Episode 1262 Scott Adams: All the News, Fake and Real, With Coffee
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
China's eventual full control of everything
Mask risk management
News Review Board to call out Fake News
COVID SuperSpreader mouths
Biden Admin and buyers remorse
Stalling tactics, desalination and salt brines
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I'll bet I'm sideways, aren't I? Can somebody tell me if you're seeing me sideways or right side up?
Yeah. Okay.
So, most of this trip, as I tweeted earlier, because you go to a new environment and there are all these controls and user interfaces and buttons you have to learn, I swear half of my life is just figuring out new buttons.
For example, the toilet here has this two-part button where, you know, depending on your business, you push one button versus the other.
And it has this unique design, which is sometimes the button flushes the toilet.
And when I say sometimes, I mean one times out of three, And the other times you can jam it as much as you want and nothing happens.
Now you're thinking to yourself, it's because the bowl has filled or the tank is filled.
Nope. It has nothing to do with that or when you do it.
It's just that it only works one time out of three, one time out of five.
And my entire environment is filled with that.
I'm using Periscope right now.
The comments are coming streaming sideways.
So I can't read them very well.
I'll try, but they're sideways.
Instead of the way they normally go.
Why? I don't know.
How many times have I used Periscope?
A billion times?
But this time it doesn't work?
Oh, here's what I could have been doing.
Instead of Periscope, I could have gone to YouTube and livestream on there.
Now, you probably know that I've been livestreaming on YouTube for Months and months and months, every single day.
So, if you were to say to yourself, does that guy know how to livestream on YouTube?
Does he know what button to push to make YouTube happen and livestream?
Yes, he does, because he does it every single day.
Except, for reasons I don't quite understand, those buttons don't exist anymore.
And I honestly don't know why.
I open up YouTube, Just like always, look at the app, look at it on a browser, look at it on a different browser, and that little button that I've been pushing for months to go live, live stream, it's not there.
I don't know where it is. Now, you say to yourself, I'll bet you could solve that, Scott.
You know, you operate in a complicated world.
I bet you could figure out where that button is and why it's not there.
It might have something to do with being in another country.
I don't know. That does make some of the apps not work.
But here's the thing.
If that were my only interface problem, Yeah, I could probably take half a day and Google it and figure it out.
But I'm surrounded by these.
Everything I've touched has become a technical problem today.
Everything. Every button, every piece of software, every device.
I've got several electronic devices.
So we've reached the point In civilization where a full 50% of our time in any given day can be given up to fixing your printer, reloading your software, figuring out why the car doesn't do what it used to do before.
So there's your world. Alright, let's talk about the news.
In California, it's reported that the government of California will not tell its citizens what kind of formulas and statistics and algorithm, I guess, they use for deciding what to do about coronavirus.
And the reason they're not telling the public it's reported is, and I quote, state health officials said they rely on a very complex set of measurements that would confuse and potentially mislead the public if they were made public.
That's right. So in California, my state, I'm not allowed to see what kinds of information is used to determine my entire life.
You know, what happens with the coronavirus.
Isn't that a problem?
Now, I understand the point that it's complicated, people wouldn't understand, they would take it wrong, it would cause some problems.
But, is that a problem with the people?
Is that a flaw in the public?
Because to me it looks like a flaw in how they're measuring things.
If you're doing big public policy like this and you haven't simplified what it is you're measuring and therefore managing to, you're doing it wrong.
So as soon as somebody says, yes, we're managing to a complex, stop.
It's already wrong.
You don't need to hear what even the rest of the sentences.
Let me say that better without butchering it.
If a politician says to you, we're going to make decisions based on a very complex, stop.
You don't make decisions about public policy based on complexity.
Because if you do, the public won't understand it, they won't buy into it, it won't work.
So you need to simplify it somehow, even at the risk of being less accurate.
Simplicity is really, really important.
So there must be some way they can simplify their decision-making down to, you know, if, I don't know, School children or people over 65 have X infections or something like that.
Now, it would be deeply imperfect, but probably better than what they're doing now.
You know, you could be 80% imperfect And it might be better than the current situation, which is not telling the public why they're doing what they're doing.
Plus, we're not so smart that being really complicated in our formulas is going to get us a better result.
We just don't know. We don't know what works and what doesn't.
So being complicated about it That might be adding complexity to the unknown, which is really just getting you further from anything useful.
So simplify, simplify.
That's my advice. Seattle police have made a startling decision.
This surprised me. I think you'll be pretty surprised too.
So the Seattle police are going to do this thing called cracking down on crime.
You've heard of crime. That's when people do things that are against the law, such as rioting and raking windows in businesses and vandalizing and stuff.
And up until now, I didn't know this, but apparently they were just spectating.
So the police were more of a spectating situation, but now they've decided they're going to crack down on rioters who damage businesses.
