Episode 1539 Scott Adams: How to Solve the Supply Chain Problem, and a Review of Inappropriate Alec Baldwin Jokes
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Best Cornholio memes of Biden
Alec Baldwin didn't confirm gun was empty?
Let's Get Biden To Quit....LGBTQ
Ryan Peterson, CEO of Flexport on supply chain bottleneck
Whiteboard: What to do with all the empty containers
Enes Kanter, a citizen doing our governments job
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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
Hold on. Well, today will be interesting, won't it?
Yes, it will, because it turns out this is far too glaringly white, isn't it?
Too glaringly white.
We're going to use this in a minute.
But let's get it out of my way for now.
All right. So, congratulations to all of you for showing up at the best place in the entire metaverse.
Yeah, yeah. This used to be the best place in the world, but then Facebook announced that it was going to create infinite new metaverse worlds in virtual reality and AR, and now...
Now we know it's the best thing in all of those worlds.
Yes, and if you'd like to take it up a level, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tangered chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask or vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasured.
Pleasured? Unparalleled pleasure.
The dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better except the shipping containers.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and it happens now.
Go. Ah.
Antibodies. Mm-mm-mm.
Well, in no particular order, my favorite story of the day, I saw Erica.
You all know Erica, right?
Erica tweeted this.
Apparently, at a Louisiana high school, there was a violent week of fighting at the high school, and a bunch of dads got together to basically help out at the school.
So this volunteer group of dads...
I'm looking at a meme of me as Cornholio that's happening over at Locals right now.
So the dad's on duty.
They put their little shirts on to say, Dad's on duty.
And they go hang out with the kids.
And it turns out the kids kind of like it, which is weird.
I'm not sure the reporting is all accurate.
But it looks like the students appreciated having some adult dad-like figures.
And the funny part of the story is that the dads were just making dad jokes.
And the kids were laughing at the dad jokes.
But it just changed, it sort of changed the vibe of the school and apparently made a big difference.
So, kudos to dads on duty.
If you saw this story, I feel like this is one of those weird periods in history, right?
Now, if you saw the visual of the story, all the dads are African American.
And they're all big guys, too.
They're just really big guys.
And I feel like I had to mention that, even though it's not relevant to the story.
Like, we're in that weird time where the fact that all the dads involved seem to be black, somehow that mattered, but it doesn't matter.
Like, the story doesn't require it, but somehow it...
I don't know, adds flavor to the story or something.
So, oh, I guess maybe this is the angle on that that makes it a little special, is that it's just a great solution.
Maybe we can see more of it.
I don't know. Actor Peter Scolari passed away, age 66, from cancer.
I have a Peter Scolari story.
One of the weird things about my life is I just end up meeting a lot of people who end up being in the news.
And years ago, when I was doing a Dilbert TV show, we were casting for the talent for the various Dilbert parts.
And just an interesting thing I learned that involved Peter Scolari, because he was one of the people who...
Well, I can't use the word tried out for the part, and that's the point of the story.
So apparently in Hollywood, there are three levels of actors.
At the bottom level, the people who are new to the game...
I see you all like fighting you naked.
I saw your comment.
Um... So there are three levels of celebrities, and I learned this when I was working there.
At the bottom level, they have to audition for every role because they're not famous, nobody knows them, you just have to audition or you're not going to get the job.
At the next level up, you still need to audition, but you're a little bit famous or even, you know, a lot famous, and they don't want to call it an audition.
So you do a fake audition, but you call it a meeting.
And so Peter Scolari was already quite successful from Bosom Buddies and other stuff.
And so when his name came up and we invited him in, I think he was trying for the role of the Dilbert voice, if I recall.
And you have to do this whole thing where you pretend you're not actually doing an interview.
You just have a conversation.
And so you pretend that when he tries out, he auditions, that he's actually just having a conversation with him.
He's not actually auditioning.
So it goes like this.
You'll be, you know, what do you think of this?
Interested in this role? You make conversations and stuff.
And at some point, the actor will say, yeah, you know, and so let me look at this.
Were you looking for something like, you know, he'll do a voice, he'll do a take, and he'll say, yeah, yeah, that's pretty good.
We're thinking about that, maybe a little more serious or something, maybe give him a note.
But you wouldn't ask him to do it again.
He would have to volunteer to do it again.
