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Aug. 19, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
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Episode 1097 Scott Adams: Ask Me Anything Today

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Hey, everybody.
Come on in here.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best part of the day.
I know it is for me.
And watch how some of that good feeling transfers onto you.
That's how it works.
If I'm in a good mood, you're in a little bit better mood.
And today... We're going to do an experiment.
Yeah, something exciting.
Normally, I'm very prepared when I get on these periscopes.
I've looked at the news. I've checked my Twitter.
Today, I just woke up.
So the question is, can I do this periscope with no preparation whatsoever?
Well, we'll find out.
And I'm going to be taking questions as part of my strategy for being unprepared.
Does it really matter today?
Nope. There's no news today.
If you check the news, which I did briefly, you will notice there's not really any news.
It's just made up stuff about somebody may have said something, done something.
Somebody feels bad about something.
Somebody's personality is bad.
They're worried about somebody might do something.
Their character is bad.
Somebody's loyalty. Nothing.
There's no news.
But first, the simultaneous sip, and all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or sign, 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 of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it is sure good.
Ah, how did I predict Kamala?
I'm going to take that question first, even though you are not a guest yet.
If anybody wants to ask a question on here, you can see guest mode has appeared at the bottom of your screen.
If you have a mobile device, it doesn't work on a laptop.
And you can press that and it puts you in a waiting list for me to accept you as a guest.
So the question was, how did I predict Kamala Harris?
And I almost hate to tell you, a lot of it had to do with her look.
Because we're a very visual species, and the way people look makes a difference.
If you were short and bald, could you be president of the United States?
I'm talking about myself now.
Not too easily.
Not too easily. If Jeff Bezos ran for president, could he become president?
Well, he has every skill in the world, right?
So you think, well, if Jeff Bezos can't run for president, who can?
And the answer is, it might make a difference how you look.
Kamala Harris has the look.
And the look is not before you say, oh, it's because she's female or attractive or something like that.
No, it's not that at all.
Now, she is both of those things.
She's female and attractive for age.
You know, everything has to be highlighted, or everything has to be normalized for age.
But that's not it.
The part that set her apart is that she has a predator look about her.
Now, she can, obviously, she can be giggly and happy and smiley.
She can be a prosecutor and a senator and an attorney general.
So she's got a good talent stack.
But she has a predator look.
She is ambitious, which weirdly people are trying to make sound like a negative.
Talk about your sexism, eh?
Do they ever say that about men?
Has anybody ever said, we don't want that man to be a vice president because that man is too ambitious?
Nope. I've never heard that.
Maybe somebody's said it once, but I've never heard it.
But they said that about Kamala Harris, as if that's a negative, that she's ambitious.
So if you put predator and ambitious and has the right look, but is also the right demographic, I thought she would be a strong matchup for Trump.
What I didn't see coming in the primaries, and I didn't see this at all, complete blind spot, is that she was terrible at campaigning, just terrible.
And that was reflected in the result.
She was one of the first to drop out.
But the thing that I could tell about her, which is obvious, is that she's smart.
And remember the ambitious part?
If you are smart and ambitious, you are also coachable.
Coachable. Meaning that if she really, really wanted something, she would go find somebody who could teach her how to get it.
In fact, She's had mentors all her life, right?
That's part of the good and the bad part of her story is that she's had the advantage of mentors, Willie Brown in particular.
So if somebody can learn, then if you were selected to be on the ticket, you would be coached by the top coaches in the world.
Whoever is coaching Kamala Harris right now, Let me tell you something with complete certainty.
It's not her sister, because her sister was the campaign manager, I guess, when she was in the primaries.
And everything that Kamala Harris did seemed wrong.
Something that a professional would have said, how about less of that, and maybe more of something else.
And that never happened in the primaries, but as soon as she became, she sort of disappeared for a while, and then she started talking again, and there were some things that she fixed, which I had predicted, because that's the obvious way this would go, is that she would get better help, and she would get better at doing public stuff.
And she stopped being jumpy.
If you used to watch, her shoulders would go up when she talked.
And it would make her look less confident.
She'd be like, well, I don't know why we're not doing something about this, and why don't we do this?
And that largely stopped.
Now think about that.
That was a lifelong habit that just sort of stopped.
Somebody's coaching her, and she's practicing.
If you can find somebody who's a learner, keep them.
And I'll tell you an anecdote about that in a minute.
So, she had the right look, she had the right demographic, person of color, woman, she was a senator, and she could be coached up to a higher level.
And then when Biden became the likely candidate for the top spot, it was sort of obvious at that point.
Now, let me offer this challenge to you.
I think it was, I might have been, I don't know if I was the first or near the first To say that Biden had a mental disability, meaning that there was something happening with age.
Can anybody confirm that?
Because I'm not going to make the claim, but I don't remember anybody in public.
Here we're just talking about public people.
I don't remember anybody in public who was as early as I was, because it was a long time ago when I said, uh, are you listening to him?
It's not all there. Now it's a little more obvious.
Everybody can see it. But I think I might have been among the first.