And I'm thinking to myself, now I would like to have been in the brainstorming meeting for that, right?
Wouldn't you like to have been in the brainstorming meeting?
Okay, your comments are going sideways, but I can see that a lot of them have the word SIP in them.
And I think that means that you're telling me it's time for the simultaneous set.
And I believe it is.
And if you'd like to enjoy it to its full potential, all you need is a cup or a mug or glass, canteen, jealous, no, a thing, more things that liquids will go into without spilling.
There are several of them with different names and blah, blah, blah, blah, the dopamine hit of the day.
It's the best part of the day.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
Go! Are you ever frankly amazed that I can't remember the thing that I say literally every day?
You shouldn't be, because it's actually completely normal within the landscape of my brain.
One of the things that Christine and I love talking about is the differences between what she can do and what I can do, things her brain can do that mine can't.
She can memorize Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata in three acts, which has how many notes?
I don't know. A lot of notes.
Thousands and thousands of notes in a specific order.
And she can memorize that.
I can't memorize a thing I do every day.
It's just a few sentences. So, different brains.
Anyway. China has decided to ban the Trump administration, or ex-members of the Trump administration, from ever entering China.
To which I say to myself, is it getting a little bit too obvious that China and the Democrats are sorta, you know, hand in the glove?
Now, you can say to yourself, but Scott, they're not working together.
They just both don't like the same thing.
There's nothing unusual about that.
But every time we see a situation where the Democrats and China are on the same page, there should be a little flag that goes up in your brain that says, huh, maybe you ought to look into that a little bit more.
So, honestly, I think there's an inevitability to China's control of our information and our government, I think.
Because it goes like this.
Whoever has the most money wins, just in general.
Eventually, just because of the sheer size of China, if they just grow at some normal rate and the United States grows at some normal rate, China's going to be bigger.
And it won't take long, because they've got more people, so that's all it takes.
When they have immensely more money than anybody else, they can start bribing like crazy.
And they can send millions of people to embed themselves in other governments and other countries until eventually they have full control of everything.
So there are really only, I guess, three things you'd need.
For China to control everything?
Immense amount of money, check.
They have immense already, but even more coming.
Are they willing to send millions of people into undercover jobs around the country or around the world?
Yes, we already see them doing that.
And then third, they have to be willing to do it.
They have to think it's a good idea and a high priority and just willing to do it.
And they are. So if you take those things, what's going to stop them from eventually having at least a financial direct or indirect control over everybody?
Take me. I'm a giant critic of China, but even I have business that goes through China indirectly.
Not my own personal business, but if you look at my publishers or my people I work with, they have China business.
So pretty much everybody's got something to lose or will have something to lose if they speak out against China.
That's where we're heading.
Where you won't be able to criticize China, because they'll have too many controls in too many places.
What would it take for China to control CNN? What would that take?
I think all it would take is to open up their market and say, yeah, you can have some news here, but after you've got a nice profit there and your stockholders like it, we're going to say, you know, maybe you can't stay here if you keep talking the way you're talking about that story.
So, China has a whole bunch of different ways to directly and indirectly apply financial pressure or incentives to people.
So I don't really know how they could ever avoid having full control of everything, just by money, without firing a single shot.
I don't know what would stop that.
I can't think of anything.
The only thing that would stop it is what Trump was doing, which was looking to decouple our business.
It looks like Biden's probably going to reverse that, I think.
And therefore we will have no plan compared to China's long-term strategic plan, which is largely guaranteed to work in the long run.
The only part you don't know is how long it takes.
You don't have to wonder if it happens, it's how long it takes.
I say the same thing about the integrity of our election system.
And I'll say it about every other country.
Any country that has an election system and enough openness that people can get in and mess with it if they had a reason to.
Eventually, I would think any voting system would be compromised by the intelligence agencies of either their own country, so that the intelligence agencies could have more power, or by an outside force.
And again, it's exactly the same question.
It's not if it's going to happen.
It's guaranteed.
It's just when. Has it happened already?
Or is it in our future?
That's the part we don't know. But it has to happen.
There's no way around it in the long run.
Of course, there could be surprises, right?
So a straight-line prediction of anything is always the worst prediction.
So when I say it has to happen, that assumes nothing's different between now and whenever it might happen.
But things change, so there could be lots of things that would get you off track there.
We're seeing calls for Fox News to be banned from the White House.
Now, this, of course, would be the mirror story for Trump banning CNN for a while.
I don't know how long that lasted.
But the call for banning Fox News, you knew that was coming.
But, of course, the stories that talk about it will give examples of things they say Fox News got wrong and riled people up and blah, blah, blah.
What they don't talk about in the same story is how many things CNN got wrong and how many things MSNBC got wrong.
Because the claim is that Fox News is a special brand of wrong news.
I don't see it.
