Episode 1440 Scott Adams: The Republican Pandemic, Teachers Unions Destroy Everything, and More Fun
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
China's inexplicable COVID results
Masking up again
Unvaccinated COVID hospital patients
Why doesn't President Trump push vaccination?
Secret sonic weapon now in Austria?
Teachers Unions cause our biggest problems
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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
Well, good morning, and welcome to the best part of your day.
Now, you might have other parts of your day that are also good.
Some of them might be great.
But welcome to the best part.
The best part. And if you'd like to make this extra, extra special...
Two extras. All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a canteen jug or a flask.
A vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee, if you didn't know.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine to end the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and watch it happen right now.
Go! Oh, my goodness.
So, are you ready for some of the most provocative thoughts in all of podcasting?
Well, they're all going to be coming at you pretty hard.
And, you know, I'd be doing the show right now if, under the condition that I had printed out the right set of notes, we'd be, like, jumping right into the show right now.
But it seems that I'll be talking and printing my real notes out at the same time.
But I'm going to give you a fun fact while this is happening.
Do any of you own cats?
Did you know that a cat, when it talks and it goes, you know how cats talk?
Did you know that they don't do that to other cats?
They don't talk that way to dogs.
They don't talk that way in the mirror.
The only time your cat talks is when your cat is talking to a human.
Did you know that? Otherwise, the cats don't talk.
So they actually think they're talking to you.
All right.
So I thought I would share that with you because that's very, very important.
And now we have the proper show notes.
Oh, much better.
Much better. All right.
Are you ready for the most provocative thought?
I know it's a high bar.
This will be the most provocative thought.
Are you ready? It goes like this.
Are you wondering why there's not more of a COVID problem in China?
Is it because China is so good at locking down their country...
And then keeping out anything from the borders.
That's why there's no more COVID in China.
Does that feel...
Just think about that.
Big country. Billion people.
The start of the pandemic.
But they got rid of all of it.
No more COVID in China.
The whole country of China.
Billion people. No problem.
Does that sound right to you? Now, hold that fact in your mind that China has the most inexplicable COVID result.
Because you can see if a country never got much of it in the first place, how they could do well.
But there's some mystery there, isn't there?
Some continuing mystery about why China is not totally ravaged by the virus like everybody else.
Some are saying it's a media blackout and that maybe there's a big problem in China and we just don't know it.
But if it were as big as it should be, by all common sense and everything we know about the virus's viral properties, do you think they could keep that a secret?
Do you think if the Chinese hospitals were crashed with patients...
Could they keep that a secret?
I mean, I know that they can close the internet and they can do a lot of stuff, but seriously, you don't think we have enough assets, you know, intelligence assets in China to know if the hospitals are packed?
We would know that, right?
I hear somebody saying it's ivermectin.
Maybe, but I don't think so.
Suppose, and this is provocative, but this is not where I'm going, so I'm not making this claim.
Suppose that the virus had been weaponized in a lab and designed so it wouldn't hurt people who were ethnically Chinese.
Is that possible?
It might be, but I don't think that would explain what's happening in China.
Because there must be enough ethnic variety even within China...
That you couldn't make something so targeted that, oh, if you have just the right genes, it won't affect you, but it only works within the boundaries of China or something.
Eh, you know, maybe, maybe, but it doesn't feel like that could explain it.
It feels like to be something else.
And so I had this thought this morning that I thought, if I Google this, am I going to get a result?
And it goes like this.
What is it that the Chinese people do that other countries don't do?
But they do a lot in Asia.
And Asia in general has done pretty well with the coronavirus, hasn't it?
Have you noticed? Yeah, you're...
Damn it, you're way ahead of me.
You're way ahead of me.
Green tea. The people who drink green tea, coincidentally...
Seem to be doing the best against the coronavirus.
Wouldn't you say? If you were to look at, you know, some countries doing worse than others, of course.
But, so I looked up, I just googled, does green tea cure COVID? And apparently, there's some reason to think it might.
Weirdly. Now, I wouldn't put too much credibility in this, but there's an author, Suresh Mohan Kumar, who researched during his time at blah, blah, blah, some medical place.