So if you take the fact that he can't make it all the way, but he's likely the nominee, add to the fact that she would be the perfect solution to that, and they had some personal connection there, and that apparently Kamala Harris was a favorite of some of the old school.
You know, the Hillary Clinton people were some of her staff in the primaries.
So it all just kind of made sense that she would be the puppet of the puppet.
Or she would be the double puppet play.
So there you go. You want to know the real answer?
It's none of those. I'll tell you the real reason that I predicted it.
And it's none of the things I just said.
They're all true. And I did go through that thinking process.
Do you want to know the real reason?
I could just see it.
The real reason is I could just see it.
I could see it like it was a hand in front of my face.
Now, Probably, that feeling that I could see it, which was identical to the feeling I had when Trump was running, it wasn't that I was predicting it exactly.
I just saw it.
I could just see it, just like I was looking at it like it was right in front of me.
Now, probably, that's just imagination fueled by the fact that the requirements for that to happen were in place, and my brain wasn't quite processing it logically.
But it presented that little movie for me because it had done the work.
It just hadn't explained it yet.
So the explaining it is what I did to you.
So there is a logic and a structure to it.
But the real reason?
I just saw it. I just saw it like it was right in front of me.
Now, you all watched or some of you tried to watch the Democratic Convention.
I tried to watch a little bit of it, but it was just painful and useless and didn't have any point.
AOC is the big story today because she said she endorsed Bernie Sanders in her one-minute speech.
Not endorsed. She said she...
What's the other word?
Doesn't matter. But anyway, apparently that was just a procedural thing because she sort of had to say that, but that she does endorse Biden.
But it certainly looked a little suspicious, gotta admit.
She was not legally, legibly speaking.
I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah.
So, you know, I've warned some of you before.
I'll probably start blocking For this in the future, so I want to warn you.
So there's somebody in the comments who's making a Kamala Harris knee pads joke.
And the knee pads joke, they're funny the first few times you hear them.
You're like, oh, I get it.
It's because of this or that.
Well, actually, it was never funny, funny.
But at least you could understand why somebody would say it the first time.
If you're still making that same joke, About Willie Brown and Kamala Harris.
It's time to let it go.
It's just not funny.
It's not even a little bit funny.
It's not clever. It's not insightful.
It's just bad form.
So eventually I'll probably start blocking people for making that comment because I just sort of just don't want it in my universe.
It's not that I'm offended per se.
I don't get offended on behalf of other people.
It's just so boring.
Just really find something else to say.
Oh, nominated was the word.
Thank you. So AOC used the word nominated, not endorsed.
All right. So let me take a question or more.
Whoa. We got lots of people who want to ask questions.
Let's see if we can get somebody who's really lively.
I think Flip.
Somebody named Flip is going to be interesting.
Can you hear me, Flip?
Hey, do you have a question for me, Flip?
I do. So James Altucher, friend of yours, wrote a really interesting article about the death of New York and how, unlike the financial crisis or September 11th, Now we have bandwidth, so there's no reason for the offices to fill back up or people to come back.
So I'd just be interested to see your perspective on the future of cities in America, specifically New York, but generally the cities.
Yeah, you know, let me give you some context.
A long time ago when the radio was huge and television did not exist, The television was invented and it obviously was catching on quickly.
And then soon there was color TV. And everybody said, hey, I guess radio is going to go away because why would you have this radio in your living room that you all gather around to listen to the radio shows when you have a television?
Makes perfect sense, right?
Like radio obviously will be extinct.
But instead, radio got bigger.
It just moved to the automobile.
It wasn't obvious that that was going to happen and then radio became the Rush Limbaugh's and the Howard Stern's.
It became huge. I say that only because we are really bad at predicting, we meaning all people.
If you look at New York City and you take the most obvious prediction, the most obvious prediction would be why do we need retail stores at all?
We have Amazon. Why would anybody go back to a place that's crowded and congested?
It's hard to do anything.
It's expensive. And now law enforcement has gone away, or it's not enough to protect your store.
So the straightforward walk right down the highway that has nobody blocking you is New York's going to have a lot of trouble, at least with the business part of it.
But going back to my radio versus television analogy, the other possibility is that New York will find a way to be a different New York.
So, for example, all that retail space could get picked up by tech companies.
Just one example.
And then suddenly it's not so much retail stores, but you've got your Googles and your Amazons maybe.
That sort of thing. So it's completely unpredictable.
More unpredictable than anything.
What I think is the least likely outcome is that it will go back to the way it was.
I think it'll have to go back to something different.
But personally, I don't know why anybody would live in New York City at this point.
And I think that the cities might be coming to a close faster than they would have.
I think you're going to find that building homes that people can afford at very low incomes in places where there were no cities and no towns before should be the future.
And that would leave some big questions about what do you do with the stuff that's already been built that nobody can afford to live in.
And at that point, supply and demand should even things out and then it will be cheap to live in New York and people will live there because it's cheap.
That might be what happens to it, oddly enough.
So that's just one possibility.