I don't see it at all.
The criticisms that they leveled Sort of depend on magical thinking, which is, let's say they know that Fox News is wrong about some things that you couldn't know they're wrong about.
They might be wrong, but you couldn't know they're wrong.
So I'm not going to get into the specifics of that, because I don't want to get kicked off of social media.
But, you know, it's amazing that, in my opinion, I think it's true.
I don't want to be a mind reader, but I believe it's true based on observation, see what you think about this, that the people who are saying that Fox News should be banned from the White House and, you know, taken off the air or whatever else they're saying, I think they actually believe that CNN is giving them real news.
Don't you think? I don't think that they think that CNN is biased propaganda, but it's on their side, so that's okay.
I don't think they think that.
I think they're completely unaware that all of the news is the same.
They're just differences on topics.
But there's no such thing as one of the news that's nailing all the stories correctly.
That doesn't exist in any world.
But I think they think it does.
And I'm going to get to that point in a little bit.
We'll say more about that in a bit.
All right. I was also reading on CNN, which I read for entertainment, not news, an opinion piece in which somebody smart was on the air saying, and this is a direct quote from CNN, quote, and this is an opinion person, not a news person, who they had.
It was an opinion person that they had on to talk about it.
And this person said, it doesn't matter who it is.
It's the point that matters. It's been very clear from the data that states that have implemented strong mask policies have a slower increase in the number of cases, or even a decrease.
But it's not mask alone, says this person.
It's mask in combination with other measures, such as distancing and improved ventilation and hand washing, etc.
I don't know if that's true or untrue.
It's my personal opinion, based on science, that masks probably work.
When I say probably, Ninety percent.
Nothing's a hundred percent these days.
But I'd say, just my personal opinion, not an expert, not a doctor, and not even looking at the studies.
Just the fact that if a mask slows down the spread from your mouth and that's the problem, it just makes sense.
It probably works.
And social distancing, how do you get something from somebody you're not near, right?
So it makes sense to me that these things work.
But why have I never seen a reliable study or set of studies that say that?
Doesn't that seem missing?
Is it because of my news sources?
Because the gentleman who made this claim didn't point to a source.
How many people believe that this is a true statement, that science has looked at the data and they're quite, quite certain, based on what they've seen, in a scientific, logical, data-driven sense, that masks work?
Where is that data?
Now again, I believe they do work.
I think you should wear your mask until there's some proof that they don't work and we don't have that.
But where is the evidence that they do work?
Doesn't that feel sort of suspiciously missing?
It's just the most obvious thing, right?
If wearing masks is so important, Why doesn't CNN and anybody who wants us to wear masks point us to the data and say, look, we're not making this up.
This is not us just trying to guess on science.
We're looking at actual studies.
Here are the studies.
You can look at them yourself.
Take your skeptics in, look at them, and you can see that these masks work.
Now, Democrats believe these studies exist.
I think they might. I'm not saying they don't.
But why don't I know that?
At this point?
And I like to use myself as sort of a canary in the gold mine, or in the coal mine situation, which is, I follow the news pretty closely compared to the average citizen.
Pretty closely.
I follow it on the left, I follow it on the right.
Every single day I check both CNN and Fox and compare their stories.
Every day. That's part of what I do here.
And I don't know.
Where I would look to find the definitive study or studies that confirm that masks are lowering infections.
Now, I have seen lots of studies of laboratory tests.
If you've seen a laboratory test where they say a mask doesn't have the density to stop the virus because the virus will pass through, do you know that those are worthless?
Because you might not if you only watch news that's sort of right leaning.
You could test all day in the laboratory, but it's not really testing the real world situation.
I'm pretty sure the only way you would know if masks work, because obviously air is getting out somehow.
You couldn't exhale unless the air was getting out somehow, right?
Anyway, my bottom line on masks is that it's not just that we don't know, it's that they're not pointing us at an authoritative source.
That's got to bother you, right?
If they want us to believe masks work and the science is unambiguous, that's what the claim is, How come they don't just point to it and say, here it is?
And every time this subject comes up, Joe Biden says, look, I know there are a lot of doubters, but here's a link.
Go look at it yourself.
Ask your best data people to look at it.
It's really clear.
It's right here. I don't think that exists.
Now part of the problem is that I don't think you can measure it.
I don't think that we have the ability to know that a certain, let's say, city or state had better or worse performance because of masks.
I don't think we can know that.
I think we can only know what happened.
We can't know why.
Now, statistically, you could often tease out a cause, but there are so many variables going on and we don't understand the interplay of all the variables, and they're big ones.
We just don't know. I mean, you know until recently, we didn't know that it's hard to get the virus from a surface.
We didn't know until recently that the super spreaders are really the problem.
If you could get rid of all the super spreaders, you'd probably get on top of this pretty quickly.
