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March 3, 2021 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
58:25
Episode 1302 Scott Adams: Texas Chooses Freedom, AOC and the Minimum Wage, and Dr. Seuss

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Texas and Mississippi fully open Human smugglers anticipate soft Biden policies Transgender athletes surprise poll result AOC's persuasion and tweet technique Dr. Seuss "offensive drawings"? Gender equality and ethical, moral superiority ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Boom, boom, boom, boom.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
Well, today is going to be one of the best coffees with Scott Adams of all time.
I'm going to say that again, but make it sound like extreme sports.
Today, coffee with Scott Adams, extreme!
It's better that way.
It really is. If you'd like to make it even more extreme, even better, what would it take?
Hmm... Would it take a cup, a mug, a glass, a tanker, a challenge to sign a canteen jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind?
Yes, it would. And I recommend filling that vessel with the liquid of your choice.
Any kind. For the dopamine push of the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Yeah, it's that good. It's that good.
Don't miss it. Here it comes.
Go! I feel so bad for the people who missed this.
Don't you? A little bit.
A little bit of guilt. Well, let's talk about all the things.
Possibly my favorite story of the day.
You might not have heard this yet.
Apparently the BBC, and in this context, the BBC refers to the British Broadcasting Corporation.
If you thought BBC meant something else, Well, you've been spending a little bit too much time on the wrong websites.
Or the right websites.
I'm not going to make a judgment.
But anyway, the BBC, the one that does news, has apologized for airing an interview with someone posing as Senator Booker.
Is that perfect?
So apparently some imposter called up saying he was Senator Booker, Cory Booker, and did an entire interview on the BBC. Now, here's my first question.
Was the interview by the fake Cory Booker better or worse than the real Cory Booker?
Because what is missing from the story is all the crazy stuff that the imposter said.
What if the imposter was just as good as the original?
What if they couldn't tell?
Do we need an original if the imposter does just as well?
I suppose we did.
Yes, and the joke is, I am not Spartacus.
Sometimes you think I'm Spartacus, but I'm not actually Spartacus.
Maybe he's Spartacus.
Definitely not me.
I'm not Spartacus. But that guy looks a little Spartacus-y if you know what I'm talking about.
Go talk to him.
Now, this was a radio interview.
I should have mentioned that.
So it was audio only, so it's easier to fake.
But what happens when somebody can make a deep fake that just mimics their own mouth motions?
So you think you're calling in on a Zoom to do an interview or something, and somebody just puts up a fake.
How far are we from...
An entire fake video answering interview questions.
Now, it would require a real person behind the scenes.
I'm not talking about AI. But AI pretty soon, too, right?
Pretty soon, 20 years.
It's going to take longer for an AI to look exactly like a human in terms of how it acts.
But maybe not 20.
Maybe 10. I've noticed a difference in my trolls.
My trolls are very different lately.
These days my trolls come in and they blame me publicly, on Twitter usually, for not criticizing Trump on some topic that I did criticize Trump.
So it's not like I haven't criticized him, but all of my trolls are coming in and saying, why didn't you say something when Trump was putting kids in cages?
To which I say, I did.
I did. And why didn't you say something when Trump wasn't doing all the right things in the pandemic?
To which I say, I did.
I did do that.
So I've completely run out of trolls.
Can somebody put out the word that I'm under-trolled?
It's just not the same.
I don't want people who agree with me trying to troll me.
Can I get somebody who disagrees?
Please, just somebody who disagrees with me, could you troll me?
Anybody. Just somebody who's got a different opinion.
I miss you.
I miss you. The good trolls.
Well, Texas and Mississippi are leading the way, and I'm going to give Texas the big credit here.
So the governor has said, Governor Abbott has said, Texas is going to open up.
Every business is allowed to open.
Of course, the businesses can decide on their own, but they're allowed to open, and there is no state mandate for masks.
Now, does saying there is no state mandate for masks mean that everybody will stop wearing masks?
No. No, it doesn't mean that.
Do you know why? Because Texans are not a bunch of frickin' morons.
Surprise! Surprise!
Turns out there's a lot of smart, responsible people living in Texas.
And those who damn well better protect themselves until they get the vaccination, yeah, they'll wear masks.
Or they'll not socially mingle with people who might be infected.
So I think you can trust, at least at this point, I don't think you can trust it early on in the pandemic because people were not as well informed, not as well trained.
But I think you can trust that the people in Texas who are at risk will make the damn decision themselves.
They will make the decision.
Now, let's talk about whether Texas is doing the right thing or the wrong thing.
How many of you are positive that Texas is doing the right thing?
And then how many of you are positive that it's the wrong thing?