So I don't know if that came anywhere near answering it, but I think in the future, cities will move to small structures, maybe even single-story things that people could build themselves, but are really good to live in and have schools and everything else you need.
All right, that was my answer. Thanks for the question, Flip.
Thanks, Scott. All right, let's see what else we got here.
How about Jill?
Let's see if we can get Jill to connect.
Jill, can you hear me?
Oh! Kamala Harris pick was brilliant when you said it because I know she just lost and you made the prediction anyway and I said, you know, Scott sees there's free money and he's picking it up because it's like what do you have to lose if Kamala Harris doesn't get anywhere further?
You lose nothing, and if Kamala Harris does win big in this, which she has, then you look like a god, right?
No, I would say that that would have been true with my Trump prediction in 2016, because at the time, nobody thought of me as a political pundit, and nobody thought of me as someone who could predict anything.
But when I got the Trump prediction right, you know, that wasn't as special because lots of you got that right as well.
I think what was different is I said it in public, which made me stand out a little bit.
But with the Cowboy Harris one, once I had been established as somebody who talked about politics, if I had been wrong on this one, I would have been mocked forever.
I would never have been able to turn on my Periscope without a troll coming in and say, why should we listen to anything you said?
You picked Kabbalah Harris to be the nominee, and that's the dumbest thing that ever happened.
I would never hear the end of it.
I love predictions that are out on the edge because they stand the greatest reward, and that certainly did right there, and I loved it.
And as for the cities going away, I think the original reason cities became in existence in the first place in civilization was for protection against marauding wild people that were on the outskirts of the cities.
And I'm not sure that would not go away in the new future with Antifa and Antifa-like groups and marauding people who are looking for stuff.
I love that point because, yeah, the earliest cities had walls around them, and they were fortified for defense, as you just said.
But today, we might still want to put the wall around New York and Seattle, but for a different reason, to try to keep all the marauding people on the inside.
Don't let them get into the countryside.
I live here in Seattle, and it's not so bad.
Just to the north end of Seattle, we had some protesters on the corners, and that was great.
You could go down there and talk to them.
And there's nothing really in the areas that aren't right in the middle of the city.
So right in the middle of the city is where all the protests have always concentrated.
So it's not so bad as you might think.
What about the retail stores?
Once you get out from the epicenter of it, are the retail stores open and functioning?
The retail stores are open and functioning.
A lot of them are low in stock because they were raided by some organized criminal Activity that went through and just looted them all at once to just dilute the police presence.
They got a bunch of their windows busted in and were ripped off majorly.
Like Best Pife, for example, was practically cleaned out.
I went down there to shop the other day and there weren't any products on the shelf that I wanted.
So I had to order them off Amazon.
So those retail stores are good except for the fact that they don't have any products to sell?
That's it, yeah. All right.
That could be better. All right, thanks for the question.
Thank you, sir. All right, let's take another one.
That doesn't sound like an ideal situation.
They've only been robbed once and have no product to sell, but otherwise, they're terrific.
Let's see if I can get this to work.
Okay, that one didn't work.
That was for you, Justo, but you went away.
How about Will? I think Will...
Might be here. Will, do you have a question for me?
Good, good. Thanks.
I was kind of writing it down and didn't get finished with it, but we've seen the far left causing mayhem.
It's gone on across the entire globe from Europe to here we see Antifa really causing a lot of trouble in the cities and it just it seems like we may be headed to a place where the normal people get fed up with this and take up arms against the far left and I'm afraid this could be a worldwide Little pockets of civil war.
Do you think that there's any possibility of this?
You know, I'm hesitant to predict because you could get canceled pretty easily for making it sound like you're promoting violence, right?
So let me be as careful as I can by starting out and saying I don't promote any violence and I don't hope that any of this happens.
But if you were just going to connect the dots and say, what is the most likely outcome of what you're watching?
It does end with some firearms.
That would be the most likely outcome.
Because it doesn't look like the protesters are going to just burn themselves out by making their point and moving on.
Because the ones who just wanted to make a point about systemic racism, I feel like they made their point.
There's no more point that needs to be made.
The ones who just want to destroy everything and tear down, they don't have an end date because there's no reason for them to stop.
They're having fun.
It seems like it's a social event, gives them meaning.
So what would stop the worst of them, the ones who are there for anarchy, not the ones who are there for social justice?
What would stop the anarchists from just going until everything's gone?
Nothing except force.
And it does seem that the citizens don't seem to want to put up any force in the cities where it's happening.
And probably because it's not that close to their personal homes.
As soon as this moves close to homes, that's when you see like the couple who brought out the firearms.
That'll happen everywhere.
So as soon as the protesters leave the zone where it's just a business, where there might be some business insurance, people have a different investment, emotionally a different investment in their work than they do in their family.
But boy, you've seen a few anecdotes of the few times that Antifa has gone into a little bit more rural or suburban area.
The McCloskeys, yeah, the couple that brought out their guns.
In rural areas, you know, my neighborhood, there are a lot of guns around here.