So there's a whole bunch of stuff that are really, really big variables that we didn't know just recently, until recently, and I would argue there's probably a whole bunch of variables we still don't understand.
So I don't believe it is scientifically, logically possible for us to know that masks have worked by observing them in the field.
I don't think that's a thing.
That feels like confirmation bias.
That said, it's my opinion that masks work and you should do what you can to wear them.
All right, and I say that in terms of a risk management calculation.
Maybe they don't work.
I mean, it's a strange world.
I could be surprised.
But the risk management is that You know, there's not that much risk of wearing it.
It's just a huge pain in the ass.
But if it saves lives, well, maybe.
Alright, the other news was the New York Times had an article that the blood plasma idea was saving lives.
Now, the idea is that you would take some blood out of somebody who had already recovered and had antibodies.
You pump that blood or some condensed version of it into somebody.
And they would acquire the antibodies from the person who got them and then they would be better off.
I was very happy to see that for five minutes.
That's how long it took.
Somebody smart to debunk it.
Now keep in mind this is in the New York Times.
It took five minutes to debunk it.
Now when I say debunked, I don't mean proven that it was incorrect.
But I do mean proven that you shouldn't necessarily believe it.
I still think it almost certainly works.
If I had to guess, it would be hard for me to imagine it not working, because it's a well-known process that's been used for other things.
There's just no reason it shouldn't work.
But, as one of my Twitter buddies who's really good with data, Anatoly Lubarsky, He follows me.
I think if you just Google him, you can find him.
He's an excellent follow.
He's a game designer, but whenever there's this data kind of a claim, it takes them about five minutes to debunk it, and it doesn't matter what the claim is, and it's really actually impressive to watch, and I hate it.
I hate it, love it, because I often will be tweeting studies that I think are a big deal, and it's good news, and hey, this is great, and we've learned something.
And then Etatoly Lubarsky comes in five minutes later with the counterclaim and the other study that shows it's bullshit, and I think, ah, not again.
Got me again. I don't know if the plasma situation actually works.
I do know that there's at least one study, as Anatoly said, that showed it didn't.
So now we have a study that shows it didn't, a newer study that shows it does, but apparently the newer study that shows it does, according to Anatoly, was a small study and not well constructed.
So we just don't know if it works, I would say.
I don't trust any of the studies until you've had lots of confirmation of them.
Here's one of the things that...
Oh, and let me back up to something I've been talking about before.
I told you I was going to form a news review board, if you will.
It's a brand new idea, and the idea is to find some independent thinkers who you could rely on to tell you what fake news is fake news.
Now, that should be helpful for people on the left and the right.
It's not about just calling out CNN. It's about calling out everybody.
So it doesn't matter if you're left or right.
And at first I thought I would organize it, meaning actually have a group of people who talk to each other and they know exactly what the topic is and then they rule on it or something like that.
But I'm starting to think maybe I should just create a list of trusted sources and then you can do what you want.
You can go follow them and you'll get better ideas.
I'll tell you who's on the list so far.
for different topics.
Andres Backhaus, Michael Schellenberger, Michael Tracy, Eric Weinstein, Christopher Hill, who also is great at just using the logic of anything that's technology related.
And then I'm going to put Anatoly Lubarsky on there.
Now, none of these people asked to be on my list and they may not be happy to be on the list, I don't know.
I'm just saying that if you were to follow the people I mentioned, and I'll add to it as I go, You would get the point and the counterpoint to a lot of things which you've only seen the point to.
If you've only seen a claim, you don't know anything.
So these are the people that you would rely on to know where the counterclaims are and to look at the counterclaims and the claims and give you a sense of what's crazy and what's not.
It doesn't mean that these are the people who will be right every time.
It does mean that they're very smart And they have independent minds and they have a background and history of being wherever the data goes.
Very rare. They're very rare to find people who will follow the data and the logic and will do it in public and will do it consistently.
I named a few. I'll be adding people as we go.
All right. So that's where that's at.
I don't know that it needs to be organized.
Maybe you just need to know who these better minds are and you can follow them.
All right. We've learned recently that These super spreaders are the big problem and that those people who are super spreaders literally have more virus in their mouth and nose.
So you can find that some people just have a big dose and when they talk or sneeze or whatever they do or cough, they have more virus to send out and that's worse.
Here's a question I ask, and I assume this is not possible, but I just like to think of fun, optimistic things sometimes, so don't take this too seriously.
If a gigantic amount of virus in your mouth means something, could you invent, is it possible, a lozenge That would turn color or change taste if you had the presence of a lot of coronavirus.
Is that possible?
Now the first thing I say is the cheap, fast tests are a chemical reaction in which something changes color, right?
So are those deadly chemicals?
Are those chemicals you would never want to put in your body?
They should only be in the chemistry test.