It's too early! Or as the governor of California said, it's reckless!
It's reckless! Well, here's the argument...
And you have to look at all the variables.
If you look at one variable, of course, you're being dumb.
Variable number one.
Will opening up Texas lead to more infections and death?
What do you think? Do you think that Texas opening up is pretty much guaranteed to have some extra deaths?
We don't know how many.
Hoping it's not a new surge.
But when you say reasonably, it's fair to say there will be more deaths if you loosen up a little bit.
Now, even if you're arguing that Sweden did well, etc., they still had extra deaths.
So I don't think anybody's arguing that there won't be extra deaths, right?
Are we on the same page?
That Texas is pretty much guaranteed...
By their actions to have some extra deaths.
Now anybody who says no, I think you're just not informed.
Because there's no expert who thinks that the measures have zero effect.
There are plenty of people who say, I don't know if it's enough of an effect to be worth the pain it's causing.
But I don't believe there's anybody who says, anybody who's an expert, who says that you'd have exactly the same death rate no matter what you do.
I don't believe anybody says that.
At least in terms of the virus.
They might say it in terms of net, but not in terms of the virus.
So is it the right decision or the wrong decision?
Here's the best argument I heard, and I would recommend this as a good filter on this question.
Question number one.
Does the government know the right answer for you?
Say you are one individual, you live in Texas.
You're just one person.
You're not an average person, because nobody is the average.
Everybody's a person.
Does Texas know what would be the best thing for you, specifically?
I'm not talking about what's best for the state, but does Texas know what's best for you, specifically?
The answer is no. Because if If our government was so well informed and our science was so accurate that the government could say something like, look, there's a 99% chance that what we're doing is the right thing.
I know it's inconvenient, I know people are going to have lots of costs, but we're 99% sure we're doing the right thing in general.
Now, if that were the situation, I would feel that the government had some moral right.
In other words, if they've got good information, they're trying to save the most lives they can, I feel as if they do have a moral right to maybe force people like me to do some things I don't want to do.
In the short run. I don't have a big problem with that concept.
But what happens if the government doesn't know what to do?
What if the government is not sure?
If keeping things closed is better net, if you look at the net effect of mental health and everything else, suicides, drug addictions, what if the government itself can't tell?
It can't tell if it's good for you or not.
Well, then you default to personal freedom.
That is the correct decision.
We live in a country where the correct default The thing you do if you don't know what to do is individual freedom.
Now, if we had really strong indication that that so-called individual freedom would lead to a catastrophe of untold proportions, well, then I think the state government has a role in being the adult in the room and forcing you to do what you don't want to do because it's good for everybody.
There can be those situations.
But this isn't that.
We are close enough to the end of the pandemic, whether it's six months from now or whatever it is, that I do think that Texas has a completely valid argument that they, Texas, can't tell.
They can't tell what's good for you.
And if you can't tell, there is only one morally and ethically responsible thing to do.
Leave it to the people.
Now, educate them as much as you can, right?
Do as much as you can to minimize risk.
But you have to default to freedom in this situation.
Now, should everybody do it?
Do you think all of the other states, Californians, should just say, ah, Texas is doing it, let's do it.
Nope. No.
No. Even if you think that what Texas is doing is 100% the right thing to do, that does not mean that the other states should do it.
Because I'm in California.
We'll probably stay locked down longer than other people.
Even in California, although I am jealous, I'm envious of the Texans who have more freedom than I have, I'm okay waiting.
And the reason I'm okay waiting is that I don't mind Texas being the control, the control case.
I would like to see if Texas runs into a big problem because they're handling things differently, but I want to keep California the same just long enough to know for sure.
I feel as if it's worth risking a state or two to leave them behind long enough to see if there's some big difference.
If it happens to be my state, that's not ideal.
But whether or not my state had changed things, I probably would have acted the same.
Or very similarly.
I mean, I could have gone to more places.
But I probably would have stayed out of...
Even if the restaurant said you could go there for full capacity, put yourself in my shoes.
I've got asthma.
I'll be 64 in a few months.
So I'm sort of on the edge of the bubble...
Depending on your point of view, of risky people.
If California opened up like Texas, I wouldn't go back to normal because I might have only one more month before I'm vaccinated.
Maybe a month.
I'll tell you, my personal risk management assessment is if it's really one month, and I think it is, Before I get vaccinated, I'm going to be extra careful for one month.
Does that not make sense?
That I should be extra careful?
Because now that it's only one month, that's not big risk to save my life, you know, if there's some deadly risk.
If it were six months, maybe I'd say, ah, I've got to live.
But one month? I can wait one month, you know?