I mean, people don't bring them out, but I can tell you for sure, this neighborhood's pretty strapped.
And people would take out their self-defense at the moment the Antifa showed up.
So... But that alone isn't going to stop anything because it'll just go where it's a softer target, right?
If they get resistance, they'll just go somewhere else because they don't have a reason to quit.
But what would give them a reason to quit is if something bad happens.
And again, I'm not promoting it, so don't cancel me.
I'm not saying you should do this.
But the odds of one...
Let me tell you what it would probably look like.
One military veteran...
Who has some skills.
I'm not going to say more than that, right?
Just one military veteran who just says, you know, this has gone beyond protest.
This isn't the First Amendment.
I would die for the First Amendment.
If it's just freedom of speech, I'll die for you.
That's, you know, a military person might say such a thing.
But if you're destroying my country, I have a vow to protect it, and I don't see anybody else doing it.
So the odds of somebody with a military background getting almost activated, if I could say that, because remember, if you're in the military, you're programmed.
You're actually wired differently than anybody else.
For good or bad, you are wired to be a different creature.
And I think some of that lasts, I would assume.
I mean, if PTSD can last, I would expect that also the rest of the training or experience would have some lasting benefits.
And it would only take one event, again, I'm going to speak generically, just one event that would make it a really bad idea to go out in the street and be identified as Antifa, because they would think it would happen again.
Now, it might have to happen more than once for people to say, uh-oh, it's a trend.
It happened twice.
But I see that as the likely outcome, that there will be somebody with a military background who will say, not my country.
I'm looking around.
Not my country. The media would paint that person as far right and they would become a villain.
The entire news media is run by leftists pretty much other than Fox.
Yeah, it would become a story about the crazy Republicans.
Yeah, you're right. It would become one of those stories.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a Republican or even a conservative who might just have enough.
It could be just somebody who lost their store.
It could be somebody who was a victim of it.
Somebody who, you know, a friend got beaten up by Antifa.
It could be just somebody who's had enough.
But in all likelihood, if there's...
Let me just say this.
These things don't stop without force unless the group that's doing the bad stuff has a reason to stop on their own.
And they very much don't.
The ones who want anarchy only want to stop when everything's broken.
So only force will stop them and the government has indicated that it doesn't want to use it, at least the local government.
And because we don't have a dictator, it turns out we don't have a dictator.
Surprise! Trump's not a dictator.
The federal government won't move in and we'll let the local people just destroy their own city if they want to.
The only way anything stops is with force.
If it's not going to come from the government and be sanctioned and the appropriate kind, it will happen.
It will just come from another source and then that's when the bad stuff happens.
Does that answer your question?
It does. Great. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. All right.
Let's take another one. If that don't get me canceled, what will?
All right. Cryptic, are you there?
Hello? Can you hear me, Cryptic?
Do you have a question for me?
Scott, how do we save music?
How do we save music and art?
What's the save? It looks pretty good to me.
Let me elaborate. Well, actually, have you developed that thing where when you look at an artist's profile and you kind of say, oh, I could tell that they're an artist and Is there anything that you're kind of developing with that, like a theory with why that's so?
Because I'm actually a rapper in Austin, Texas and I feel like with my background in business degree economics and all that, I feel like I'm really singled out and I'm just like looking at everyone around me and it's insane.
It's like the way everybody is like in the music business like You know, super Black Lives Matter supportive and stuff, but do you know why that is?
Yes, I do. In fact, my book, Loser Think, is on that exact question.
It has to do with your talent stack.
So, as you said, if you have exposure to decision-making fields, business, economics, law, medicine to some extent, engineering, any of the fields that teach you how to think, You're probably going to do better in understanding your world and dealing with it.
The people who become artists have two problems.
One is there's a self-selection thing.
So the people who decide, hey, I think I'll be an artist, it might be because they're good at lots of things and they chose that, but it's also a lot of people say, I just don't like math.
Math isn't going to be my thing.
I don't want to sit in an office.
So there's a self-selection thing.
And then there's a non-exposure, because they're not doing the things that would teach them how to make decisions.
And then there's the associating with other artists, which is likely if you're in that world.
So they have three things working against them.
Self-selection, who they hang out with, and then lack of exposure to decision-making.
So it's pretty straightforward.
These are people who are either unable or untrained by To look at things rationally and I feel sorry for you if you're in that world and you have to deal with them because have you tried to have any kind of a rational discussion with your peers that you're talking about and is it just head shaking?
It's not just a difference of opinion, is it?
There's something else going on there, isn't there?
Right. It's literally like I'm watching two movies on one screen.
Like my own movie, and then I'm watching them have discussions that...
I just want to jump in there and just say, why do you guys think this way?
But I just have to bite down and just kind of accept it sometimes because...
I feel like it's just so overwhelming, the difference in opinions.
It's wild. So just for fun, try this.
The next time these topics come up with your friends, if you don't want to out yourself as the one who disagrees, just try to give some clarification and say, you know, suppose the protesters got everything they wanted, you know, in social justice, etc.