Or, is there any way you could make a lozenge that you'd suck on it for a while and then you'd take it out and look at it and find out if it changed colors?
And you could just take one every day.
Just take a lozenge every day.
Now, suppose there was also a lozenge that you knew would kill coronavirus.
And you said, hey everybody, we don't know if you have coronavirus or not, but Why don't you just maybe chew on some of these lozenges a few times a day?
Would that make a difference?
If you used the right mouthwash, would it get rid of the coronavirus in your mouth?
Or do you need something more specific to get rid of a virus in your mouth?
And secondly, if you could get rid of your virus with mouthwash or a lozenge or just some physical process, How long would it take for your mouth to be full of virus again?
In other words, if you killed everything on the surface of your tongue, on the inside of your mouth, would it be five minutes later it's full again?
Or is it tomorrow?
Because that's a big deal, right?
If it's tomorrow, all you need is mouthwash to end the pandemic.
Right? Am I wrong about that?
But I don't think it's tomorrow.
It's probably closer to five minutes than it is to tomorrow, how long it would take to produce more virus to live in your mouth.
Yeah, so people are joking about bleach.
It does seem to me that, have you ever seen those teeth cleaning lights where you put the solution on your teeth and then they shine this blue light on you to help the chemical do its reaction?
It does seem to me like you could have some kind of a UV light, if it's the right kind, I think it's far UV or something, or UVC, that you could just stick in your mouth, literally like a flashlight in your mouth, and just go, aww, stick it in there with a UVC light.
And clean in, you know, maybe 30 seconds, clean all of the virus that's at least on a surface and in your mouth.
Would it hurt you? I don't think the far UVC light would hurt you.
I think other kinds might.
But here's my main point.
If the biggest lever that you could pull turns out to be finding and stopping the super spreaders who have a lot of it in their mouth, Why don't we go after that directly and just make everybody put something in their mouth that kills it three times a day and see what happens after three weeks.
So, anyway, I just put that out there.
I doubt there's any scientific thing there that would work or else we probably know about it.
Alright, here's another positive thing.
There are now new super, let's say, air purifiers.
Prior to the pandemic, there were HEPA filters and air purifiers, but they were not quite up to the task, right?
You couldn't just turn on your air purifier and everything's good.
You needed a leap of technology, and now apparently those leaps are happening.
So there's a company called ActivePure, which I believe they do as one word, ActivePure.
So you can Google them if you're interested.
And they make this box that looks like, just from the picture, it looks like it would fit on a tabletop, you know, a portable thing you just plug in.
And apparently it's really, really good in terms of removing the virus from the air and killing it.
And it's so good that it might be the difference between opening a restaurant and not.
That's actually how good it is.
Now, these are claims, you know, you have to be careful about who claims what.
But, what if a restaurant was willing to get one of those, or more than one, depending on how many zones they have.
I don't know what they cost, but, you know, people are going to be willing to pay some money to get back in business.
What about a rule that says if you have one of these per whatever square feet they handle, because they only handle a certain amount of square feet, what if you had the right amount of these?
Is that a good enough reason to reopen a restaurant?
I feel as if we should push to get an answer on this really quickly, either an up or down, right?
And I'll make a direct call to the Biden administration And say, dear Biden administration, if you have somebody who could do a quick look at this device and look at the science, look at the data they have, and just give us an up or down.
I think the public would like to know that.
We'd like to know if we can get back to our indoor spaces, especially restaurants and recreational things.
That entire industry has been devastated, and we would like to get that back on track.
So Biden administration, Up or down?
Do they make enough difference to maybe recommend and maybe fund?
Maybe Biden would say, let's give you some financial aid to get some of these into probably senior citizen homes and restaurants and anywhere that we need them.
Now all of this depends on the fact that this technology works.
I'm not the one who can guarantee that.
I'll just tell you their claims and there have been at least some research and studies.
Alright, you've probably seen the video if you're on social media in Tacoma that there was a police car that was set upon by a mob and the mob was jostling the police car and they surrounded it and the police car decided that it would have none of that and just drove forward and it looked like they ran over completely one of the protesters.
So at least one person got hurt And I thought it looked like I saw the tires go over a person, like all four tires.
I thought I saw that, but it was hard to tell in the video.
That might have been an inanimate object of some type that they were going over, but it looked like a person.
And this is what I have to say about this.
Do we all agree we don't want violence?
If you can avoid violence, nobody promotes it, nobody celebrates it.
We're all adults here.
We know that violence has no place except in defense.
Can we be adult enough to say that in self-defense, nationals for defense as well, that violence unfortunately is a necessary tool in some cases and there's just no way around it.
This is one of those cases.
I would like to see a lot more...
I hope I can say this on social media without being banned.
But I think the best thing that could happen to Tacoma is a whole bunch more police cars running over a whole bunch more people who surround police cars.
