Episode 1311 Scott Adams: Biden's Boring Speech, Israel Solves Water Shortages, George Floyd Defense Strategy, and More
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Content:
"Dementia Joe" versus "damn straight"
Biden's 1st primetime address
Tucker Carlson's persuasive certainty
Concern over people avoiding the vaccination
Herd immunity math question
Annexing our border with China
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Yeah, I don't think I oversold it.
That was pretty spectacular.
Well, should we start with the good news that nobody seems to be reporting?
When I say nobody, I mean nobody except Jake Novak, who put together three facts that I was not aware of.
And when you see them together, it's quite a story.
And the facts are these.
Number one, an Israeli company has built these devices that can extract drinking water from the air.
So it will take the humidity, the moisture in the air, And it very effectively turns it into water, up to 800 liters of fresh water per day.
If the devices I saw in the picture are the right devices, it looks like maybe the size of, I don't know, two or three refrigerators put together.
So it's not like a factory size.
It's something you could put on trucks, I think.
And they must have figured out some way to make this more efficient.
Likewise, you may be aware that Israel had offered to Iran, I believe, to help them with desalinization, because Israel's good on desalinization.
They need to be, because they need to get water wherever they can.
But then there was a third thing that Jake Novak pointed out.
You should follow him on Twitter, by the way.
That there is another Israeli company that developed a drip irrigation system For growing rice, so you don't have to flood the rice paddies.
So those are the three things.
Desalinization, taking water directly from the air in some new efficient way, better than before, I guess.
And then a way to do agriculture with way less water, some kind of a drip irrigation system.
So you take those three things collectively, And that's a pretty big deal.
You know, you don't see them all at the same time, so you sort of lose sight of the fact that while we were thinking about other things, Israel used technology, basically, and science to solve one of the biggest problems in the world, that we might run out of fresh water.
Now think about your 80-year projections for climate change.
What is one of the base assumptions of the assumption that climate change will be devastating in the future?
Well, the problem is that things that are working now will break, such as people who have access to water might have droughts in the future, and other people might have floods.
And I've been saying forever that That you can't do that kind of an 80-year projection because there would be too many inventions and surprises along the way.
You can't predict that stuff. Well, here's one.
In what part of the 80-year projection of water needs and climate change and all that, where did they calculate that Israel would pioneer or improve three major uses of water?
And actually create it out of the sky more efficiently.
So that's all good news.
I'll put that out there. I noticed today that one of the trending things on Twitter most of the morning was the phrase, Dementia Joe.
So, of course, I clicked on it to see what that was all about.
And one of the things I noticed is that I guess a number of conservatives are using it to refer to Joe in his speech, etc.
But Democrats really don't like this hashtag.
Which is partly why it was trending.
Because they were fighting against it so much it just made it true.
But that's an interesting thing, isn't it?
Why is it that of all the things that anybody can say about Biden, this one, you can tell by the comments, it sort of hit a nerve somehow.
Whereas normal political speech doesn't always hit a nerve.
It's just more routine.
And I feel as if there's a thing happening now.
And it's happening in slow motion, and it's hilarious because we can't really talk about it exactly.
And it goes like this.
All of the people who supported Biden for president had to mentally do something To be okay with the fact that quite obviously he wasn't as sharp as he used to be.
Now I imagine that the way they dealt with it is either to just not think about it, because all they cared about is getting rid of Trump, or they minimized it in their minds to the point of, well, yeah, okay, he's older, but it's not that big a deal.
But the predictable arc of things...
Is that it's just going to get more and more obvious.
51 days without a press conference?
51 days without a press conference?
It's kind of obvious now.
And then you see all the gaff clips, etc.
So I feel as if the Democrats are feeling exposed.
Meaning that it's going to look like everything that conservatives said about Joe Biden's mental capacity is not just true, but it's really, really obviously true, and it matters.
How are they going to deal with that?
How does anybody deal with being wrong?
Well, most of us do it the same way.
We get triggered into cognitive dissonance, and then we somehow explain it like it wasn't wrong, even if it was.
So, I'll just note that Dementia Joe seems to really get under their skin, in case you want to use that.
Now, the Democrats are trying to respond with their own hashtag, which is getting a lot of use.