I'm going to And I think a lot of Texans, especially anybody over 60, is going to say the same thing.
If they want to take the risk, they have the option now.
So I think this is great.
I just don't know that you could say with any confidence that it will work, as well as they hope it will, but it's great that they've made the decision with this bias, a bias toward freedom.
Every time you see a bias toward freedom, you've got to be happy about that, right?
Even if it's the wrong, even if it works out poorly, you've sort of got to be glad that Texas exists.
So thanks for Texas. You know, I keep watching this developing situation of immigration and the more unattended kids, and I guess the predictions are over 100,000 unattended kids will show up, and there does seem to be clear indication that the smugglers are, you know, the people who smuggle the kids across the border, that they've stepped up operations because they think Biden will be soft on immigration.
And they seem to be right.
Given that every Republican in the world said, hey, if you make it desirable and easy and better to come to the United States than staying where you are, you'll get more people.
And sure enough, that's exactly what's happening.
Now, I feel like what's different and special about this border situation is you had such a clear Democrat standard of what you could or could not do at the border.
And I don't think they're going to be able to hold it.
Because they're either going to create a humanitarian disaster by being too good to people, which looks like that's developing, or they're going to have to change the policy and make it like Trump.
So what happens if this...
And what's special about the border situation is you don't have to wait a long time to see how it turned out.
How long would it take you to find out if something you did for the Green New Deal worked?
It could take decades, right?
You might not know for years and years whether the vast expenses or changes you're doing for the Green New Deal are going to work.
But with the border stuff, I think we'll know with complete certainty within one year, right?
Within one year, I don't think we'll be arguing...
Whether letting everybody in and being friendly to the children and especially kind, we're not going to wonder what that did.
Because we'll just look at it.
We'll know. So what happens if it's a disaster?
Because it looks like it's shaping up that way.
But honestly, I would still like to bet on the government.
I know that's the worst bet.
Betting on the government to do anything right.
It's a terrible bet. But the thing I don't do, that a lot of you in my audience do, is that just because I can't figure out how something could be done, I don't assume that it can't be done.
Now, in my mind, I can't think of any way that making it really, really easy and desirable to get into this country illegally, I don't see any way that could work.
But I'm also open to maybe somebody does.
Maybe we test something.
I've always wondered what would happen if you built a special opportunity zone right along the southern border of the United States.
I'm just going to toss this idea out here.
Suppose the United States says we're going to build a zone where you can move your manufacturing from China to here, and for however many years you won't pay any taxes or there'll be tax rebates.
Maybe there's no minimum wage.
And what you would do is build this manufacturing zone that would absorb the people coming over the border.
So they would come over the border, but then they would learn English and they would learn a skill.
They would have a job.
They'd be doing something that's good for the country.
And they wouldn't even get into the interior of the country because you would have a whole zone which would be the very best place for them to go because it would be built for them.
It would be built for a place that Wants as many employees as I can get.
Come on over. But it would be American-owned and run.
And you would just use it as an immigration control that has the secondary benefit of reducing our dependence on China.
Could you do that? I don't know.
So I don't know if any of that would be practical or economic.
But you can imagine...
You could imagine really creative ways to approach immigration, which as AOC says, and I'm the only person on this livestream who's willing to say this, I like the fact that she wants to do something that we don't know how to do.
I like that.
I want my leaders to be pushing us to do things that look kind of impossible.
And this looks kind of impossible.
Being kind to people on the border at the same time you're controlling your own country's fate?
I don't know how to do it.
Do you? I don't know anybody who knows how to do it.
AOC is pushing it without knowing how to do it.
I don't hate that.
We can't do it until we know how to do it.
But I can't hate the fact that she pushes the impossible.
I kind of like it.
I think mentally that's where I like to be.
How do we do the impossible as opposed to saying, well, that's impossible.
Walk away. Can't do it.
So I think she's a valuable asset even if you think all of her ideas are bad.
But what's going to happen with the kids in cages situation should have some carryover effect to other Democrat stuff.
What happens if the, let's say hypothetically, And it looks like it's heading in that direction.
Let's say the immigration policies of the Biden administration become an unambiguous disaster.
So much so that even Democrats say, ah, this is a disaster.
It didn't work. What would happen to their other policies?
Because isn't the main problem with Democrat policies...
That they have somewhat lofty objectives, which you might like.
You know, everybody's doing well and making money and there's fairness and equality.
Those things all sound great.
Who's against any of that?
But if you don't know how to get there, that's the problem.
So I'm thinking that even the Green New Deal will suffer if the immigration thing falls apart because it will feel the same.
Immigration has this weird quality where you say to yourself, wait a minute.