On top of that, I think citizens should be doing a lot more of it too, but unfortunately they're going to go to jail if the judgment is that they could have done something else.
But I feel as though this trend of cars being surrounded and attacked Needs a solution.
And I don't see the government being involved.
Do you? Have you seen any government action that would make any difference to this?
I haven't. So the only thing I can imagine that would stop the trend is that every time you see one of these stories it goes like the Tacoma story.
A car was surrounded and then the car ran over the people in front.
How many times do you need to hear that story before it stops happening?
So now we've heard it once and maybe it's happened a few times in the past.
It needs to be every time.
And those people need not to be punished.
In fact, here's what I like.
I'd love to see our government say that we don't plan to prosecute anybody who gets out of a situation that way.
If your car is surrounded, you have the right of self-defense.
Let me put this out there.
Sooner or later there will be a, you know, somebody's going to be prosecuted for this, right?
There's going to be a trial in which somebody's car was surrounded and they got out of it by running over somebody and injuring them or killing them.
I want to say this in public as part of their defense so they can actually use this video later.
To me, as a reasonable human, this is my opinion, not my legal opinion.
I'm not a lawyer.
In my opinion, as a reasonable person, this is self-defense.
And it's unambiguous self-defense.
And the reason I say this in public is that I'm a reasonable public figure.
And that if you're a jury, and someday you're wondering to yourself, was this person being reasonable?
That person can call on this video and say, look, other people are reasonable and they say the same damn thing.
That in this situation, it is self-defense.
Even if you're not, let's say the windows haven't been broken, and so arguably you could say you're not quite in an imminent threat, Would that be the argument?
It wasn't imminent enough because your windows were still intact?
Not good enough.
Because the time it would take between breaking a window and dragging your body out is too short.
Too short. That's like saying a gun is pointed at your head but they haven't pulled the trigger yet.
It's still imminent, right?
You can kill the person who has a gun at your head.
That's fair. And I want to add to that that the car being surrounded is identical in my reasonable citizen mind.
So any jurors who are looking at this in the future, I would ask you, Does it seem unreasonable to get into that situation with force?
I think you will agree with me that if you were in that situation, you'd want to get out of it before the windows were broken.
So I support the police officer who did that.
I would be terribly disappointed if there were any charges about that.
They obviously have to look into it, but...
That's a police officer who served the public.
That's somebody who deserves a commendation, maybe quietly, but a commendation.
Here's the funniest but most tragic part about the story in the news today, not that story but the world, is that Democrats who voted for Biden will tell you in many cases that they were really voting against Trump.
Now what is the downside Of having a strategy where you're voting against somebody, not so much for somebody.
Could that ever come back and bite you in the ass?
Well, one way that could go bad is if the person you voted for was not quite as stellar as you would imagine in your mind.
And now we're going to see that start to play out.
And you can guarantee that's going to happen.
There will be buyer's remorse because, number one, people didn't really care too much what Biden was going to do.
So they didn't look into it that much.
I think that's a fair general statement that people didn't care so much what Biden was going to do.
They just cared he wasn't Trump.
They say that directly.
I'm not reading minds.
People say that pretty directly.
So now you're going to watch what he actually does.
And the first week, A little rough.
And none of this is funny, by the way, because there are real people getting hurt with this stuff.
But let me give you some, we'll walk through it.
And this is where you learn the difference between an opinion and a half-pinion.
Now, I made up this word, a half-pinion, to cover the situation where people will look at the cost of something but not the benefits, or they'll look at the benefits and not the costs.
And Democrats do that all the time.
It's almost a defining feature of the left that is not as common on the right.
On the right, people will say, well, if you do this, it's going to have this cost, so let's balance that.
On the left, they'll say, let's do this.
Let's do this, because we like fresh air.
Yeah, fresh air is good.
Let's do this. But they haven't figured out what that's going to cost them.
They're starting to learn that via a process called the news, be it as it may.
So here are the things going on.
So Biden does the 60-day moratorium on new oil and natural gas leases.
And New Mexico, the state of New Mexico, is saying, yay, yay, Joe Biden, who we voted into office as a blue state.
And so apparently New Mexico has started to realize that if Joe Biden does exactly what he promised to do, and apparently he is, at least on oil drilling, etc., that they will lose a ton of money in their tax base that pays for their schools and their health services.
So New Mexico just realized that they had been suffering under a half opinion, and they just figured out what the other half was.
You lose your school funding, you lose your state funding, you lose your jobs.
But is New Mexico the only ones?
No, because Biden also has canceled the Keystone Pipeline, which should cost a lot of jobs.
And the unions that supported Biden are going to lose a lot of union jobs and they're now realizing it.
Why? Because it turns out that get rid of the Keystone pipeline was a half-pinion.