How would it be paid for?
And if they say, well, we'll get the top 0.01% to pay for it, then you say, why would they stay around?
Why would they stay in this country if they're being pickpocketed?
Anyway, see how that goes.
Will do.
Oh, yeah.
Move to Austin.
I'll see you here whenever you eventually move over here.
Well, it's not impossible.
Thanks for the question.
Take care. For sure. Take care.
Alright, how did I get so many listeners for taking questions?
I'm surprised. Alright, let's see if Daniel has a question.
Daniel? Hey Daniel, you have a question for me?
The last question in a way.
I wanted to ask you about education.
A lot of us don't really like the idea of college these days.
I've been. I really didn't like learning that everything had to be understood through the lens of race, class, and gender.
So I kind of wanted to ask you, as far as a liberal arts education or learning how to think, what would you recommend as a starting place for a personal system for that?
Well, for learning how to think.
If you want to understand the people who don't think well, and I think that's a good start, Google persuasion reading list.
So you'll find my list of books that are in the persuasion and influence realm.
So I'd say that's a good start because it tells you what is irrational and why people are like that.
Then the fields that get you to think better are Economics, law, engineering, science, anything that has any kind of a structured The process for figuring out what's true and what's not is going to get you there.
In economics, you spend a lot of time figuring out which variables matter and comparing two things to other things.
So you end up just automatically building a brain that does that reflexively.
I use this example all the time.
If I talk to somebody who is not experienced with economics, had no influence, and I say, is this president, whatever president, doesn't matter which one, doing a good job or a bad one, They'll say, oh yeah, good job.
Or they'll say, oh, terrible job.
He's botched everything. But if you ask an economist, hey, economist, is this president doing a good job or a bad job?
The economist will say, compared to who?
Right? Because that's the starting point.
Compared to what? There was no other president doing the same job at the same time under the same circumstances so that you could see how they acted compared to this one.
Sure, everyone makes mistakes, but on net, is one of them going to be better than the other?
You don't really know. It's unknowable.
So The Economist is just completely on a different page with the person who hasn't studied any of that.
So in terms of college, I would say that the softer the skill, the less useful it is.
Okay. The English literature, Russian studies of literature, I suppose.
You can tell. Just go for the ones that have some decision-making elements to them, and you'll do better.
But do take some kind of a writing and speaking course.
Those are good for everybody.
All right? Thanks, Scott.
Appreciate it. All right. Take care.
Yeah, college is going to be really different in a few years.
I'm glad, finally.
Let's see if Michael Sweet has something to say.
Michael, do you have a question for me?
That is anticipated?
The chaos, yes.
Go ahead. If there is no result from the election by the time the inauguration comes down, I think it would go to the House of Representatives.
Do you think that's so, and how do you think that would play out?
Well, I'm no constitutional scholar, but I would think that if we don't have a result by Inauguration Day, that our options would be to either postpone the election or to have it again, or postpone the result in the inauguration, or to redo it.
And I don't know the legality of any of that, but I imagine we could make it pass legal muster.
Because I think the Supreme Court is going to say, no, the Constitution says these are your deadlines.
But the Supreme Court is humans, not a machine.
So if you say to the humans on the Supreme Court, but you know, this year we just couldn't do it.
It wasn't an option. I think at that point people just get flexible and they say, well, you know, okay, we're originalists and we don't like to deviate from the Constitution, but the intent of the Constitution was to get a good result that people believe.
That would be easy. Nobody would argue with the fact that the intention is to get a credible result and the Republic requires that.
It's not optional.
It's not optional that people believe it was a real election.
Not in our system. That's not optional.
So you're going to do whatever you can to make that problem go away.
And I think that's going to be either delay or just redo it.
Just wait. So you might get a few extra months of a Trump administration that the other side didn't want if he lost, which I don't think is going to happen.
So that's where I think it will go.
I think people will just get real flexible.
But I also think That there's really no chance of having a credible outcome in the first pass.
It just doesn't seem possible.
It doesn't matter who wins.
It just doesn't seem possible.
So the one and only outcome I can see that would be credible enough to avoid election-related mass unrest is if Trump won by a landslide.
Or I suppose if Joe Biden won by a landslide.
So if either of them won by such a margin that even whatever stuff happened with the mail, you could even say, okay, 2% or 3% of that, which would be a lot, right?
If you had 2% or 3% fraud in a national election, that would be a lot of fraud.
But if one of them wins by 10%, you can let it go.
So anything short of a major landslide Which is not really common in our system, at least lately, is going to be trouble.
And I think that means delay or redo.
So that's my guess.
Great. Thanks, Scott.
Thank you. I appreciate you. I always appreciate your perceptions.
Thanks. All right.
Let's see who else is here.
How about Sammy the dog?
Sammy, who has an icon like a dog?
Are you there, Sammy?
Sammy may have been watching on a device that doesn't work for this.
So we're going to try Didi.
Didi, whose name is two parts that are the same.
Didi, do you have a question for me?
It has to do with the word chaos.