Damn straight. And a number of tweets say stuff like, we finally got a real president.
Damn straight. So...
I don't know. I think damn straight is in the category of no malarkey.
It's like people coming up with slogans who are not good at coming up with slogans.
Damn straight? How does that hit you?
It just feels a little cringey, doesn't it?
Yeah, okay. If somebody was actually typing cringe as I said it.
It's a little bit cringey.
Compare that to Make America Great Again.
Now, I know people had their problems with it, thinking it was some kind of a racial thing.
But in terms of coming up with a slogan or a branding, when you start to see people who are not good at it, do it directly after you've watched Trump be really, really good at it.
Like, as good, maybe better than anybody's ever been, right?
If you count all his nicknames, you know, everything from low energy to, you know, Lion Ted to...
You know, if you count all of that, Trump was basically hitting home runs every time he got up to bat.
You know, drain the swamp.
Almost everything that Trump...
Tried to turn into a saying or a logo or a statement.
It worked. Everything from fake news, you name it.
He turned everything he wanted to turn into a thing, he turned it into a thing.
But then you watch people who are not good at it.
Damn straight. Damn straight.
It trended today, but I don't think it's going to turn into anything.
It feels a little like no malarkey, if you know what I mean.
People who don't know how to do this trying to do it.
This morning, Brian Stelter tweeted, he showed a screenshot that I've been laughing about for a while.
So apparently when Biden was giving his speech, Fox News ran a chyron, the words that go at the bottom of the screen there, They ran a chyron that said...
And what's funny about this is that this is a news channel.
And the amount of partisanship...
Sometimes it crosses that line where you just have to laugh.
It's just hilarious. So here's Fox News' label for Biden's speech while he's talking.
So while he's talking below it, it says...
Low bar, colon.
Biden survives. Short, scripted speech.
Survives? What kind of news is that?
He survives it.
Because it gives you the impression, especially because it's a Allegedly a news channel.
It gives you the impression that there was some chance he would die right in front of you.
Or that his career would be over because he would be so undependable that he would just spout out something crazy and it would be over.
Now let me say, if CNN had done a chyron as ridiculous as this one, I would have also called it out, right?
So this works both ways.
But I have to give Fox News credit, because theirs is pretty funny.
I think if it's funny, you get a little extra forgiveness, right?
I feel that Fox News accomplished that.
So whoever... Whoever it is, I know there's some Fox News producer watching this right now, but whoever it is who was in charge of that chyron, good job from an entertainment perspective.
It was a good job. So here's the second part of that story.
So after I saw this, and it was Brian Stelter from CNN talking about Fox News and how they cover stuff, I tweeted that 20% of all news involves people in the news business who Criticizing each other.
Now, when I said 20%, that wasn't to be taken as an actual estimate, right?
It's just that it seems like they spend a lot of time criticizing the other channel.
If you turn on Fox News, they're talking about CNN. You turn on CNN, they're talking about Fox News.
So I tweeted 20% of it.
It's just that. And within a few minutes, Brian Stelter tweeted back at me, and he said, no, it does not.
Or, I don't know, he tweeted, not necessarily at me.
And here's the thing.
When I'm using social media...
I forget sometimes, especially if it's somebody famous who's like Brian Stelter, somebody you know, I forget that they actually read it.
Somehow my brain can't handle the fact that I'm typing using a tool, which of course the whole point of it is people are reading it, and I still can't get it in my head That when I type a response to somebody famous, they'll actually read it. It still blows me away.
And so when he tweeted back, I was thinking, oh, he actually read that.
And I understand when I do it, Why people are so mean and ugly to me.
Because every now and then I'll respond back to some troll who just said something awful about me.
And sometimes they'll say something like, whoa, whoa, I didn't think you'd read it.
So, just remember, there are real people reading this stuff.
Jack Posobiec reports that he's hearing from his multiple insider sources at the White House...
That Kamala Harris is getting the full, the PDB, what is that?
Daily, it's the briefing.
What does the PD stand for?
Daily briefing. Presidential daily briefing, I'm going to go with.
Let's say that.
I'm going to say presidential daily briefing.
But Kamala Harris is getting the full one, which even, we think that even Biden didn't get that when he was vice president.