Now they've learned that if they'd had an entire opinion, they would have anticipated this loss of jobs and loss of tax revenue.
Now, do you think that Trump didn't understand that the Keystone Pipeline had an environmental risk?
Of course he did. That was the whole point.
But he also understood it had these other benefits.
He weighed them, and then he made a choice that I would call an opinion, a full opinion, with the costs and the benefits considered.
Well, Democrats are getting a quick lesson on what an opinion is.
And the half opinion is not serving them as well as they had hoped when they voted for Biden.
So, then we learned, and I don't know the details yet, that more troops are moving into Syria.
For what?
Why are their troops moving into Syria?
Now, presumably, there's somebody on the ground, an American general, or somebody said, we need these troops for some specific thing.
But let me ask you this.
Which is your safer situation?
A president who says no to what generals ask for, even with good arguments, or a president who says yes because he trusts the experts?
Which is your dangerous situation?
Because Trump was the one who would say no to the generals and even basically called them idiots.
Biden is the one who would say yes to the generals and would call them the experts.
Which one is the dangerous one?
Well, I would say that Trump also took the advice from the experts about how to do the rules of engagement.
In that example, Trump taking their advice probably matched his own opinion.
So I'm not sure he took their advice so much as they gave him an opinion that matched his own and then he could say, yeah, we'd like to be a little tougher on those rules of engagement.
But what if, here's the scenario that's scary.
Your general comes in to the president and says, President, we need a bunch more troops to do this or that.
That's what generals do.
The general is never going to ask for less stuff.
The general is never going to say, everything's done, let's go home.
The general is a fighter, and the general might want a job in the private sector, which would be very happy to have a little more war.
So do you want the president?
Knowing the incentives of a general, the way a general is going to conduct things, which will be more, more, more, just like any leader, any good manager in a company is going to go to their CEO and say, I need more.
Those other departments, I don't know about them, but I need more.
That's every manager in every organization.
So a general is going to be one of those.
They want more. They need to do more.
That's how they get their own career does well.
That's how they get that job later in private industry.
So it feels like Trump had been saying no to generals.
I'm guessing. This is just a guess.
Pure speculation. I feel as if Trump has been saying no to generals for quite a while.
As in, maybe you don't need that many people in Afghanistan because there's nothing there that we need to protect.
It's going to go wherever it's going to go, no matter what we do.
Maybe it went something like that.
But as soon as you see Biden immediately sending extra troops into presumably harm's way, what happens to the people who voted for him?
Do they say, yeah, that's what we wanted.
What we wanted was cranking up the war machine.
Is that what the left wanted?
I don't think so. I think they're just finding out what they voted for.
And war is definitely one of the things that I would expect and of a regular politician, but less so and of a Trump, who's not a regular politician.
So Mike Sertovich tweeted about this phenomenon, about the Democrats learning about what they just bought.
And he worded it in a funny way, so I'm just going to read his tweet.
So Mike Sertovich tweeted, It's been less than a week and Biden's voters are outraged.
It's a... I think he meant testament, but it's a testament to how low information they are that any of this stuff surprises them.
That's exactly the case.
They are low-information voters who just found out what they voted for.
And I feel like Republicans largely knew what they voted for.
They knew what Trump was, but they also knew what Biden was.
So they're not so surprised.
But more generally, I'm finding that it's way more fun to be a critic than a supporter.
And watching this develop in slow motion, even though the events that are happening may be bad, and I'm not going to minimize that there could be some bad outcomes, I don't want to make light of the outcomes.
But in terms of the process, It's kind of fun and it's kind of delightful that I can just sit back and criticize Biden for things and I don't have any responsibility for him because I didn't support him or vote for him.
So being able to criticize without the burden of responsibility...
It's way good. It's way better than the old way.
And those who were criticizing Trump for four or five years, now I get why it was so much fun.
I understand how much they enjoyed it, because I'm starting to enjoy it myself with Biden.
All right, here's just a thought, just going to complete a thought here.
When we think about climate change, we tend to think in binary ways.
The binary ways are we either go hard and do a Green New Deal-sized thing that's gigantic and changes civilization and, you know, it's a real drastic thing, or you don't do enough, which looks closer to doing nothing.
So we kind of have this, you know, do nothing and die in the long run according to the climate change scientists.
Or we do something really aggressive and we kill our economy and there are other problems.
But probably there's some kind of middle ground.
And what I mean by middle ground is something that's a stalling tactic.
Something that just puts off any potential problems.
Now I understand that many of you watching still believe that climate change is not real.
I'm hoping that you will evolve out of that belief at some point for the good of the world.
Now, we could be surprised and anything's possible, but my take on it is that climate change is something you have to address.
Now, here's a stalling tactic.
Should we need to stall?
And this is a tactic which might be good to do whether there's a climate change risk or not.
So ideally, you would find strategies.