I recently observed many Democrats using that word.
Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton used it, Michelle Obama used the word.
This chaos, do you think it's an effective branding word?
Or do you think it's weak?
Well, you know, I've been asking myself the same thing because they use it all the time.
I do think that people have a sense that everything's unbalanced and that things need to be rebalanced.
So chaos definitely gets you there.
It's like, hey, this president is full of chaos.
So I think they're using chaos like they use dark.
You can take anything he does and say it's chaos.
How about the way he dealt with the Middle East?
Well, it's just chaos.
So it's a word like botched where you accept it uncritically.
If somebody says, well, this manager is not managing as well as this other manager, you might say to yourself, well, I have a different opinion.
Let's look at the variables.
Let's look at, you know, really compare these.
But if somebody says that one person creates chaos, you feel like you're done.
Because you're never going to want the chaos, anything.
It's just an automatic, no chaos, thank you, no, thanks for offering, I don't need any chaos.
So, dark, chaos, botched, any of those words that have In them, a sense of non-specific badness are very good because they don't have enough specific badness to work with.
So as long as they can keep using these general words about his personality, his credibility, his chaos, they don't have to explain exactly what he did wrong or what they would do better.
And that's bad for them if they have to explain the details because the details don't work in their favor.
What the Democrats want, first of all, they don't agree with each other.
So if you're a Democrat and you're trying to sell the national unity, hey, everybody vote for this one person, it's better if you don't get too specific, because if they do, their own team will leave.
As soon as they say, we're going to do this or that, people who are Democrats will say, wait a minute, that's not what I signed up for exactly.
I wanted something way more left to that.
So the Democrats have to hide their intention from their own side as much as they have to make a case against Trump.
So that word works really well for that, I would say.
Now, I've often said that Trump has the reverse message, which is law and order.
Now, law and order is not punchy.
Like, you know, botched or chaos or dark.
It's a little too boring and ordinary.
So if the president could come up with a response word, and the best play for the president would be to use the word against them.
Because remember how fake news the president took the gun out of their hands and flipped it around?
It's just like that.
If you look at the rioting, it's chaos.
So you could certainly make the case that the Republicans are the anti-chaos team and the Democrats are the chaos team.
I'm kind of surprised he hasn't done that yet because it's such an obvious play.
So maybe you'll see that.
All right. Thanks for the question. You're welcome.
Thank you. All right.
Let's see what blues lover has for us today.
Blues lover, can you hear me?
Do you have a question? For podcasts, I am a former California person, moved to South Carolina.
And I'm also an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation, Native Americans.
And I feel that Native Americans are not being acknowledged in the current climate.
With mention of the 1619 program, and also...
Watching a young girl in Georgetown saying black people used to live here, encouraging white people to move out.
But so did my people.
Good point.
So yeah, my tribe is actually from the southeast complex of Mississippi and Alabama.
So although I'm a conservative and I'm really against identity politics, I want to know how Native Americans can become part of the conversation of lifting people up or just our general acknowledgement of who we are in education or economics.
Well, that's a good point. It was only a few years ago that I thought I was Native American too.
I had the Elizabeth Warren problem.
My family, we had all been raised to believe that we had some proportion of Native American blood.
But when I did a DNA test, it turns out it's zero.
Exactly zero. And I've heard a lot of people since then say that they had a similar situation.
So I guess it was trendy to say that you were part Native American, which is part of my answer.
Native Americans have always had sort of a positive image in the standard, you know, European-based person who came over to the United States.
So there's always this mythic, you know, Noble kind of a thing.
So people would often say, hey, yeah, we're one of those too because it was so positive.
You like to claim it as part of your identity.
So you have a little different situation.
You don't want to have apples and oranges here with the black community.
But of course, if you notice last night as each of the states got 30 seconds to do their nomination of Biden, that there were a number of Native Americans who were selected to represent their state.
And I only watched it for a little bit, but I think I saw three out of maybe 10, and I thought, wow, that's really very high recognition of the Native American populations in those states.
But you're right.
You're right. The problem with the Black Lives Matter movement is that if it works, it's self-destroying.
Because if it works, It would cause extra attention to go to one part of the public and the rest of the public would say, wait a minute, we weren't in favor of extra attention so much, we just wanted equality.
So you can imagine that anything can overshoot the mark.
So I think Black Lives Matter will destroy itself because it has a message that It has a timer on it.
You can see the fuse is burning and you're saying, okay, this isn't going to last much longer when the leaders of Black Lives Matter are saying, Or even members are saying, let's kick these white people out of their house and give it to black people and stuff like that.
So it's sort of self destroying.
So let me say this. Is what you're looking for more attention because you would want more resources to go in that direction?
Or is it more just a recognition that you're looking for?
I think a recognition, but also perhaps resources.
Trump has been great for the Native Americans.
He's signed The Murdered Missing Indigenous People bill, as well as allowed tribal lands for us to leave it to other people in the tribe, which previous presidents had not signed, including Obama.
So he's done a lot, it just doesn't get attention.