Now, getting back to my earlier comments about how Democrats are going to have to come to terms with the fact that they elected somebody who quite clearly is not medically fully available, if you know what I mean.
And every time there's this little bit of, you know, the cats on the roof, it seems like it's going forever, isn't it?
Like, how long have we seen these cats on the roof?
Like, well, it's a little bit of a hint...
That they're not expecting him to last that long.
Even Biden says stuff like he's not going to run for a second term, etc.
So it's just funny.
Every time you see another piece of evidence that it's clearly the plan to put her in place, you've just got to wonder what they're thinking.
So I hear that comedians are having a hard time mocking Biden because they don't have anything to grab onto.
You know, Trump was easy.
He had just a million targets that you could shoot at.
But Biden is super boring.
And if you were to ask people what's the one sort of, I don't know, personality thing that stands out, or what do you think of when you think of Joe Biden, what's the top thing that comes to mind, it's medical.
It's medical, right?
His mental capacity.
And it's not really super cool to make humor about people's medical conditions.
Now, I would think a president's a little bit of an exception to that because sometimes you have to mock things to get them fixed.
And maybe having a president who's not quite all there needs to get fixed.
So, he's a special case.
But... Isn't it interesting that he's so bland, the only thing you could mock, you don't because it's real.
Don't you think that they would be mocking Biden if they thought that wasn't real?
Don't you think there would be more people, even on the left, who would take a run at it?
It's like, oh, he's dumb.
Ha, ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha, he's not as fast as he used to be.
Ha, ha, ha, he does some gaffes.
But they don't really do that, do they?
They don't really do that.
Somebody says they mocked Reagan.
Was Reagan ever this bad?
You know, I'm trying to remember.
I think you could certainly detect there was something going on with Reagan.
I don't think Reagan was ever like this, was he?
Maybe I just don't remember it clearly.
Alright, so let's talk about Biden's speech.
I might surprise you by saying I thought it was pretty good.
Pretty good. If I'm going to be objective, which is the only value I have to you, is trying to be unbiased if I can, I thought his speech was pretty solid.
Meaning that what he was trying to do was project empathy, and he gave us some dates, which I wanted.
I wanted to hear a date when he thinks he can get the vaccinations May 1st, everybody should have access to it.
It's good. I'm seeing your comments about whether Reagan was as bad.
A little bit of a disagreement about whether he was as bad.
Some say yes, some say no.
So I don't have a strong memory of that at this point.
So I'm going to give Biden a solid mark.
It was not exciting. I literally started falling asleep toward the end.
It dragged on.
It was a little too long.
He's not a great deliverer of anything.
But for what the country needed, it was pretty solid, good information, fairly specific.
Now, of course, the thing that everybody's mocking is the...
I think everyone who watched this had some kind of similar feeling to it.
When he was saying that by 4th of July, he's hoping that people can get together for their 4th of July barbecues and whatnot, and that he slipped in...
But not large groups.
And I'm sitting here thinking, what did you just say?
And then he sort of, I think he clarified it again, you know, that you'd be able to have Fourth of July, but not in a large get-together.
To which I and something like 300-plus million Americans, or, I don't know, whatever, tens of millions were watching the speech, simultaneously said to themselves...
See if this happened in your head.
Did you simultaneously all over the country say to yourself, Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Here's what's going to happen on July 4th.
I, and every one of you, are going to make your own fucking mind up about what you're going to do.
And the government's instructions to you by July 4th, because by then it's a different situation, we hope.
By July 4th, it's not the government's decision.
And even their suggestion will be taken as a suggestion.
By July, people are going to do any fucking thing they want.
And I don't think there's any way around that.
Now, a lot of people will want to play it safe.
A lot of people will want to do what the government suggests because they want to.
That's fine. But there was something about the way he presented it that carried with it a whiff of presumption that the government can tell you how to celebrate the Fourth of July in your own fucking backyard.
And that didn't go down well, did it?
How'd that feel?
Didn't feel good.
Didn't feel good.
And I've been quite supportive of the government having some, you know, a big hand in the pandemic.
I think sometimes the government needs to be the one with a big hand or a big footprint, I guess.
But that would be too far, right?