And according to a new study published in the RSC Advances, green tea might play an important role in tackling COVID-19 infection.
What? What?
Really? Green tea?
What? And they're not saying, I don't think they're saying that, you know, there's an ingredient that you can take out of it or something.
I think they're actually saying that just drinking the green tea might take care of your COVID or prevent it or minimize it or something.
Somebody says, explain Thailand.
This has been debunked.
Well, I don't think there would be necessarily any specific group that would be free from it.
So there could be a combination of green tea plus genetics.
Could be that they drink a different kind of green tea.
Could be they don't drink as much.
So I haven't heard the green tea hypothesis before, but I doubt Thailand alone would be debunking of it.
Now... I'm not going to claim any of this is true.
So let me say this as clearly as possible.
I'm not going to say the green tea hypothesis is one you should believe.
What I'm saying is, there's still a mystery here.
And it's a big one.
To me, it's the biggest one.
It's the biggest mystery by far.
Where's my randomized controlled study?
That's what I need? All right.
Here's some fake news.
Did you hear some news that the Biden administration would be monitoring private text messages to combat vaccine misinformation?
Did you hear that news?
Fake news?
That was never a plan.
What was happening is that Democrat operatives were monitoring...
Messages from the other side, and if any misinformation came out, they were going to counter it with their own, what they would say is proper information.
And somebody in the comments, do you want to talk about FDA-approved medicines like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin?
Alan, where have you been for the last year?
That's like the most talked about topic in the world.
So no, I'm not going to talk about that today.
I've talked about it a billion times.
All right, so don't worry about anybody looking at your private text messages for vaccine misinformation.
That was never a plan.
So Joe Biden's got this interesting tightrope he has to walk.
Because he's a Democrat. Lots of Democrats want to defund the police.
But he's also strong on crime.
You know, he's more of a moderate.
And crime is spiking, and he knows that that could keep a Democrat from being president.
So now he wants to be tough on crime while still being a Democrat, which is tough.
So he's announcing a comprehensive strategy.
You know, that's the best kind.
Have you ever used a strategy that wasn't comprehensive?
Somebody says the vaccine is not FDA approved.
I'm seeing in the comments. Does that matter?
I mean, you know it was approved by all the smartest people who looked at the studies.
Do you care? I mean, we're caring about a lot of things we shouldn't care about.
Anyway... I'm not saying you should take the vaccine.
I'm just saying if your concern is that it wasn't approved in the normal way, that's not much of a concern.
Because it was approved by all the right people looking at it for all the right reasons, blah, blah, blah.
All right. I saw an article, I think it was CNN, saying that...
Oh, I'm sorry.
Let's go back to this Biden crime thing.
So Biden wants to press an assault ban, or a ban on assault weapons, what he would call assault weapons, what some of you would call not assault weapons.
And I don't know how he's going to walk this tightrope.
It seems to me that the crime stories are just going to be coming just like crazy.
There's going to be more murder, yeah, let's call them rifles.
There's going to be more murder.
There's another shooting outside of a baseball stadium.
There's going to be more mass shootings, etc.
So it looks to me...
I don't know how Democrats could win again.
I mean, in the next series of elections.
What do you think? Am I wrong to think that it would be hard for a Democrat to get elected?
It might be hard for Trump to get reelected because Trump has his own set of baggage, I guess, if you will, that comes with him.
But let's say the candidate is a normal Republican, Ron DeSantis.
Could you imagine Ron DeSantis not winning the presidency?
It's actually kind of hard to believe, unless there's some Ron DeSantis thing going on that I don't know about.
Is there some scandal I don't know about?
Because I can't see him losing.
It feels like he would just walk into the job right now based on what he's done, how Florida's done, etc., Now, Trump, maybe Trump could too.
But, you know, Trump is always just his own thing, right?
Can't compare Trump to anything.
They can win by cheating.
Well, I don't know.
It's going to get harder. We do have an election system which we have to admit is designed for cheating.
Can I say that out loud?
I can't make a statement about whether any cheating has happened already because I have no evidence to support that claim.
But can we say it's designed to support cheating?
Because it can't be audited.
If you have an election system that can't be audited, it's designed to cheat.
And if you don't see that...
