrangements and stuff.
And then you could say, all right, AI, go A-B test until you have the best one.
And it would take five minutes for it to have tested all of its messages around the world by running ads just to see what people click on.
And it would tell you the best one that would just absolutely rewire people's brains.
And it would do it in five minutes.
And you wouldn't have to do any work.
You would just sit there and say, give me an advertisement, go test it.
That's scary stuff. Now, if you're thinking that the robots are going to take the manual jobs, well, of course they will.
But they're also going to take the copywriting jobs, the advertising jobs.
I think the advertising industry's got some challenges going.
Do you know Bernard Carrick, Bernie Carrick?
Was he the police chief in New York City at one point?
And he said this, which is really interesting.
He said, must begin looking at who is bailing out these people, meaning Antifa and the protesters.
I strongly believe you're going to be able to connect the dots back to their organizers and funders, making this a federal crime.
Now, I don't quite know the legal details of that, but I think he's saying that if it's more of a conspiracy-looking...
What is it that they use for the mafia?
What is the rule? There's a law they use for the mafia where if it's more of an enterprise, the feds can go after it than if it's just one person acting alone.
And I thought to myself...
I thought to myself, that is really interesting, because what if this is a thing?
Suppose we do find that whoever is paying for the bail for these people are connected and organized.
Does that mean the Feds can take down Antifa?
I don't know. Somebody tweeted a little clip from Marshall McLuhan in 1968.
Now, if you're a certain age, you've heard that name, Marshall McLuhan.
In the 60s, he was super famous as being sort of the intellectual who would talk about how the media was programming us, basically.
And Marshall McLuhan said this, which I'm going to disagree with.
He said, when humans face too much information, they resort to pattern recognition.
And then he went on to say that the world is getting more complicated So, therefore, people can't sort out the complication, so they just default to pattern recognition.
And when I first read it, I thought, I feel like this is half right.
I feel like it's...
Oh, RICO, thank you.
It's the RICO laws.
I'm wondering if that's what Bernie Kerik was referring to with wrapping up the Antifa people as an organization.
RICO, thank you. So Marshall McLuhan says that when we have too much information, we resort to pattern recognition.
Pattern recognition, of course, is confirmation bias if you do it wrong.
If you do it right, then you're just being smart.
If you do it wrong, it's confirmation bias.
And I would like to modify Marshall McLuhan's opinion because I think it's dated.
He said this in 1968 and it sounded brilliant and probably quite provocative back in those days.
But here's what I think he gets wrong.
It has nothing to do with how much information people have.
It has nothing to do with how confused you are or how much information you have.
We always use faulty pattern recognition and then we explain it to ourselves as if we had made the decision logically.
The only time that we use logic is when the situation is really simple, and there's just no emotional input to it at all.
So I think he was close to the truth, but I don't think it has to do with how much information you're dealing with.
I think we're just always, always looking for the pattern recognition, and we're not necessarily good at it.
So I tweeted something that I thought I would get more pushback from and I don't think I got any.
Imagine what I'm going to say right now that I got no pushback from, that I've seen.
And tons of retweets.
So this is very popular with nobody pushing back yet.
And I tweeted, it's time for all Americans to join together in fighting our common enemy, the teachers' unions.
And then I provocatively went on.
If you think they haven't indirectly killed more black Americans than the police, you haven't been paying attention.
Because education, economics, and safety are leaked.
So my contention is that if the school unions had been doing their job for the last few decades, the education of black America would be far better.
Because it's not that the teachers don't do a good job individually.
It's that the teachers' unions prevent competition, which means that there's a limit to how good anybody can be.
There's no competition.
So if they had not existed and there was competition and education had improved in the way you would expect in a competitive environment, Imagine how much better off the black community would be and everybody who was in a low-income situation.
So we don't even need to limit this to any group.
But because we're talking about Black Lives Matter, I'll just say that the Black Lives Matter people have been duped into pursuing their lowest priority.
They have been duped.
Now, Imagine even, I don't know, even a month or two ago that I could say this without being cancelled.
And the only reason I can say it now without being cancelled is everyone knows it's true.
Until everybody knew it was true, I kind of couldn't say it.
And it's this. If you think that the police killing of black people is a high priority, or even should be, let's say should be a high priority, for the black community, you don't know how to count.
Because the total number of people that will ever be killed by the police will be a pinprick compared to how many people, how many lives are destroyed by the school unions, the teachers unions, restricting the ability for teaching to become good, better than it is. And they're not even close in terms of death count.
We're talking about education being the alpha problem for everyone, basically for everyone, not just the black community.
But if you don't get that right, the education part, you don't get your economics right, you don't get your good quality of life, you don't get your national defense, the country's done.
As bad as the tragedies are in these police incidents, and very much we should work on it.
Don't interpret anything I say as we should not try to make that the best situation we can make it and experiment a little bit there.
We should. But let's not confuse it for the top priority for anybody.
If you think black lives matter, that's not the priority.
If you think Black Lives Matter, you'd say, well, I hope we do better on this police stuff, but let's talk about the teachers' unions.
That's when Black Lives Matter.
So I don't think I could have even said that directly a month ago, but I feel like now that the temperature is changing a little bit and we're seeing that the teachers' unions are basically holding our children hostage, think about the fact That the teachers' unions are basically holding our children hostage.
It's crazy.
All right. Speaking of competition, if you're wondering how much better could education be if you had free markets and competition, I would point you toward Elon Musk's rocket, which his astronauts just returned safely yesterday.
And I may have the numbers wrong, but it's something like this.
The mission that he accomplished for less than a billion dollars was something that NASA said would cost $26 billion.
So when NASA did not have competition, they were proposing to spend $26 billion to do a thing that, once competition was a thing, cost $1 billion.
That's the size of the potential gain in education.
And I think he did it years earlier than NASA was going to do it.
It wasn't even close. All right.
Those are my points for today.
Yeah, just looking at your comments.
Can't thrive without addressing the teachers' unions.
Yeah, so let me tie this back to the very first part of the Periscope, if those of you were there, in which I said, have you been surprised that some of the things I advocate for happen as unlikely as they seem?
I don't think I've been advocating anything harder than the teachers' unions need to get fixed or moved out of the way, or at least stop us from having free market and competition.
And I would predict That you're going to see a lot more pressure on the teachers' unions and maybe some alternatives popping up for education.
So, I'm going to keep pushing on that.
I appreciate it when you boost me on Twitter if it's some topic you think is good for the country.
And join me on the Locals platform if you want to see my special extra provocative stuff.
It's locals.com.
Export Selection