There's a point where everybody says it's too far, and I think Biden reached that So that's not the biggest problem in the world.
The other thing about his speech is that there's a lot of darkness and gloom, and it was kind of long and boring and low energy, but it got the job done.
Here's a question I have for you.
If you believe that Biden is doing a good job with pandemic management, and I would say he is.
Does anybody disagree with that?
Is there any disagreement that Biden, the administration, is doing a solid job with the...
I would fault him with school openings.
He should put more pressure on the teachers' unions.
That's a big deal. But I feel like it's happening.
People are going back to school already.
Vaccinations are looking pretty solid.
Messaging looks pretty good.
I think he's solid. But here's the question.
What is it that Biden has done...
That the Trump administration would not have, you know, predictably done.
So, for example, under Biden, the rate of vaccinations is way up.
Well, don't you think that would have happened under Trump as well?
Because we know that however it starts is going to be slow compared to, you know, how quickly it will ramp up.
So I don't see any reason that we should assume Biden did a better job.
I don't see any evidence for that.
In fact, Trump might have put more pressure on teachers' unions, although that could have been counterproductive.
You could make an argument that if Trump had gone harder at teachers' unions, they would have just hardened their stand against him.
So it's hard to predict. But I don't think there's any reason to think Biden did a better job than Trump would have if he'd been in office.
I tweeted yesterday something that I knew would get...
Get people angry or bothered.
But there wouldn't be a reason.
Which is my favorite kind of tweet.
Where people would feel like they should be offended on behalf of somebody else.
They're not sure who. And they're not sure exactly why.
But they're definitely offended.
If they could only figure out why.
Here was my tweet.
I said that if I were the attorney defending Derek Chauvin, the officer who's charged with now, I guess, second or third degree murder, one of those murders, I would say that I would deliver my closing argument laying on the ground, if I were the lawyer, laying on the ground, and I would have my client put his knee on my neck, Much the way he did with George Floyd.
And for the entire nine minutes, I would time it so it was the same amount of time as Floyd was held down.
As the lawyer, I would just speak normally.
And I would just have the, you know, I'd be on the ground with the officers, now not officer, but ex-officers, knee on my neck.
And I would say, all right, we've presented all the evidence.
And as you can see, There's plenty of reasonable doubt.
The main reason that you and the world were so concerned is that the visual of this is just deeply disturbing.
But, as you can see, the reason that this is a legal hold and the officers are trained this way is that if you do it right, it doesn't put much pressure on the neck.
And as you can see, I'm delivering my closing arguments Completely without any air restricted, and yet I can't move.
I can't get up. Can't get up.
Now, do you think people complained about that tweet?
Oh, yeah. You always get this guy.
Do you know who this guy is?
He's the guy.
It's usually a guy.
It's usually a guy, right?
Could be a woman. I don't want to be a sexist, but it's usually a guy who comes in and says something like this.
A man died.
You're laughing, and a man died.
This is not a joke.
You always need that guy, right?
The guy to remind us that there was a tragedy.
Is there anything that is more well understood than whatever that was?
It was a tragedy.
Is there anybody who doesn't know that?
And here's the second part.
It wasn't a joke.
If you laughed at it, Well, that's sort of on you, because it wasn't written as a joke.
It was written as a persuasion.
Now, of course I don't assume that the lawyer would do anything like that.
In order to do that, you need a certain kind of personality.
Let's say Johnny Cochran.
If Johnny Cochran were alive, and he heard that idea...
What do you think? If Johnny Cochran heard that idea, and you were the defense attorney, just lay on the ground, put the knee on you, and do your closing argument just like that, he would at least consider it.
Now, he might say, no, that's too far or whatever, because clearly he was the highest level of defense attorney, so he might say that's a bad idea for good reasons.
But I think he'd at least consider it.
I think he'd consider it.
I feel as if he would give it a good thought.
And here's the thing.
There is nothing disrespectful about that.
Nothing. It's not even a little bit disrespectful.
It's persuasive.
I mean, if it worked, right?
Now, here I'm making a big assumption.
That I think is fair.
Which is that if somebody is holding you down with that knee hold on your neck, they probably have a lot of leeway in terms of how painful or damaging that is.
And I don't think you can tell just by looking at it on a video.