Human nature guarantees that your plan can't work.
And I think people will just take that thinking to other Democrat policies.
So I think the Democrats are really in trouble with immigration, not just because of immigration.
Here's a question to you.
I'll base this on overhearing something the other day.
I was in a position the other day to overhear some teens talking about I'm going to be as generic as possible.
Talking about lifestyle things and some things that would be in the general social discussion, let's say.
And I was blown away.
I mean, absolutely blown away.
Because things coming out of the mouths of young people, very unfamiliar to what I would have heard in my day.
Is it better or is it worse?
Probably better. Probably better.
Because what I heard was an insane amount of lack of bigotry.
Insane. Like a kind of an open-mindedness that...
It's just shocking in a good way.
It's shockingly healthy to hear young people with not even a trace of what you would have considered, I guess, a normal amount of bigotry, sexism, anti-whatever, anti-this or that.
It's really weird. But at the same time, the young people will talk quite bluntly about ethnicity.
That's very much on the top of people's thoughts, this group.
But it has more to do with cliques and who's friends with who.
It doesn't seem to be about race.
It seems more about who's hanging out with who.
But I'll tell you, if you want to feel or see the future, if you want to see the future, you've got to listen to kids talking candidly.
It's pretty positive.
But here's the bigger question I have.
Could you teach kids, if you get them young, to be politically independent?
You could. But would we?
Because you'd be taking away the parents' responsibility in some sense.
Because, you know, you think the parents are the ones who should determine their opinions as opposed to the school.
But I wonder if you couldn't teach young kids that blindly joining a political party and assuming that everything that one party says is right and everything the other party says is wrong, couldn't you teach them just that that's always wrong?
Just to prepare them for the fact that the other side sometimes is right?
I feel as if you could prime them to make them a little bit more fluid in later life about whether they would You know, cross party lines or just be open-minded to stuff.
So I know you couldn't teach a kid to be a Republican or a Democrat, because that would be way over the line, but couldn't you teach them how to not fall into a team mentality?
And you don't even have to mention which team you're talking about.
Just don't make your decisions based on the team.
That's it. I think you could.
You can get them young enough.
It seems like that would be valuable because...
Most of our current problems are this team play stuff.
There was an article on February 21st in Wall Street Journal by Martin Koldorf.
Koldorf seems to know what he's talking about from Johns Hopkins.
So he's a medical professional from a credible place.
And he's saying that in this article, it's now a few weeks old, that the Number of COVID cases, how rapidly it dropped in January, can't be explained by the holiday traffic.
Now, I had been saying, duh, infections are down because it's not Christmas anymore.
And you could pretty much track the holidays or the spikes.
And then after the holidays, things calm down.
It's pretty universal. And so I thought it was pretty clear.
To me, it seemed I could be wrong.
But to me it seems really obvious that the traveling for the holidays is the big problem.
And that when it's done, you would get less of it.
And it makes sense to me because I would think...
If I were to put the single biggest variable, it would have to be the amount of time you spend indoors with bad ventilation.
So I'm not counting...
Let's say if you're in Africa or India and you always have your windows open because it's always hot.
So that's different.
But if you're indoors with the windows closed, it's how many people are coming in and out and are in close contact.
It's probably just that.
When I say just, it's probably 60% of all infections are exactly that, something that happens in your own house or in a house.
So I don't know how holidays could not be the explanation of most of the dip, but his claim is that the only way to explain it would be if people have T cell immunity from related coronaviruses, maybe Or there's way more infection, so we have more herd immunity than we know.
What do you think? Do you think that we can just look at this data?
Can we just look at the curves and look at the data and make the conclusion that it's T-cell immunity?
I feel like that's a little too far.
I feel like we don't have the data to say that that's the case.
But his case is an argument by ruling out the other things.
So can you rule out the most obvious thing, which is that holiday travel brought people together who don't get together and put them indoors for a long period of time?
So I'm going to say I don't buy it.
I don't buy it.
I do buy the general notion that there might be more immunity in the public than we know, and that it might be a pretty big variable.
But I think the big dip had to be the holidays.
I just feel that way. All right, we need more.
Yeah. We need more information.
So apparently some more rocket attacks are happening in Iraq on American military bases.
And there was a contractor who died from a heart attack during an airstrike.
So I don't know.
Was it the airstrike that killed him?
I guess you could say so.
And here's the real question.
So now that Biden had responded to the last attack by Iranian surrogates, is this Iran just seeing how far they can push Biden?
Is that what's going on?
Because if Iran is saying, oh, we'll just keep pushing, just keep pushing, would they have done this under Trump?
Do you think that Iran would have attacked A second military base through a proxy, not directly.