So there's this whole weird etiquette of how to deal with different levels of celebrity.
You just can't ask him to audition.
He's just got to volunteer.
Anyway, he didn't get the job.
But I will tell you, he was very talented.
The people who are successful professionals, actors and actresses, I'm not even sure if you use actress anymore, they could do different takes on the same character, and other people couldn't.
And it was fascinating to watch.
So somebody like a Peter Scolari could come in and give you, you know, one kind of vibe.
And then you'd say, well, you know, make this change.
And then he could give you a whole different vibe for the voice.
And others just couldn't do it.
They could do ten versions of the same voice.
So there is a difference between those who can act and those who can't.
And I will say Peter Scolari had it.
He had the gift. And I got to see it live, and it was a treat.
And by the way, at the top level of the stardom, you don't ask them to do anything.
You just offer them the part, right?
If it's Tom Cruise, you just offer them the part.
The best Biden memes that we saw coming out of the strange behavior where Biden's hands were in front of him like Beavis and Butthead and Cornholio.
I don't know how many you saw, but the ones I liked were the meme where somebody put ski poles in his hands, put them on the ski slope.
The jetpack was good.
Did you see the jetpack one?
Lifting off of the jetpack.
The riding a tiny horse...
He had the reins in his hand, and he's on top of a miniature horse.
Very good. Very good.
And, of course, Cornholio was my favorite.
Did I miss one? Did I miss one?
The llama? Oh, was there a...
Oh, the ice cream cones.
That was actually my idea, was he was holding two ice cream cones, and somebody photoshopped that in there.
Holding corn dogs...
I absolutely love this era where you can turn something into a video or visual meme in an hour.
Oh, yeah, the Rock'em Sock'em robots.
That was a good one, too. All right, those are all good.
What else is happening?
So CNN is covering the Alec Baldwin story and has a big article about it.
And I guess we learned today that allegedly the prop person handed Alec Baldwin this gun and announced that it was, quote, a cold gun.
Now, a cold gun, in the lingo of, I guess, the business, is it means it's not loaded.
And then allegedly, and this part is unclear, it looks like Alec Baldwin might have aimed it at somebody, but I don't know that that's true.
I think that was debunked.
So we've got some sort of conflicting stories.
It's unclear if it was intentionally aimed at anybody, even in joke, or it just went off, you know, accidentally in some way.
Yeah. Now, here's the part...
You're ahead of me in the comments here.
You know exactly where I'm going on this.
CNN does this story without ever mentioning that it shouldn't have made any difference what the prop person said.
Are you with me? Anybody with the smallest ounce of common sense or gun training, you know, gun safety training, you don't take somebody's word for it that a gun is unloaded.
Is there anything more basic than that?
Do you know who I don't believe if they hand me a gun and tell me it's not loaded?
Do you know who I don't trust?
Everyone. Everyone.
There's no exception.
If the Pope hands you a gun and says, don't worry, it's not loaded, check it.
Check it. Because you don't know the Pope is...
Tell me the truth. Don't take a chance.
So somehow they can write that story without mentioning the most basic gun safety facts that it shouldn't have mattered Who made that mistake?
There were ten ways for the accident not to happen.
And all of them involved just normal common sense.
So I don't think we can let anybody off the hook by saying, oh, he didn't know it was loaded.
That doesn't count.
Sorry. No credit for don't know it was loaded.
My favorite joke so far in the totally inappropriate category...
Let me give you a test.
Are we adult enough that we can handle the contradiction that I think most of us genuinely see this as, I hope, as a real tragedy with real people who really will have to suffer forever, the survivors, who will have to suffer forever, the loss of their loved one, and of course the deaths themselves.
So it's a tragedy, and as humans we need to point that out.
But... Are we not allowed to enjoy the jokes?
What do you think? Where do you stand on that?
My take is I can't help it.
I feel like it's beyond my control.
If something's funny, I laugh at it.
And I don't know how many of you have this same feeling, but the thing that makes these jokes make you laugh...
Is that they're so deeply inappropriate.
Am I right? If they were not deeply inappropriate, would they really be funny?
No. So in many ways, I'm giving you an out.
So if somebody accuses you of laughing at these jokes, here's your out.
They're funny because they're inappropriate.
It's true, right? It's the inappropriateness, the fact that it's a tragedy.
That's why you're laughing.