I don't think you can tell. So it would be...
I don't know how they could possibly convict.
Let me ask you this.
If you saw that closing argument...
And you watched it for nine minutes, and you watched the lawyer talk normally, could you convict?
Because that removes all the reasonable doubt.
I mean, it's just gone at that point.
I would have done it. All right.
There's a study of Israel.
Israel's in the news a lot.
That they think aspirin may protect against COVID. They thought, you know, there's some evidence it does.
Andres Beckhaus commented on that to point out it's a low-quality study, and I wouldn't start taking aspirin.
Because, number one, you know, I usually tell you don't get your medical advice from me, but I'm actually going to give you medical advice right now.
Don't start taking aspirin unless you talk to your doctor.
I feel that safe, right?
It feels like that's safe medical advice.
I used to take a baby aspirin every day because for, I don't know, decades I believed that the science said that it would protect you against strokes or heart attacks or something.
And so I'd take my little baby aspirin every single day.
The new science, or at least the latest thinking is, there's no indication whatsoever that aspirin is going to protect you from any of that stuff.
And it might have some negative effects, because aspirin is not exactly harmless.
So I wouldn't trust anything about an aspirin study, just in general, but not that one.
Here's an interesting thing to watch.
I've been asking the question, Who is the conservative voice now?
Because Trump himself is sort of, at the moment, a little bit off the stage.
Coincidentally, Rush Limbaugh passed.
You would think of him as maybe the dominant voice in conservative politics.
So now the two most dominant voices are out of the game.
And I was watching as a The Tucker Carlson show came on immediately after the Biden speech.
And there's an interesting phenomenon you have to experience.
Maybe you did. You probably did.
Which is you watch the event yourself.
So you're watching the Biden speech or any other event.
And then you're forming an opinion.
And you're thinking, oh, I think this about it or that about it.
And then you see somebody like Tucker Carlson...
Give you a very strong opinion and a take, if you will.
How quickly does your sort of generic forming opinion start to match identically to Tucker Carlson's opinion?
Because it's the first thing you heard while you are still trying to form your opinion.
And he is so certain when he speaks.
It's one of the things he does well.
He speaks with a kind of certainty that is very persuasive.
I've told you before that we don't make up our own opinions on politics.
You think you do, but you don't.
Now, I'm not saying that's 100% true, but it's close enough to 100% true that you can treat it that way.
Meaning that whether you're on the left or the right, if you were to look at your political opinion on any topic, you will be amazed and surprised that it matches whoever you watch on TV the most.
Most of the time. It just matches who you watch on TV. And it's because your opinion was assigned to you.
The people who are good at expressing things, they express an opinion and then you just adopt it.
It's like, oh, that's a good way to think about it.
That's my opinion now.
But watching Tucker Carlson assign opinions...
To Fox News viewers in real time was sort of mind-blowing.
And I watched that happen last night.
Because I wanted to see...
I was sort of monitoring my own opinion to see when it got formed.
Because I was feeling, oh, that's sort of a boring, good Biden speech.
He didn't hurt anybody.
Didn't hurt himself.
Got the job done.
And then as soon as I turn on Tucker, it's a dumpster fire, and what he said about Fourth of July is crazy.
I agree with him, of course, on the Fourth of July stuff.
But the other thing is that, as somebody's saying in the comments, part of what makes Tucker so powerful is not just that other voices got decreased, which is a big deal, but that he's really good.
Like really, really good at his job.
And he seems to be getting better.
At his current age, you know, I'm not sure you'd expect his quality of production to just keep getting better, but it is right in front of your eyes.
I think he's unquestionably at his highest level of quality as well as importance, you know, his impact on the country.
So I feel as if he just became the guy.
I feel as if you've been looking for who's the voice of the conservatives, it feels like it's him.
It feels like it. Now, not to say there aren't other voices, but he does seem to have emerged as the prime voice.
Over in Portland, I guess there have been nightly protests and stuff for almost a year now.
And I read that some Portland business owners are boarding up their businesses because they're expecting more trouble from everything from the George Floyd stuff to who knows what.
And I thought to myself, there are still businesses in Portland?
Why would you stay in Portland if there were protests for a year?