Do you think they would have approved that attack under Trump?
I feel as if no.
But you can't know, right?
But the thing that Trump had going for him is that he was less predictable.
And I feel like we put Mr.
Predictable into the office and Iran is just running with it because they can predict him.
Maybe. We'll see.
So I guess Governor Cuomo of New York was stripped of his emergency COVID powers just weeks before they would have expired anyway.
Can New York get any dumber?
I think New York seems to be setting new records for dumbness because I don't believe that the governor's emergency powers were really the problem here.
Was anybody arguing, you know, he did ask if he could kiss that woman two years ago, so therefore he should not have emergency COVID powers.
What? I feel like New York is just shooting the missiles in the foot because they're mad at their governor.
Why would you want to take away his tools if you're keeping him in the job?
Yeah, we'd like you to still be in charge, but could you do it with fewer tools?
Well, why would I do it with fewer tools?
No reason. It has something to do with a girl you tried to kiss, a woman you tried to kiss.
So, how does that make sense?
It's just like New York proving how dumb they are, no matter how mad you are at your governor.
All right, are you ready for the most controversial part of this periscope?
Are you ready? I'm going to bring up a topic you hate, But I'm going to put a new twist on it.
So you should stay for the new twist.
Because it's even new for me.
There's a Rasmussen poll on what people think about transgender athletes.
And specifically, of course, everybody's talking about transgender athletes playing women's sports.
And we found that the majority of the public is against it.
The majority of the public...
Doesn't favor transgender being able to play on women's sports teams.
And so we should go with the majority, right?
What do you say? We live in a sort of a democracy-ish kind of a place?
Should we go with the majority?
All right. Well, here's something that you could pull out of these numbers, the Rasmussen poll.
Women under 40...
57% favor transgender athletes playing female sports.
So the category of people who are most directly affected, besides the transgender athletes themselves, are women under 40.
Because they would be the ones on professional teams, the ones who recently played sports, you know, not that long ago in high school and college, and would even be having kids at 40...
You know, that's the age where your kids are getting into athletics early in school.
And that group, the ones most directly victimized, can I use that word?
Because that's how it's being spoken.
I don't use that word to speak of this.
But some people are saying, hey, what about that That biologically born female athlete who now can't get first place because the transgender athlete is just getting all the medals and winning everything.
If the people who are most affected are by a strong majority in favor of doing it, is it any of your business?
Do you think everybody should have the same weight of opinion if there's only one group that is impacted by it?
Right? Should these two people have the same vote on this topic?
There's a hermit living in the Alaska outback...
American citizen, so American citizens get to vote, get to have an opinion, but doesn't have a kid.
It's a man. It's a hermit living in Alaska.
How is that person in any way important to this question of transgender athletes?
Completely unrelated.
Does that person's opinion, should it count as much as somebody who is the very center of the question?
Which is non-transgender athletes who would be affected by having people on the team that are superior athletes.
What is fair?
So forget about the question, forget about the topic.
Forget about the topic being transgender athletes.
Just forget about it. Just answer the question in the generic question.
If the people who are most affected, victimized, if you want to call it that, Say, let's do this by a strong majority.
This is a strong majority.
It's overwhelming.
Shouldn't they get what they want?
Why is it the hermit in Alaska who gets an equal vote?
Somebody says, stop.
You're going to go away.
Rose, you don't get to be here anymore.
Hide user on this channel.
Okay, you're gone. Now, again, I'm open to any counterarguments.
I like counterarguments. And in fact, this is weird, but I enjoy being proven wrong, because I think it makes this better.
You know, the thing I do.
Anytime I can be proven wrong, and it's confirmed, That's kind of exciting to me.
Because I don't feel any shame from that.
I feel like everybody's wrong.
So if you can learn something, good.
Alright, so my only thing I'm going to add to that is, although legally everybody gets the same vote in this country, we don't want to change that, sometimes you should look at who's affected.
Right? And to me that matters.
Alright. AOC is making more news by saying the minimum wage should be raised, of course.
But I want to show you her argument style.
So here's a tweet, and we'll talk about whether the minimum wage should be raised, but that's going to be separate.
I'm just going to talk about her technique, her persuasion.
So I told you I'd try to teach you something every live stream, and here we're going to learn from AOC's technique the same way we would learn from Trump's persuasion technique.
Here's the tweet. AOC says, it is utterly embarrassing that, quote, pay people enough to live is a stance that's even up for debate.
Override the parliamentarian and raise the wage.
So she's asking her own party to act differently, asking Biden and Harris to override this.