It wouldn't matter if climate change is catastrophic or less than catastrophic.
It's just something you'd want to do anyway, such as clean energy.
You'll want to do that anyway.
So you don't need a crisis to do it.
But here's an idea. Suppose you get your Generation IV nuclear power plant and you put it in the middle of the desert in northern Africa.
And because it's in the middle of a desert, you don't worry if it doesn't work.
You know, it's a little safer there. If you had a new design for a nuclear reactor and something went wrong, well, at least it's in the middle of a desert.
But, let's say it works, and you're getting lots of power.
You use that power to run desalination plants next to the ocean, and you pump it in the water and you start growing stuff.
So you need more than water to grow things.
You need reforestation plans, etc.
But it can be done.
And let's say you take your goal to reforest the desert areas in Africa.
Now, if you grew a lot of stuff where there used to be desert, would you not have more carbon capture because plants capture carbon?
So that part's good, right?
So you'd have more plants. But there's also another benefit, which is, and I'll need a fact check on this, it's something I've read and I believe it's true, but if I'm off base, I'm sure somebody will tell me.
My understanding is that Atlantic hurricanes form because of the temperature differential between Northern Africa during a certain part of the year and the ocean.
And that temperature difference is what gets the wind going, which gets the hurricane started.
So, if you were to lower the temperature in Northern Africa by vegetation, Would it reduce the power of the hurricanes even if it didn't do much else about climate change?
That would be a stalling tactic because the hurricanes are one predicted problem that maybe in 50 years they would be much worse than they are now.
But if you started now and tried to increase your vegetation and cool down the northern Africa, could you make a dent in it?
Could you do enough in time to make a difference?
So I just put that out there as a question.
Now somebody asked me when I mentioned this the other day, what about all the salt brine that's created by desalination?
And that's a problem, because you don't want a bunch of basically condensed salt.
You don't want to throw that in the ocean, even though the ocean is salt water.
You don't want too much of it in one place.
So the way they get rid of it now is they've got an expensive process where they spread it out and it goes back into the ocean, but they spread it out so it doesn't matter.
Apparently there's a new process where you can fairly easily Change the salt brine into something commercially useful.
Oddly enough, some of those commercial uses are making desalination plants more efficient.
You can actually take the salt brine, turn it into sodium hydroxide, and it's a caustic soda, and it can be used to pre-treat seawater going into the desalination plant.
And pre-treating it helps the process not gum up the works.
So apparently they can make money on this salt brine and what they don't use themselves they can sell because it has some commercial value.
And one of the big problems with desalination plants is that they go offline and this will help them not go offline.
So, I'm just going to put that out there.
I have no idea if this is just dumb ideas or not, but there probably are some stalling tactics that would be good no matter what.
Wouldn't you like to have fewer hurricanes?
Sure. Wouldn't you like to be able to reforest a desert, make it more useful?
Sure.
So maybe reasons to do it anyway.
Yeah, it's salt brine, not salt Brian.
Somebody says give it to Elon Musk.
Well, I think first you need the nuclear power because the desalination plants or desalination.
Which word is right?
You know what I'm talking about.
All right. That is all for now.
Let me show you what it looks like. It's looking good out there.
I think I'll go out and try to enjoy this day.
A few more days here and then Back to life.
All right. Are we still in the golden age?
I think we are. We just don't know it.
I think we're going to realize it.
The pandemic threw us a loop, but we'll get on top of the pandemic.
And I think we're going to learn so much from the pandemic that it's going to look like a better world when we're on the other side.
Let me give you just a small example.
Restaurants and hotels now, instead of giving you a physical menu that's often on a date, will give you a barcode so that your menu appears on your phone.
I love that.
And here's a feature at this hotel.
So I'm at the Four Seasons at Bora Bora.
And a feature that the Four Seasons has is that you just use an app to text them for anything you need.
So anything from room service to making, let's say, scheduling appointments for things during your stay.
You can just send one text, always to the same person, so you don't even have to worry what department you're sending it to.
And so I sit over here and I just say, Can you give me some coffee and some bagels or whatever for breakfast?
And a text comes back immediately, 30 minutes.
And then it shows up.
And I think to myself, every way that this was done before needs to be eliminated.
The only way I want to deal with my hotel is by text.
It's great!
And maybe this is how this becomes permanent.
And the only way I want to see my menu is on my phone.
That's great. And I wouldn't mind having air purifiers in my restaurant anyway, right?
I don't care if it's the normal seasonal flu or somebody's got rabies, I guess that's a bad example, or tuberculosis or something.
I wouldn't mind having one of those active air purifiers in every restaurant, no matter whether there's a pandemic or not.
So there are a whole bunch of things that are going to be better because of what we learned from the pandemic.
So, yeah, I think the Golden Age is still on track, but delayed.