I don't know. It seems like that would be long enough to make other plans.
But... It's hard to move a business, I know, but I can't believe there are any businesses left.
Here's another compliment to the Biden administration.
You didn't see this coming. Pete Buttigieg as the transportation secretary is a really good choice.
He's a really good choice.
I don't know if you remember, but Buttigieg's background is as a business consultant.
I mean, that was his first role.
And you don't get the...
Was it Bain? I think you worked for him.
But you don't get that kind of a job unless you're just crackling smart and you just came out of Harvard, usually, as he did.
But the thing that makes this perfect is that it's a purely, it's an analytical job.
Oh, McKinsey, somebody's saying it was McKinsey, that's right.
So he was a McKinsey consultant.
But he has exactly the right skill set, exactly the right skill set for transportation and infrastructure, because those are things that people sort of are more likely to agree on, right?
We're a little bit closer on the need for an infrastructure package than we are for probably almost anything else.
He's perfect. So, you know, I'm going to give the Biden administration an A-plus on that appointment.
We'll see if he delivers, right?
He still has to deliver.
But that's a perfect fit of training and competence with job.
You heard the AstraZeneca's vaccination...
Some people thought it might cause blood clots, but now they've looked at the data and they say, nope, no blood clots.
So that story about the vaccinations being a problem is fake news, as far as we know.
There's still a lot of concern that people will not get the vaccinations because they're afraid of it, or mostly they're afraid of it.
And I'm going to predict that in the end that won't be a problem.
My prediction slash observation is that because supply is limited, that people's willingness to get the shot is going to match the supply all the way to the end.
Meaning that you'll get enough people vaccinated to get to wherever we need to get.
People like me are quietly saying they're skeptical until the last minute.
You should stay skeptical until you have a chance to get the shot and then take all the information that you have up to that point and make your decision.
But you don't need to make a decision until the shot's available.
Something tells me that a lot of the people who are sort of talking about not getting the shot, when they really, really think it through and when they watch how many people have gotten the shot and they haven't heard that many stories of bad outcomes, I feel as if A lot of people are going to get the shot.
I think we'll get as many as we need.
I think we'll be fine there.
Here's my math question for you.
And I asked this this morning.
I got a number of answers, and I'm still not sure of my opinion on it.
So help me form an opinion on it.
It goes like this. If we had a normal virus...
That affected everybody about the same way, every age group.
Then we're told that getting to 60-70% herd immunity with vaccinations or prior infections, that getting there would be enough to stop the spread.
But what if you've got a weird virus that has a special characteristic that attacks, let's say, 20% of the population aggressively, And 80% of the population hardly bothers them at all.
What happens if you can vaccinate almost all of that 20%?
Well, it won't stop the infection from spreading through the other 80%, of course.
And that other 80%, if they came in contact with the few people who didn't have it yet in the high-risk group, then those people could get it and die.
So... But here's the question.
I'm just trying to think the logical math of it through.
I do understand something Andres Backhaus said this morning on Twitter, that the rate of infection where it's been studied seems to be fairly similar with every age group.
I didn't know that until this morning.
So you can get infected at every age group, which suggests that my idea doesn't make sense.
That if everybody's getting infected, it's at least in that one sense, it's like every other virus.
It's just the outcomes are different, not the infection rate.
So, but I haven't given up yet.
I feel as if, just help me think this through, because I really, there's too many variables here to quite Grasp it.
But my gut-level statistical intuition, which is very unreliable, tells me that if you vaccinate, let's say, 80% of the high-risk people, they tend to hang out with themselves, don't they?
Senior citizens are far more likely to have extended contact with other senior citizens.
They do have family contacts, etc.
And then kids, mostly hanging around with kids.
And under that scenario, couldn't you not have herd immunity in the classic sense where the virus just stops, but in a functional sense?
Where once you've got the high-risk people done and the low-risk people are still getting infected but you don't care because they're not getting any bad outcomes, don't you sort of reach something that's like a virtual herd effect except plenty of people are still getting infected.
It's just they're not dying.
So when we talk about herd immunity from a regular virus, we're talking about the virus just stopping.
It just can't spread. It just stops.
But maybe when we talk about herd immunity for this one, what we should really be talking about is bringing the rate of risk down to whatever is a baseline normal risk of life.