Well, you could be really disappointed that you don't have a democracy sooner or later.
There's a question on CNN whether salad bars will ever come back.
I have really mixed feelings about this.
My favorite place in the world to eat was a salad bar.
It's called Sweet Tomatoes.
There was one in my town. I don't know if the whole chain went bankrupt or just the one in my town went out of business.
But it was my number one favorite place to eat by far.
Because blah, blah, blah.
All the food was there. It was all the stuff I liked.
But I have to say that my grossness trigger has changed quite a bit because of the pandemic.
And now the thought of eating food that other people have been breathing around...
I don't know if I could do it.
Here's another one. If the restaurant workers take off their masks, I'm not going to be as happy.
You know, I would love to see their faces, and I would like them to be happier in their jobs.
So that would mean a lot to me, right?
But honestly, my...
I guess my freak-out level from every kind of germ and virus that you could think of has changed.
Have you ever had that experience where in your life you feel your own gross-out level change and you're aware of it?
It's like, oh, this used to gross me out, but it doesn't bother me now.
Or, this didn't used to bother me, but now it does.
Is anybody having the same experience?
Somebody says, I have a plumbing license.
Okay, I think that's an answer to the question.
Yeah, same here. I have a feeling that it would be tough to open a salad bar these days just because it just doesn't feel as hygienic.
I don't know if it ever was.
Now, I don't think you can actually get coronavirus from the salad bar, at least from the food.
You can get it from the other people.
So it's irrational.
I'm not saying any of it's rational, but it does make a difference.
So yesterday I went to the grocery store in my town, Trader Joe's.
And I live in a county in which the mask recommendations are...
I think they're going to make more mask requirements or something.
So there's something happening that's a little unclear.
But I walked in and I was the only person without a mask...
I didn't see anybody else without a mask.
And so I said to myself, did the mask requirement change specifically?
Like, do I need one? And I didn't see a sign, but I also didn't take any time to look for one.
You know, there's always lots of signs in front of a grocery store, you know, do this, don't do that.
Maybe it was there, I don't know.
But I said to myself, once I was in there, I said to myself, what if there is a mask requirement?
And I'm the only one who's not wearing one.
Now, eventually, I saw some other people without masks.
But when I first went in, I didn't see anybody.
And I said to myself, I think this is the way I'm going to play it, because I'm fully vaccinated.
I think I'm going to let them ask me to put it back on.
And then I'll decide if I want to complete my transaction with a mask on, or if I want to take my business elsewhere.
It might depend on the situation and how badly I need, whatever I need.
I'm going to make the mask.
I'm going to be very polite about it.
I'll say, oh, are you really asking me to wear a mask?
I'm fully vaccinated.
The CDC would not require it.
But if that's what you're asking, I'll respect...
I'll respect your business requirement, and I'll either put on a mask if I need to, or I'll go shop somewhere else.
But I'm not going to fight it, because I don't have any fight with a store owner, right?
I'm not here to make anybody's life worse if they run a store.
That's not my job. But you want to put some friction into the system.
You want them very quickly to give up on it.
You want the store owner to know that they can't win the fight, that some percentage of their customers are not going to wear a mask, and if they want to just do normal business, they're going to have to figure out a way to do that without asking everybody to put on a mask.
So I would say stay completely polite.
Understand the situation of the store owners and the managers and the employees.
They're in a tough position. But don't be an asshole.
You don't have to be an asshole about it.
If they ask you to do it, either comply or leave.
But you don't need to be an asshole.
Just be polite about it. You'll get what you want by being polite anyway.
So I felt like a conscientious objector, but I still don't even know what the store requirement was.
Nobody asked me to put on a mask, so I don't know.
Smirkanish asked an interesting question on CNN, as Smirkanish often does.
I often recommend Smirkanish.
Because I do think he's the closest to an objective news opinion person on CNN, and maybe on other places too.
He's pretty darn objective.
So much so that I wonder how he can stay on CNN. He's actually so objective that I'm sometimes surprised that they even let him on there.
So he's kind of an exception on that network.
But he reports that 47% of Republicans say they won't get vaccinated, but only 6% of Democrats.