So as somebody who, let me just say, For you and your audience, when I hear people say we're a nation of immigrants, it kind of bothers me a little bit.
And I don't like identity politics, but I'd like us to be acknowledged at the table as just being equal, not being better than or original or anything, just at the table.
But you know, to my other statement, Do you find that there's much day-to-day any kind of discrimination against Native Americans?
Is that even part of your experience?
Well, I have blonde hair, part of the colonization.
So there is some discrimination for Indians that don't maybe fit the complete bill.
By the way, we don't go by DNA. We do go by genealogy.
So, you know, we have actually, there's a card that people get if you're an enrolled member.
So it's kind of interesting.
But I think we are being discriminated against with the 1619 Project.
Oh, that's true. Yes.
Well, in the sense that your place in history is minimized by that.
Yeah, you have a good point. Or being erased.
Yeah. Yeah, like the beginning.
Yeah, I can see that.
So you have the disadvantage of numbers, right?
What percentage of the United States is Native American?
Is it 2%, 1%?
It's under 3%.
Yeah. It's under 3%.
Yeah. So having numbers would help.
Everybody who's in that 1% or 2% is going to have trouble getting attention in this world.
So your point is well taken.
Thanks for the call. Thank you.
All right. Interesting.
All right. Let's see if we've got another caller here whose name I will not try to pronounce.
Hello, caller. Can you hear me?
Hi. How do you pronounce your first name?
Ching. Okay.
Ching. Do you have a question for me?
Yes. So my question was about building good habits like Sometimes like I have bad habits like I don't want to get out of bed and like then I just make myself more and more miserable and I know that every time I don't procrastinate I just get up and I do my meditation or do anything I'll feel better but for whatever reason sometimes I just keep slipping back into those bad habits.
Now, when you're in it, and let's say you're laying in bed, and you're saying, I should get up, but I'm just not.
Is that the situation where you know you should, and you're just not doing it?
Yeah, I know I should, and then I think I start tormenting myself with all these thoughts.
All right, try this. So this is a tip from my book, Loser Think, and it has to do with how to break couch lock.
Because I have this myself.
I'll be sitting on the couch and I'll be perfectly happy, but I know I'm supposed to be doing something else.
I just can't get myself off the couch.
My brain is having a conversation with my body and it's saying, you know, you should be doing something else.
And my body is just like, nope, I'm going to sit on the couch.
Here is the hypnotist trick for breaking that.
You wiggle your pinky.
Just wiggle your pinky.
Because your brain won't have an objection to that and neither will your body.
So you just wiggle it.
And then you let that wiggled finger go to the rest of your hand and you just move your hand.
As soon as you move your hand, you'll be able to move your arm and you can stand up.
So in other words, you take agency over your body because for momentarily, it's as if your body and your brain are disconnected.
It's almost like they're having a conversation with each other.
Hey, get off the couch. Not really.
So as soon as you take control of the smallest part of your body, just wiggle your pinky.
It reactivates your connection, and it tells your body who's in charge, and then your executive function can say, off the couch, and now we're onto something else.
That's the first thing. Second thing is you should develop a system, a consistent system of rewards for anything you want to do more of.
So if you want to exercise more, make sure that when you're done, immediately after you're done, exercising is always a reward.
I like to have a nice smoothie that is delicious, spend some time looking through my phone and just have some downtime and not work.
And to me, that's like a delicious little 35 minutes there.
And so that reward just trains us like dogs to seek the reward even if we're not consciously thinking it.
So there's a book called Habit.
By Charles Duhigg.
D-U-H-I-G. Might be two G's, I forget.
And he teaches you how to develop habits.
So I would recommend the book Habit.
Try the pinky trick.
And give yourself a reward for whatever you want to do more of.
And that will get you started. Okay?
Thank you, Scott. You're welcome.
And that was a...
Very functional question, because there are probably a lot of you who are saying, you know, I'd like to hear the answer to that question.
Let's see if Taylor has a question.
Taylor, come to me.
Your technology has failed.
Taylor, we will go with Amy.
Amy, Amy? Amy, can you hear me?
Are you the Amy who recently sent me something in the mail?
No, I'm the Amy who told you that Fitton was not a lawyer.
Oh, yes.
That was quite a shock to me because I just assumed he was.
I think it's because the person who had his job before that was a lawyer, right?
I don't know about that.
He's been doing that a long time.
I just like the fact that he's got pecs and bi's, you know.
He's pretty strapped.
Well, you're a little bit younger than I am, but we're fighting to keep our young appearance and all that kind of stuff, particularly as a woman.
It's really necessary, as you might not know or do.
So anyway, I do have...
I've been struggling with this, sending kids back to indoctrination centers from people on the right and people on the left wanting to keep the kids home, which you would think that they would want to keep their kids indoctrinated or...
In that, so I've been struggling.
I have a grandson at home, and he's going in person two days a week, and I've got him home three days a week, which has been wonderful because now I can see what he's not getting.
And it's scary as all get out.