McDonald's workers in Denmark are paid $22 an hour, plus six weeks paid vacation, $15 an hour, which is what she wants in this country, It's a deep compromise, a big one, considering the phase-in.
I mean, considering you don't even get to 15 for a number of years.
Now let's talk about her technique.
I love starting out with, it's utterly embarrassing.
Because she's taken an economic question and moved it directly into feelings.
If you're going to influence somebody, you want to go for the feels, because they'll always argue you on the data.
If she made her argument entirely upon data, people would just argue the data.
They'd say, well, you don't know that, can't be sure.
That's it. So arguing with data would have no real value.
So she doesn't.
That's what makes her a little bit better than other politicians.
She doesn't do the thing that won't work in terms of persuasion.
Then she says that to pay people enough to live is a stance that's even up for debate.
That is really, really good framing, even if you don't agree with her point.
We're not talking about the politics or the policy.
But that's just so well said.
I mean, it's just framed with perfect persuasion.
And then she goes on saying what she would like to be done.
Again, perfect persuasion.
Your persuasion is useless if you make a point and don't have a specific thing you're asking for.
So she makes her point, goes right to the specific request.
Again, perfect form.
And then she does the comparison thing, where you make a big first ask so that whatever you're asking for sounds not so bad.
So she uses the Denmark comparison because 22 is such a big number.
When you're only talking about raising it to 15, then your brain starts to say, wait a minute, Denmark's at 22, and the country's not falling apart.
Denmark's doing okay. 15 doesn't sound so bad.
Don't get ahead of me. Don't get ahead of me.
I know what you're going to do.
I'll get there. I'll get there.
It's not all good.
So I read that, and I thought, well, that's a pretty good argument.
Now, for background, AOC has a background in economics.
A lot of people don't understand that in college she actually has an economics degree.
As do I. I have a degree in economics and an MBA. And if you were to ask me, Scott, forget about the morality part.
Forget about the morality.
Just, does this work economically?
Because the things you're looking at is you're not just raising somebody's pay.
It's coming out of somebody's pocket.
So how many businesses will go in a business?
How many fewer employees can be employed because now you can't afford as many of them?
How do you do the math and figure out what works?
Now, wouldn't you say, Scott, every time you depart from the free market and you put the government in there, you get a worse result?
How many of you believe that?
In the comments, tell me.
Is that a fair thing to say?
Is that a good general statement?
That whenever you remove the free market and insert government control, that's never good.
Right? Never good.
Well, if you believe that, why do we have a minimum wage now?
Why do we have a minimum wage now?
Do you know...
I can't remember specifically, but don't you think that whenever the minimum wage was put in place or the minimum wage was raised, don't you think we had the same argument every time?
Was it right the last time?
Do you remember when they raised the minimum wage to what it is now, and then the economy fell apart?
It didn't.
It didn't. It's the same argument that we know wasn't true before.
We don't have to guess.
We know. Because the minimum wage has been raised before.
And And the country survived.
Now, did it cost people jobs?
Yes, of course. Did some businesses probably go out of business?
Yeah, the ones that were so weak, so weak, they couldn't afford to do this.
Were those businesses going to last?
Were those the businesses who were paying a lot of taxes?
No. They couldn't have been paying a lot of taxes because they didn't have enough margin to even give their employees a raise.
So, You have two arguments here.
And they're both pretty good.
And they're on different sides.
The pretty good argument against raising it is free markets are better.
You won't get people coming into the market who would only take those low jobs.
They couldn't get a better one.
So you're not training people.
So the argument against it is completely solid.
Completely. I mean, human motivation is very predictable.
There will be fewer people hired in the short run.
But on the other hand, the AOC argument is there are plenty of cases where people argue the same thing was going to happen, and it didn't.
We just adjusted.
We just adjusted.
Somehow. So here I am sitting here with two degrees that should allow me to answer this question and have a really smart opinion that it's a good idea or that it's a bad idea to raise the minimum wage.
I don't. Do you?
You've watched me for a long time, and I honestly don't know if this is a good idea or a bad idea.
And I don't even know how you'd check.
Because I wouldn't believe anybody's prediction, would you?
Would you believe anybody's economic projection of what would happen if we did it?
I wouldn't. Because the one thing I do know is that I wouldn't trust any economic prediction.
Would you? And if you don't trust the experts, what are you going on?
What are you going on?
But here's the punchline to the whole thing.
While it is a tremendously good persuasion play to say that Denmark has $22 an hour and all this paid vacation and stuff, it took about a minute for somebody to come into the comments and say Denmark doesn't have a minimum wage.
The whole thing is bullshit.
Denmark doesn't have a state-mandated minimum wage.
They just don't have one.