So let's take that forward and say that those numbers hold, and something like half of Republicans never get vaccinated, but maybe something close to 94% of Democrats do.
Wouldn't that make it a Republican pandemic after that?
Right? Because if basically all of the Democrats who want it are vaccinated, they're done.
Apparently, if you look at the hospitals in LA and San Francisco, how many unvaccinated COVID patients are there in all the hospitals in LA and all the hospitals in San Francisco?
What would you guess? The total number of unvaccinated patients Patients who have COVID and are in the hospital for it.
How many are unvaccinated versus vaccinated?
And the answer is 100% of them are unvaccinated.
100%. There are zero hospital patients with COVID who are vaccinated in LA and San Francisco put together.
Both of them added together.
Zero. Not one.
So do you think the vaccination works?
Now, you could argue that there might be complications you're worried about.
We don't know about that long term.
But is the question answered?
I mean, it's frickin' zero.
The question's asked and answered, right?
I don't think we have to wonder about that anymore.
But here's an interesting fact about this.
At what point, if the only people getting COVID are Republicans, at what point is COVID some kind of voter suppression?
Could you actually reach a point where an election was determined by the number of people who were killed by COVID? Or people who were sick at the time and couldn't vote, I suppose?
No. I don't know.
Probably won't ever get that big because it's such a tiny number of people who expire from it in the first place.
Check the video somebody posted on Locals.
Very informative about this.
I would like to see that.
And Smirkanish asked this question, which I think is a fair question.
He says, why won't Trump encourage vaccinations?
Now remember, Trump apparently got vaccinated.
Even though he'd been infected, I think he got vaccinated also.
And he was the chief architect of Project Warp Speed.
Trump gets the credit for the vaccinations.
But you don't really see him pushing you to get vaccinated.
And do you think that that's a mistake?
Now, I'm guessing that because it would be basically impossible for him to get re-elected if he did...
That's a pretty good reason. At least politically, that would be a good reason, right?
If Trump pushed vaccinations, even being the architect of warp speed, so many Republicans who don't want vaccinations would bristle at that, that he wouldn't be able to get elected.
Do you think that's why he doesn't do it?
Do you think that Trump is allowing Republicans to die, to die, so that he has a better chance of getting re-elected?
That's Murkanish's question.
Effectively, I'm adding a little bit to his question, but it looks like it.
It looks like it.
Now, I've told you myself that even though I'm vaccinated, I don't promote it for you.
And the reason is, I'm not a doctor, right?
It would be completely unethical for me to suggest that you, who are a completely different person from me, different risk profile, everything else, I'm not going to recommend you get vaccinated.
That's your frickin' business, right?
And because I've taken care of myself, so I'm not worried about me, and therefore, you make your own decisions.
I don't bitch when you ride your motorcycle.
I don't bitch when you drink a beer.
I don't bitch when you eat a cheeseburger.
I'm not going to bitch about this.
That's your business. But suppose you're a leader, which I suppose I'm not.
Suppose you're Trump.
Suppose you are the architect of the vaccines.
Suppose you only want the country to be better.
Should you make an exception?
I don't know. It's a tough one, isn't it?
Because if he does make the exception, he probably can't be president again.
I mean, if he decides to go full persuasion on it.
Let me ask you this. If Trump went full persuasion on vaccinations, how much of an impact would it have?
What do you think? Do you think that he could move the needle?
How much persuasive ability would Trump have if he had, just wait for it, imagine if he had vaccination rallies.
Where they offered vaccination at the rally.
You know, optional. You don't have to get the vaccination if you went to the rally.
But what if you did? How many more people would get vaccinated because of that?
It's optional. You know, he would just say, look, I'm not your doctor, but talk to your doctor and make your own decision.
Just make it available.
You can decide if you want it.
And I don't even see...
I haven't seen Trump even make the case that it's up to the individual.
Because that, too, would be sort of political in our current environment.
And then the question is, what happens if the vaccine has some side effect you don't know about, and then it's all Trump's fault, I guess.
But it's going to be his fault no matter what, right?
If the vaccinations...
And I think this is unlikely, but, you know, just to include all risks, right?
To include everything. What if someday we find out the vaccinations were causing some damage to people down the line?
I think it's unlikely.