If it were not deeply inappropriate, you wouldn't have two things in sort of out of balance, which is what triggers the reflex to laugh.
So I'm going to give you permission to enjoy this, but maybe not right in front of the victims or their families, okay?
I hope they're staying off the Internet today.
But Wendy Rogers, who's an Arizona state senator, had the tweet of the day, in my opinion.
Now, what I like about this tweet is it's coming from somebody who's not a professional humorist who somehow crafted a perfect joke.
Okay? So a non-professional, Wendy Rogers, somehow crafted a perfect tweet.
You want to hear it?
Of course you do.
Here's her tweet. Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney, and Alec Baldwin go hunting.
How does that play out?
Come on, that's pretty clever.
That's pretty funny.
Now, here's what I liked about it.
The ending, how does that play out, is perfect.
Just in terms of joke construction.
Because... And this is basically where hypnosis and humor overlap.
What is beautiful about this punchline is the question, how does that play out, allows you to imagine your funniest version.
That's a hypnosis trick.
Now, I doubt she's studied hypnosis.
But leaving stuff out so that the audience can fill in the joke is really good form.
Now, I don't know if she's just really good at this, Wendy Rogers, or if she, you know, she just hit one out of the park, lucky swing.
But this is a perfect joke.
I looked at this, I read this like five times.
I was like, God, there's not one wasted word in that sentence.
There's nothing you could change in that that would make that better.
Anyway, so we've got some runaway inflation, it looks like.
Or do we?
Does anybody understand how inflation works?
Is anybody old enough here?
I know some of you are.
Do you remember stagflation?
Remember in the Jimmy Carter years, we had stagflation.
And then all the experts said, whoa, now we know what stagflation is, and we know what conditions will cause it in the future.
And then those conditions happened again in the future, and what happened?
No stagflation.
So we don't even know what caused it.
Well, I mean, I don't, because we were pretty sure that it was going to happen again, and then it just didn't.
Now, of course, there are lots of variables in play, so you have to have all the other things lined up to get the same result, and we didn't.
Now, how good are we at predicting economic stuff?
Not really good, are we?
That doesn't mean it's not a problem.
What it does mean is I can't tell, right?
And I remind you too often, I have a degree in economics.
I don't know if we're in trouble or not.
And I'm not sure I would trust anybody's opinion on this.
Because people have been so wrong about inflation and stagflation and national debt.
We don't even know what national debt is.
We don't even know what it is.
Like, just the most basic stuff about the economy, I don't think anybody knows.
And the problem is that there are just so many variables, right?
So something could happen with a war, a shortage, some kind of bottleneck thing.
I don't think anybody saw the supply chain thing coming.
Maybe they did. I don't know.
But I guess my only takeaway on the runaway hyperinflation risk is we don't really know.
Maybe. Maybe.
All right, Britain, it looks like they're first in line to get these new antivirals, the therapeutics, coming to us from Pfizer and Merck.
So there would be pills that you take that could reduce the risk of...
that mild to moderately ill people would reduce their risk of disease by 50%.
I'm sorry, the risk of, you know, serious hospitalization and death by 50%.
To which I say...
If you could reduce the winter surge by 50%, and again, other people say we already have therapeutics, you know, we've already got Regeneron, etc.
Given all the ways that we've learned to treat COVID, given the fact that our most vulnerable are mostly vaccinated, given the fact that the people most likely to die, a lot of them already died, I feel like the argument for keeping any restrictions in place really just became irrational, didn't they? At least after the pills are available.
So they're not available yet, maybe the end of the year.
But if we're in January, and we've got these antivirals, I don't know if they can produce enough of them fast enough, but if we had them in January...
What would be the argument for any ongoing restrictions?
Now, the argument, of course, is to reduce deaths.
But if you can reduce them by 50%, isn't that going to be enough?
I mean, we keep doing things that reduce the risk by 50%.
How many times do you have to cut it in half before you're okay?
They've been irrational since, yeah.
They've been irrational for a while.
Long-term effects? Unknown.
Correct. Long-term effects of the antiviral drugs?
Unknown. Long-term effects of getting COVID? Hey, I have a question for you.
I'm just going to put this out there.
So we keep hearing about all of the so-called long-haul COVID problems.
So people get the COVID, and let's say they have a bad case of it, but then for weeks or months they have symptoms.