So the whole argument is just complete bullshit.
But did it work?
Yeah. Yeah, it works really well.
As an argument, it works really well.
It works as well as President Trump saying, you know, your TV won't work when the windmills stop turning.
Right? It's not exactly the most honest argument in the world, but you get the point.
Right? You get the point. So it's the same technique.
Alright, so just as President Trump did not pass a lot of the fact-checking, but yet he was amazingly good at persuading, and the things that he persuaded toward were also good, I can't even think of an exception.
Right? I mean, arguably, I can't think of any exception.
So I don't mind that Trump plays fast and loose with the facts, as long as the direction he's going It's quite obviously a good direction for the country in a lot of people's opinion.
That's fair. AOC doing the same.
Here's a question for you.
Well, actually, let's talk about Dr.
Seuss. How many of you have now seen the so-called racially offensive Dr.
Seuss drawings?
It's been in the news for a while.
That there are some Dr.
Seuss books with racially offensive drawings.
How many of you have seen them?
Because I'll bet you all have opinions, don't you?
How many of you have seen them?
I have now seen them, thanks to a tweet by Joel Pollack.
And it's the only place I've seen them.
I haven't seen them anywhere else, except one tweet pointing to a blog article, and that was Joel Pollack.
Who pointed to the article.
He didn't write the article. And I'm looking at your answers, and I only see one person says they've seen them.
But you all have opinions, don't you?
Oh, a number of you have seen them.
So, for those of you who hadn't seen them, and then you did, did it change your opinion?
Did you get a different opinion after you looked at them?
I did. I did.
Let me tell you what my first thought was.
We weren't being shown the pictures, and that led me to believe that maybe they weren't that bad.
Because if they were that bad, wouldn't they just show them?
Because the media leans left, right?
So if they were really that bad, I feel like we definitely would have seen them.
So I was biased toward thinking there's probably nothing there.
There's probably imagination, and you're reading into it a little bit.
And then I looked at them.
They're pretty bad by today's standards.
By today's standards, Pretty bad.
Pretty bad. By the standards of when they were drawn, not at all.
Not at all. I mean, if you put it back in its historical context, I don't even know if anybody would have even raised an eyebrow.
The most...
I'll describe them for you.
So there are three images I saw in particular.
One was some probably Middle Eastern...
I imagine an Islamic guy riding a camel, wearing sort of traditional look, and having a cartoon face that looks caricature-ish of the region.
Not too bad.
I would say on that one, if that had been the worst one, I would say give it a pass.
Because really it looked like more they were trying to get the clothing right.
It didn't look like, I don't know, is riding a camel...
Somehow an insult if people actually ride camels and it's a thing.
I don't know. That one didn't look bad.
Then I looked at the next one.
It was some characters drawn as Chinese characters that looked like Fu Manchu, you know, with robes and, you know, little facial hair that you would see in some stereotype.
And they were carrying on their head, I think there were three or four of them, They were carrying on their heads as if they were porters, you know, who would carry things on their heads.
A big cage with some Dr.
Seuss animal, but then at the top, the top of the cage, was this drawing of a little white hunter.
So you've got the Chinese characters carrying on their head a cage of an animal, and on top of it, the white guy.
Mmm, ah...
Not so good. But if you take it back in time, who were the porters if you went to China and you organized an expedition, who would be carrying the stuff?
Chinese citizens, right?
So if you just put it in its context, it's actually what it would look like if you don't factor in that he made all the Chinese characters look, let's say, stereotypical of that day.
Not in a good way.
So that one I would say was a problem.
I could see how somebody would say, this is a little marginal.
Let's get rid of this one.
But then the third one showed some black characters from Africa carrying some other Dr.
Seuss character. And then again, a little bit more of a problem.
The black characters...
May I use an offensive word if I tell you that there's no offensive intention?
So what I'm going to say next will sound offensive, but it's not my intention.
So intention matters more than words, or they should.
I'm just going to say it.
He drew the black characters to look like monkeys.
Now, if that doesn't offend you, I don't know what would.
I mean, that's about as offensive as you can get.
Now, was he thinking that when he drew them?
Or is it just an artifact from his drawing style, which is it just fell out that way, but he wasn't thinking of it in any way like that?
It's a problem. Now, I said before that the easiest way to solve it would just be find a black cartoonist, And just say, hey, do us a favor.
Can you redraw these so that we can tell they're African natives, but they don't seem offensive to you?
Just give us a hand.
I mean, if you looked at, like, the whole body of Dr.
Seuss's works, there are only just a few pictures.
Why don't you just have the people who are most, you know, the victim of that characterization, have them, you know, take a shot at it.