But what if? Well, Trump is going to get the full blame for that, right?
Because he's the architect of Project Warp Speed.
Hey, why'd you rush it?
So if Trump is going to get the blame if things go badly, no matter what...
Maybe he should go all in.
I'm not saying he should, but just consider what's your risk-reward here.
If he's going to get the blame no matter what, why not get the credit?
Because he doesn't have any option of getting the credit if half of the Republicans don't get vaccinated.
It's going to be hard to credit him for that.
Right? I don't know.
So I guess the question is, should he go all in?
Or should he sort of stay on the sidelines like he is now on the biggest question in the country?
I don't know. In my opinion, if the only people in the hospitals for COVID are the unvaccinated, we should treat it like obesity and smoking cigarettes.
Meaning that it's just a lifestyle choice at this point.
My lifestyle choice was to get the vaccination.
I don't promote it for you.
That's your own decision, right?
I'm not persuading you.
But my personal lifestyle choice was to get vaccinated.
My personal lifestyle choice is to eat good food when I can and exercise.
Those are my lifestyle choices.
What happens when I have some, let's say, an injury or whatever, and I go to my local healthcare provider and I'll be sitting in the waiting area, and there'll be all the other patients waiting for their doctors.
How many of the other patients in the waiting area of your doctor have a healthy weight?
Almost none. Almost everybody at the doctor's office At least at mine, they look like they have lifestyle-related problems.
There's the diabetes you gave yourself by overeating.
You know, you can just look at the people and say, okay, lifestyle, lifestyle, lifestyle, lifestyle.
So at what point does the COVID just become a lifestyle risk?
You want to live unvaccinated.
I don't mind getting a vaccination.
Your lifestyle choice gave you COVID. Mine gave me no problem.
It's just like obesity now.
It's just like smoking cigarettes.
It's just like drinking beer.
It's all of those things.
It's not bigger, is it?
If you went to these hospitals in L.A. and San Francisco that I told you have zero people in them that are vaccinated, so they have a number of unvaccinated COVID patients and some of them could be pretty severe.
But how many people are there for obesity-related problems?
More, right?
More. Aren't we at the point where there are way more people with other lifestyle problems, things that they brought on themselves essentially?
And COVID is just another one of those.
It just joins the list.
All right, you smoked, you drank, you didn't exercise.
There you are. Have you noticed that COVID has become like a news sweetener now?
It went from... The news, of course, during the height of the pandemic.
And it stayed sort of the meta news over all the news for a while.
But because of the vaccinations and because it's summer and everything, it's shrinking down a little bit.
And now it feels like a sweetener to an existing story.
Would you like an example?
Here's a story that doesn't require COVID, but then the COVID is put onto the story like a sweetener.
The story was that in Texas, a bunch of Democrat lawmakers got on a bus or a plane or something and they left town.
So that there wouldn't be a quorum for a vote on something they didn't want to get voted in, which is the changes to the election stuff.
So all the Democrat lawmakers, they got together, masklessly took pictures.
Hey, look at us.
Did you see the creepy selfies that they took in the bus, the Texas Democrats?
What's wrong with their faces?
Have you seen the pictures?
Look at their faces.
There's something wrong with all of their faces.
They're all... I can't even do an impression.
But their faces are like demented.
They have that kind of, I'm a little too happy for the situation.
I can't even do an impression, but they all look demented.
But that's not the story.
So the story is all these lawmakers leave town and to block the vote by the Republicans.
That's the story. Now here's the sweetener.
Three of them got COVID-19.
It's just a sweetener. It has nothing to do with the story.
But you just add a little COVID on there.
You can do it for anything.
It's like baseball season opened.
The A's had a good game.
Two of them got COVID. It's just a sweetener.
Add the sweetener.
All right. Remember years ago, there was the mystery, possibly a secret sonic weapon that...
Affected the health of some diplomats in Cuba.
Do you remember that? And I alone in the entire universe said, this is fake news.
I believe...
Can somebody do a fact check on this?
I believe I'm still the only person in the world who says that's fake news.
Now, I'm not saying that people are not sick.
That seems to be true.
But the cause of it being a secret sonic weapon, I say, fake news.
But we have now yet more reports.