And I feel like we're going to hit that really soon.
That's my statistical slash...
Math intuition that we're going to hit it really soon, like way before May.
I'm thinking April, hospitalizations will be almost nothing.
But the spread will still be widespread, because the kids will still be giving it to kids, etc.
We won't know about it.
So, I am not convinced that I'm right there.
Let me make another point about your skill stacks.
When I advise you to add additional talents to what you already have to make your stack of talents, your talent stack, as I like to say, is special.
Statistics is one of those things you should have on there.
Now, I've taken a course in statistics in college, but it was a million years ago.
I don't remember a lot of the math.
But you can develop, let's say, a statistical intuition about things.
You can get to the point where you could look at, say, this aspirin study and say, oh, the number of people studied was small.
The way they studied it is not as good statistically.
So you would just have an intuition that you shouldn't trust it necessarily.
And I think that's a really good thing to develop, and you don't need to do all the math to do it.
Just spend enough time looking at the illusions of statistics.
The things that you thought would be true, but turned out, if you do the math, are not true.
Every time you're fooled by statistics, make a little note.
Say, oh yeah, that's one of those situations where it looks like it could be the case, but if you do the math, it's the opposite.
So try to develop some kind of intuition about where things are credible and where they're not independent of having the math.
Here's my most controversial idea of the day.
We know that China is sending fentanyl to the cartels, and the cartels are packaging it up in drugs that look like other kinds of drugs, such as fake Xanax, shipping it to the United States, and 50,000 to 70,000 Americans per year are dying from this.
We believe that China...
is pursuing this total war idea where it is completely intentional and they could obviously stop it because we've actually told them the name of the person in China who's sending the fentanyl.
We know the name.
It's this guy. China, of course, can find that guy.
So there's no question about those two facts.
We've told them who it is, who's the fentanyl kingpin in China, China knows where he is.
They could stop him.
Does anybody doubt that they could stop that guy?
No, of course not. So we have to assume it's intentional and that they are killing 50,000 to 70,000 Americans per year intentionally as a plan.
Now that's war, isn't it?
But Given the nature of all the obstacles and variables in the world, we can't just sort of attack China militarily.
We just do this weird thing where we demand that they stop and then they just don't.
Because they don't have to.
Apparently there's no penalty.
So to me it seems that Mexico and the cartels are a combined allied military force in a war with the United States.
Now, we can't attack China because they have nukes and stuff, but we can certainly attack their ally who holds territory.
And their allies hold the border territory.
If you didn't know this, the cartels actually are the government on the border.
Literally, they're the government.
The actual government wouldn't even be too afraid to even go there.
Because they would kill the actual government.
They're just not allowed. So for all practical purposes, Mexico is not even on our border.
We don't have a Mexican border, but I'd like one.
Let's see if we can get one.
So the way to get a Mexican border for the first time is to get rid of this small...
Let's say, unlabeled country owned by the cartels.
Different cartels, but they have different parts of it.
And I think that we should at least consider annexing that territory that Mexico doesn't control.
Now, you would say to yourself, whoa, whoa, whoa, you've gone way too far.
The government of Mexico is never going to allow you to annex Part of that territory.
To which I say, wouldn't that be great?
Wouldn't it be great if Mexico surged their government military into that area to protect it from the United States annexing it?
That'd be fine. Then we don't have to annex it.
Because if the Mexican military tried to defend it, they would move their military into that zone, and that's all we wanted in the first place.
We want Mexico to be on our border.
So if Mexico wants to be on our border, we'll help.
But of course, the real Mexican government is afraid of the cartel, as they should be, so they can't really do that.
So what would they do if we just annexed it, just took it, and said, we're not taking it from Mexico.
Mexico doesn't own it.
And here's the best part.
If Mexico wants it back, they can have it.
Just ask. All you have to do is control it.
Just move your military in.
Control the border.
We'll give it right back to you.
You can have it back.
But if you don't want to do that, it's not Mexico and it's not the United States.
It's China. And I don't want a border with China.
Right now we have one.
They happen to be the cartel working with China, but for all practical purposes, we just got ourselves a border with China.
And they are invading and attacking over the border.