Just redraw it.
Annotate it, make sure everybody can see the original, and tell them why you changed it.
I don't think it's a big problem.
I think it's easy to solve.
Just have a little bit of technique.
Just get the right person involved.
It literally would be one drawing out of a whole book.
No big deal. I wouldn't lose the original, though.
Here's a provocative, sexist hypothesis from user Novicus on Twitter.
And I'll try to characterize the claim.
It's that societies that have the most gender equality are also the most ethically and morally superior.
So it's a two-part opinion.
Do you agree with the first part?
That societies that have the most...
Gender equality are, and it's not a coincidence, that they're more ethically and morally superior.
Do you buy that? It might be an opinion, social opinion sort of thing, but I do.
I would say observationally that feels about right, doesn't it?
I've seen a lot of people say no.
I don't think that the people saying no...
I have a bad argument, by the way.
But I am a little surprised that there are as many no's.
Oh, interesting. Okay.
All right, but let me just finish the point.
So this is not my point.
I'm just putting it out there.
That wherever you have more women with more equality, there's more moral superiority.
But it's also the reason you're doomed.
It's also the reason you're doomed.
Because the country with the most morality and equality...
We'll be the weakest country in terms of homeland defense.
That all of those things that make you ethically and morally superior put you in peril, right?
Because if you want to be protected, you want the person on your side who's the worst person in the world.
You don't want the ethically and morally appropriate warriors on your side.
You want the ones who will burden the village.
Right? I mean, you wouldn't say it out loud.
But if you had a choice between your country being destroyed and you being killed, or your military people might be kind of badass, might kill a little bit more than you expected, might take more chances, might do a lot of things that maybe you wouldn't think are a good idea, but maybe you need that.
The trouble is that the more dangerous you are, the more likely, even if you lose 9 out of 10 times, if you're the more dangerous one, you only have to win that one time, and then you're in charge.
So, somebody says that's why Sweden is in bad shape.
I don't know if that can be proven by any data, but I do think this is an interesting point.
That the nicer you are as a society, the more vulnerable you are to societies that are not as nice.
Now, the way Novik has put it is that they are male-dominated societies.
If you look at Russia, male-dominated.
China, male-dominated.
Those are two biggest problems.
And would those male-dominated cultures produce, let's say...
Let's take China, for example.
We believe that China is doing all these terrible things to us, from shipping us fentanyl, to stealing our IP, to spying, to gathering our DNA, to all these things.
Would China be doing all of those things if they had a gender equal society with women in charge as much as men?
Would they do all those things?
What do you think? What do you think?
Would China be as aggressive if they had gender equality?
I feel like they would be less aggressive, and that there's something to this hypothesis.
So, anyway, I just put that out there.
It's very sexist. But it matches observation, even if my observation is so biased that I can't see it clearly.
Somebody says the CCP is not China.
Yeah, that's a fair statement.
But the Communist Party is male-dominated.
So that's the point.
They have 100 million excess men, somebody says.
Do they? China has no diversity on their corporate boards of directors.
In the future, yeah.
All right. So that's all I got for today.
And I will talk to you tomorrow.
All right, YouTubers.
Yeah, it's from the one-child family rule, I guess.
Swedes get paid five weeks of vacation.
Somebody says. Why do I always wear the same shirt?
I do this in my pajamas.
So the shirt you see is the shirt that I wore to bed.
I'm always in my pajamas.
I can prove it.
Pajamas.
And I'm always barefoot.
Thank you.
So I've created this entire Show, which now has national prominence, and I've never once worn pants.
I mean, I have pajamas on, and I've never done it in my shoes.
So I like a job that you can do in your pajamas, without shoes, and make a lot of money.
Now, I'm not making a lot of money, but it is monetized.
Yeah, it is the best way to do a show.
Do I still go on other people's podcasts?
Not at the moment. I'll confess something to you right now.
The enjoyment I get out of doing this and also the content I do for Locals, which is a subscription site where I put a lot of my content that you don't get to see, I enjoy that so much that my cartooning, it's just hard for me to do it.
Like, it's 30 years of drawing these same characters.
It's really hard now to make myself sit down and do it one more time, which is what I have to do today.
And I'm way behind deadline.
Or I'm too close to the deadline, actually.
So I've got to get ahead on deadline.
It's going to take me a few months. And that's all.
Will you have on Jovan Pulitzer?
No. No, there's a certain type of guest that I'll never have on.
And that's anybody who can make a claim that I don't know enough about to ask the right questions.
and he would be in that category.
What school of economics did you learn from I wouldn't say it was a school of economics.
I just have a degree in economics.
So we got to see a lot of stuff.
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