There was something in Canada and then now Vienna, which we know to be a hotspot of U.S.-Russian spy activity.
Sort of a nexus, as they say, of spy activity.
And coincidentally, Vienna, which is the nexus of spy activity.
Roughly two dozen possible new cases have been reported by U.S. spies and diplomats in the Austrian capital.
More than in any other city except Havana.
Wait, what?
More than in any other city?
More than? Are you telling me that this is happening in a variety of other cities, but maybe not as much?
Huh. This secret sonic weapon is getting around quite a bit.
It turns out that somebody with a secret sonic weapon is going from city to city all over the world, really.
Zap it a few people, but not as much as Cuba.
Not as much as Cuba.
And then they'll go to another city.
They'll zap a few people with their secret weapon.
They'll run away to Austria, Vienna specifically, where apparently there's just a lot of spy zapping with secret sonic weapons.
I don't believe any of this.
Not a single bit of it.
Because this is almost a textbook perfect case of hysteria.
In other words, people get sick all the time and they don't know why.
If you were to do brain scans of these people's brains, how many of them would have abnormalities?
Probably a lot of them. If you just took a random bunch of people and scanned their brains, don't you think you'd find, like, little problems with everybody's brain?
It's like, well, this one, a little area over here, and this one's got a little area over there.
So I'm not sure the brain scans are really telling us anything.
I do think there could be a variety of other reasons that people have these problems.
You know, sick buildings and everything else.
But I do not believe, and I will double down, triple down, I will quadruple down on my prediction that it is not a secret sonic weapon.
Does anybody think it's a weapon?
In the comments, tell me if you believe it is really an actual weapon that somebody's using against all these How many people?
I'm going to read some of your comments.
I see a no, yes, no, not sure, don't know, not a weapon, no, no, me, could be, nope, yes, there's a chance, yes, EMF, low probability, yes, microwave, 30%.
Oh, okay. Those are good answers.
When people are answering in terms of probability, then I know you're thinking.
Then I know you're putting actual correct mental effort into this.
The people who are just clearly not part of the thinking class are the ones who are sure.
I'm making my prediction that this is not a weapon, but if I had to put my certainty on it, it would be closer to 90%, maybe.
But not 100%, but 90%.
Maybe 95%.
All right. Let's see what else is going on.
The California wildfires are starting.
It's weird. We have a fifth season in California.
You've got your regular four.
They're not pronounced in California, of course.
But we now have a fire season.
And the fire season is more than whether it affects where you are specifically because the air just turns smoky.
You can't go outdoors. The air quality goes so low that you literally need to stay inside during the summer.
And we're just beginning that.
So we've got nine fires that are not controlled or not out.
Nine fires in California.
And here's my question.
We really can't figure out how to put out fires because In forests?
In 2021?
We literally are putting billionaires in space.
But we can't put out fires easily when they start.
And I wonder why.
Have you ever thought about the science of it?
The science of it, which is how fast does a forest fire start?
How long does it take to notice it?
And then how quickly can you get resources there to maybe surround it or put it out?
Why can't we get resources to a fire within one hour of the fire starting?
And is that too late?
Is one hour enough that there's nothing you could do?
If you burn for an hour, it's already too big?
So, here's my question.
Why do we not have a permanent fleet of drones...
That are looking for sparks and little fires, flying at night and looking for smoke and everything.
Just sort of a permanent, always in the air, just forest fire-looking drones.
And then the minute the drones see a fire...
Why do we not have a fleet of other drones carrying water who just take off and they converge on this place and they're maybe not that accurate, but they just drop a shit ton of water or fire suppressants wherever it's been identified?
Why do we even have people involved?
Are you telling me that the cost of all these fires is not more...
Well, are you telling me it's more than the cost of building a bunch of drones that can put out fires?
I get it, water is heavy, but we also have, you know, we do put out fires with airplanes and water.
So, of course, there would be an issue of how quickly those planes could get in the air, but why don't we have, like, this giant fleet of, you know, water-carrying airplanes that are just ready to go within an hour of somebody spotting it?
Or is that not enough? I don't know anything about forest fires, so I may be asking all the dumbest questions, but maybe there's no way to do it.