So I would treat it like a Chinese military exercise, and when Mexico complains, you say, oh, I hear what you're saying, but it's not really about us.
This isn't about the United States and Mexico.
We don't have any complaints with Mexico.
At all. Not the Mexican government.
We have a complaint with China who is working with these cartels who own this territory.
This has nothing to do with you.
But if you would like it to be about you, we would like that too.
You could join us. But until then, it's war with China, and we'll just treat it that way.
In the comments, somebody says, this idea is so crazy it could work.
Let me tell you about so crazy it could work.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
The idea is not so much that you would actually annex it, but you would change the frame.
You would reframe the situation from an immigration problem, a drug problem, a crime problem, because that's not getting us anywhere.
Is it? The way we currently frame and think about the border is giving us nothing but worse problems.
If you reframe how you think about it, that opens up options.
You don't necessarily know where that ends up.
It could end up with Mexico just defending their own border better.
That'd be fine. But the reframe just gets you out of the broken and bankrupt way of thinking.
The bankrupt way of thinking is that we have a crime immigration problem at the border.
That's just not what's going on.
What's going on is that China is attacking the United States right now, successfully.
And we're not defending against an attack by China.
Mexico, you're just not part of the question.
I wish you were.
Honestly, I wish you were part of the question.
But you're not. The cartels are.
All right. Here's the most...
This will just make your head spin for a while.
I believe there's another sexual category.
And I'm just going to put this out there, and then you won't accept this at first.
But wait till you look into it.
Some of you will be able to go home immediately and ask somebody for confirmation.
Most of you won't. But watch what happens when you do.
If you said to a, let's say, a teenage girl in the United States in 2021, so it's just your average teenage girl, and you say to that teenage girl, what is your orientation?
They'll tell you. They'll say, I'm either straight or I'm gay or I'm bi.
And they'll tell you just right now.
So, at least in today's world, I don't see at least nothing like it used to be.
In terms of anybody saying that they're gay or they're lesbian or anything else.
So the first thing that would be eye-opening is that a teenager today is far more likely to just be completely open about what their sexuality is.
Here's the shocking part.
Ask a girl who identifies as heterosexual, not bisexual.
They have to identify as heterosexual and then ask this question.
Would you ever marry a woman?
There was a time, if you asked somebody who identified as heterosexual, would you ever marry somebody of the same gender, they would have said, well, no, what do you think heterosexual means?
The whole point of heterosexual is, no, I'm interested in the other gender.
Not today. If you ask a teenage girl today, are you heterosexual?
She says, yes, totally heterosexual.
I'm not bi at all.
But would you marry a woman if you fell in love?
They will say yes. And won't even blink at it.
It's kind of interesting.
It's neither good nor bad.
I'm not putting any kind of judgment on it.
It's just an evolution that's sort of fascinating to watch.
Now, I don't think that men would answer the same.
I don't think a teenage boy who identified as heterosexual, if you asked, would you ever marry another man, probably would say no.
You know, in 2021 still, probably.
Not everyone, but more often.
Somebody's asking the question, what would happen if you asked a, let's say, a teenage white girl if she would marry a black person?
I've heard teenagers discussing that very question, and 100% of them said yes.
And there were more people who say they prefer it.
In fact, several said they prefer it, but I've never heard anybody in the modern era say that they wouldn't.
I haven't heard it. So I don't think there's anybody, at least maybe this is a California thing, so it could be really different where you live.
California tends to be five to ten years ahead of some of these things.
Somebody says, would you stay with a spouse who changes their gender?
I think it depends.
It depends, right? There's no one answer to that.
That would depend on the two people.
When are you in the company of teenagers?
Well, I don't hang with teenagers, but let's say if you have a family situation, you're exposed to them whether you like it or not.
So the answer is through family connections.
But I'm not talking about anybody in my family.
I'm talking about a general statement.
If you ask a personal question to a group, you'll get a peer answer.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, I'm just looking at your comments.
Okay. Well, I didn't know if that would be surprising to many of you or not.
It's a sign of the times.
Probably a good one. Good sign of the times.
Because the teens are definitely woke.
There's no doubt about that.
And that's not all bad.
All right. That's all for now, and I'll talk to you later.