It really is. Yeah, I don't think a lot of us, I will speak for myself, I don't think we knew how bad it was.
I was opposed to public school because I saw...
The destruction of just putting kids in that environment.
Because kids are terrible to each other.
It's awful. You're guaranteeing that you're putting your kid into a bullying situation unless they are the bully.
So there's no good answer there.
So it's a very cruel...
And I've spent a lot of time trying to think, well, would it be better to homeschool?
Because then you don't get to socializing unless you really work on making sure it happens.
I don't know. On balance, I think public school is bad for kids on balance, given that you could educate them a different way.
Well, my grandson is on the spectrum.
And one of the things that is nice now is that they aren't demonized as they were like when we were in school and we didn't really even know what we were dealing with back then in the late 60s and 70s.
And so there is a lot of understanding.
But then again, he's just for the socialization.
But as a literalist, I'm afraid that he's going to suck all this stuff and turn into something that really won't serve him best in the long run.
Oh, you know, I think it's going to go the other way.
Because when you say on the spectrum, are you saying on the spectrum like he'll be an engineer someday?
Or on the spectrum like he has more problems than that?
No, that's the goal, because he truly is a math genius, and he has perfect pitch, so he's a music genius as well.
I wouldn't worry about him.
Because here's the thing.
He's wired, based on what you're saying, he's wired for rational thought.
And if somebody tells him something that he can't see and observe, I just don't know he's going to be gullible.
So you may have raised somebody who is unusually resistant to the very thing you're worried about.
Well, that's what the hope is.
That's what the hope is. Because, you know, dad has a degree, has a master's in computer science, and we've got another son with a PhD in chemistry.
And, you know, and I have a STEM degree and my husband has a STEM degree.
So, I mean, they don't have a chance.
They don't have a snowball's chance in hell of going to the left, I hope.
Well, we'll see.
All right. Thanks for the call. Well, thank you.
All right. Take care. All right.
Let's do one more. We'll take Donna and then we'll wrap if Donna's technology works.
Donna, are you there? Good morning.
What's your question? I'm curious if you read the New York Times article or any of the other responses to the thousand page Senate report.
I glanced at it, and it looks like they're trying to make an opposite claim of reality, but saying, you know, about Trump's campaign ties to Russia, etc., etc.
I'm having trouble making all of that mesh with everything that you've been talking about.
And, you know, I want to be able to talk about it with people in a way that makes sense.
So I'm curious if you read it and if you have any comments on it.
I don't read the New York Times because I don't...
Because I don't trust it as being a credible news source anymore.
I hate to say that. I mean, it's just the worst thing in the world.
And I don't say that as a partisan.
I say that as an objective fact.
The news just isn't really giving us news anymore.
So I don't read it.
And if it's beyond a paywall, I'm not going to pay to read something I don't trust.
So you're saying that they're making the case That the Trump campaign did have connections to Russia?
Is that what you're saying? What it said was that some people in Trump's campaign talked to some Russians.
Well, that's true. Yeah, so the claim is that because there's a lot of information about people in Trump's campaign talking to Russians, that that proves everything that they've been talking about since the beginning.
Yeah. Well, I think you just have to dismiss that as the fake news doing what the fake news does.
You know, the most normal thing in the world is for an incoming administration to have People that they know in the Russia sphere.
Keep in mind that Russia's objective is to make sure that whoever the administration is, or even if it's a maybe administration coming in, that they would give them as much contact as they possibly could.
Because the more contact, the better from Russia.
So remember, you got Russia doing perfectly legal things, which is have a phone call, have a meeting, Talk to somebody, create a channel.
So it sort of would have to look like this.
Under every situation, I believe it would look like this.
It wouldn't matter what the administration was.
So the way I would answer it is, you realize that whoever is the next administration after Trump, whether it's this year or some other year, whoever is next is going to have a lot of initial contacts And past contacts with Russian folks.
So you should first explain it away as normal and say it's going to be like that for every administration regardless and always has been.
I'm sure there hasn't been a past administration that didn't have some serious contacts with lots of Russians.
They have an embassy. They have a reason to have contact.
We have a reason to have contact with them.
There's nothing unusual about it.
So there's no story there is what I'd say.
Gotcha. Okay. Thank you, Scott.
I appreciate it. All right. Hope that helped.
Okay. I don't want to go any longer, but I was surprised that we got as many people here to watch this.
Let me just wrap up on the Democratic convention last night.
It's obvious that this recorded speeches and stuff just doesn't have the same pizzazz as anything live, but I thought they did a little bit better job last night.
I don't know who the candidate is who's running because it seems like he's a non-entity except for his name.
Everybody's just waiting for the moment that Joe Biden has to talk to somebody without looking at a teleprompter.
Everything else kind of doesn't matter.
So we've got to see that before we know anything.
So Bill Clinton talked and got mixed responses, and even CNN, one of their panelists, was making a big deal about, why isn't he canceled already?
And that question just lingers.
So... Oh, is tonight the nomination?
Official nomination tonight?
All right. Well, I don't know if that'll be interesting either.
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