Could you not bring a bunch of bulldozers into an area where there's a fire and just put a ring of some kind of fire-suppressing road and fill it with people who have small fire suppression gear?
How hard is it to get up into those forests?
I don't know. It just feels like we're not doing enough.
That's what it feels like. California, you're not doing enough.
Or maybe I just don't know enough.
All right, how many stories in the news are caused by the teachers' unions, but we don't talk about it that way?
So here are all the stories in the news that, in my opinion, are caused entirely by teachers' unions, or mostly, not entirely.
There's a big spike in crime.
Would you say that crime...
It's fundamentally caused by the teachers' unions.
I say so.
Because if everybody had the ability to get a better education, especially in poorer neighborhoods and especially in minority neighborhoods where it's the worst situations, don't you think there would be a lot less crime?
And the reason that they have bad schools in some areas is because of the teachers' unions.
The teachers' unions suppress competition in schools, which means that you can never get better because there's no competition and everybody just stays where they are.
So I would say all the crime stories and crime is going through the roof and violent crime is going up, that's pretty much a story of the teachers' unions failing us for decades.
How about racism?
Well, racism wouldn't go away because the teachers' unions acted differently, but imagine a world where everybody had the same economic opportunity because they all had a good education.
Everything's different. The entire...
The filter on racial discrimination would be completely different if everybody got out of school with a good education, or at least the opportunity to get one.
It would change everything.
Now, of course, there's still racism, but it would make such a difference.
It's the number one biggest thing you could do.
There's a story today about disparities in STEM. Why are there disparities in STEM? So apparently the government of the United States has decided to be really stupid.
The stupidest thing you could do is to try to incent or force companies into hiring more minorities into STEM positions.
Why is that the worst idea in the world?
Is it because I'm racist? No.
It's because there's nobody to hire.
You don't think that all these big, woke corporations would be hiring as many minority and women and handicapped and everything else?
You don't think they would be hiring as many as they could if they had supply?
If they existed, you don't think they'd be hiring them like crazy?
Of course they would. The problem is supply.
They don't exist. So, of course, it's being attacked in the wrong place.
The right place to attack it would be teachers' unions.
The reason that there are not enough, let's say minorities in particular, in STEM is because they're coming out of schools that are poorly executed.
If you fix the schools, you would have a supply of minority people for STEM, and then the big companies would hire them, and then you wouldn't have a problem.
Again, it's teachers' unions.
How about vaccination decisions?
Oh, it got complicated now, didn't it?
You don't know what to think.
I'm borrowing a line from Norm MacDonald.
He goes, you don't know what to think now.
Well, here's what I would say about vaccination decisions.
You can make your own vaccination decision, of course.
I'm not going to influence you.
But don't you think that a lot of decisions are being made by people who are not good at decision-making?
Don't you? It's their own decision, so let it remain their own decision.
But how many people have learned how to make decisions?
And why do the schools not teach that?
Teachers' unions.
Basically, the teachers' unions are keeping the schools kind of the way they've always been.
They don't change that much.
But imagine if you had competition.
Imagine... Just imagine somebody opening a competitive school, a private school in a neighborhood where you don't have much opportunity, and they teach a class on strategy and decision-making, like life strategy and decision-making.
It would be like a superpower.
But kids don't learn that stuff.
Now, how would that affect your vaccination decision?
Well, I don't know if it would make you more likely or less likely to get a vaccination.
your decision.
But at least you'd be making a rational one.
And right now the worry is that people are not making rational decisions.
So at least we get the rational part fixed.
So when you look at all these various problems in the world, it turns out a lot of them have the same problem.
What's wrong with the economy?
Is it that people are not trained for the right kinds Yes. Right?
You could go right down the line.
Almost every problem we have has at its base that we didn't educate the public properly.
And specifically, we did not educate the low-income part of the public properly.
And that bites you in the ass.
It'll bite you in the ass every time.
You know that. That's why we have public schools in the first place.
Because everybody knows if you don't educate the kids, you're doomed in the long run.
Elisa says, I learned decision-making in science class.
I'll bet you didn't. Because I learned it in economics.
And I'll bet it doesn't look the same.
I think you need both of those.
I think you need science, but you also need business and economics and maybe psychology as well to get a full...
You know, a talent stack for decision-making, is what I'd say.
Now, one of the most interesting things is that there's also concern that among the STEM workforce, not only is there not enough women and not enough minorities, but there are not enough disabled scientists.
Not enough disabled scientists, and people are concerned about that.
And I'm thinking, that would be the easiest one to solve, right?
Because what you do is you take the scientists you already have that are not disabled and you would encourage them to take on hobbies and sports which have a high accident rate.
Now, you don't solve the problem immediately.
But if you get enough scientists who are rock climbing and doing competitive biking and such, you're going to get some disabled scientists.
Doesn't happen right away.
But at least you get that good outcome of more disabled scientists.
Some would say you should start with a disabled and make them into scientists.
I say that's the hard way.
It's going to be a lot easier to start with a scientist and turn them disabled.
I mean, one of them is easy.
One of them is hard. And if the goal is to have more disabled scientists, I see an easy way to do it and a hard way to do it.
So one of them is going to be a lot faster.
That's all I'm saying. Make your own decisions.
I'm not here for your moral or ethical dilemmas.
You have to solve that on your own.
I'm just saying one is faster.
That's all I'm saying.
I'm not promoting any kind of violence.
I'm just saying one is faster.
That's all. So...
Has anybody been booted off of Twitter or social media lately?
Is anybody...
Getting banned for saying all the wrong stuff?
Well, we know it's coming.
You self-bodied yourself.
Okay. I see that in the comments.
And how many of you are happy with the audio on these podcasts now?
It's pretty good. Because there's another level I need to take it to.
So I've got these two Rodecasters, and apparently they both need a firmware upgrade, which will give me a little more control over the specifics of my sound.
I think I can make it even better, but I don't know if I want to play with it.
The audio is the best it's ever been.
Would it help anybody for me to do a little tutorial on how I got the audio to work well?
Because it turns out you learn a lot.
It's easy to share.
It's not really complicated stuff.
Somebody says the audio is great on Locals, but it's lower on YouTube.
Interesting. It will be the same...
I'm pretty sure it will be the same...
Once I have two iPads running.
All right. Yes.
Oh, let me give you this micro lesson.
So I was asked on the Locals platform to do a micro lesson on how to better do multitasking.
And so I've been thinking about that for a while, and here's my answer.
Multitasking is an illusion.
There's no such thing.
So trying to do multitasking better would be kind of like trying to use magic better.
Since magic doesn't exist, you can't really do it better.
Likewise, since multitasking isn't a real thing, it doesn't actually exist, you can't do it better.
But here's what we can say about it.
Avoid it. The number one thing you should do about multitasking is avoid it.
Multitasking makes you worse at everything.
And it makes you distracted and it just brings down your performance at everything.
Now, there are lots of jobs where the difficulty of all your things is not very high.
So let's say you're working at McDonald's and you've got all kinds of things and you've got to keep the franchise going and take care of a customer and stuff like that.
That kind of multitasking, most people can handle.
And it's fine because you don't need to think deeply about the french fries.
You just need to respond to them when the timer goes off.
But let's say you have a thinking job.
You're a computer programmer and you need to really go deep on things.
You're a scientist. You're a creative person.
And you have to go really deep.
How do you multitask in those situations?
And the answer is, don't!
Don't! Do not multitask if you're going to think deeply about anything important.
It doesn't work.
You need to be able to go down the well, all the way down the well with the smarter thinking jobs.
You've got to go deep.
That's one of the reasons that I like getting up at, you know, oh God, 100 in the morning so early that other people are not awake to bother me yet.
So when I get up at 3 or 4 in the morning, I can think very deeply because there's nothing else going on.
I'm not distracted by what's happened in my day because nothing's happened yet.
I'm not getting phone calls, texts, emails.
Just nothing's happening. And those times I can just go down the well as far as I want.
And I would say that's your multitasking lesson, is that just avoid it.
Don't do it if you have to think.
But if you have a job that doesn't require thinking, it's just doing a bunch of stuff, everybody can do that.
You just have to have a little practice.
All right. That is all I have for today, and I will talk to all of you tomorrow.