I'm just going to put this out there, because the range of symptoms seem pretty broad.
Have you ever had a surgery...
So I've had three surgeries, none of them super major, right?
I had, you know, a couple of nasal things, etc., some polyps in my sinus.
And so none of them were major surgeries, but each of them required anesthesia.
How long does it take you to recover from anesthesia and surgery?
And I don't mean that day.
I mean how many months?
Have you ever had a minor surgery?
No. It takes months, doesn't it, to feel right, even after your problem is completely solved, you know, whatever the actual cutting was about of the surgery.
There's something like a fog that somebody says like a year, right?
Now, last year, or actually during the pandemic, I had some surgery that was delayed for months and months.
And many of you know the story.
I had some sinus polyps that needed to be removed.
And so the surgery was delayed, and part of that delay put me on prednisone.
So I got on prednisone for, you know, a period.
And then I thought I was going to go from that, and the prednisone reduces the polyps in the meantime until you can get the surgery.
Then the surgery got canceled, delayed.
So I got on prednisone again, a second dose within a year, which is sort of a lot.
Because getting off of prednisone is kind of a problem.
And then I had it a third time.
So I believe, if I'm remembering right, there were three separate extended periods of prednisone.
It took me months to be able to walk upstairs after I got off prednisone.
Months. And I was in good shape, right?
I mean, I was a gym rat.
And just the prednisone, it wasn't even the illness, and it wasn't even the surgery.
But just getting off of prednisone, if you have too much of it, it's months.
Like, I would get to the top of the stairs, and I'd be like, uh...
And now it's fine. I can run upstairs, you know, easily.
Now, prednisone is a steroid, right?
Don't you get prednisone when you get COVID? Isn't that a pretty normal prescription?
Am I right about that? And if you get prednisone, do you get it long enough that you have the problem I had?
Because I don't think they give it to you that long, right?
Because I was on it for a few weeks, I think, each time.
Yeah. So here's my question.
How many of what people are reporting to be long COVID, months-long symptoms, how many of those symptoms are caused by the treatment?
Or just recovering from a bad illness in general?
If something just knocks you on your ass, whatever it is, could be just a bad regular flu, don't you have lasting issues from that, like a few weeks later?
A few weeks later, you've still got some problems.
I don't know. I'll just put that out there.
A lot of the reported long haul might have...
might be just the trauma of the experience itself.
All right. Let's go, Brandon.
All right. I need a little help here.
A little help. I would like to employ the global brain.
Calling on all viewers to be part of a single intelligence...
I'm going to set you up, and then your global brain will be unleashed.
Right? Have you noticed, and this is not my original observation, that Let's Go Brandon starts with LGB, as in LGBTQ? Can we think of the T and the Q so that Let's Go Brandon, total quality, or something, I don't know.
I just feel like there's some way to make a meme or a joke out of this, you know, with being respectful, of course, to the LGBTQ community.
Don't want to insult them unnecessarily.
But it's a weird coincidence, isn't it?
Oh, there it is. Somebody already has the show.
There's already a t-shirt, LGBT. Let's go, Brandon, team.
Let's go, Brandon, teachers quit.
Totally quit.
Alright, I'm looking at your take quaaludes.
Let's go Brandon to Quantico.
To Quantico.
okay right into quit let's skip Brandon to quit There we go. Let's get Brandon to quit.
That's it. Oh, it's already a shirt.
It's already a shirt.
I'm seeing a video of it here on the Locals platform.
So you can't see it here on Netflix.
But over on the Locals platform, they're posting pictures of it.
Yeah. Let's get Biden to quit.
Actually, it says, let's get Biden to quit.
All right. Here's a segment I call Citizens Doing the Work of Governments.
You ready for this?
Citizens Doing the Work of Governments.
So what's our big problem?
It's the supply chain, as you know.
And I'm going to read you a tweet thread because I want you to see an example of Of a citizen solving maybe.
We don't know if it's a solution yet.
But certainly it looks like leadership from citizens as opposed to government.
Now the question is, who's in charge of the supply chain problem?
Biden? Buttigieg?
Anybody? We don't know.
But Ryan Peterson, private citizen and CEO of Flexport, who is in the business of logistics and stuff for shipping.
So here's somebody who's a CEO of a shipping logistics entity, and so therefore has an understanding of the big picture, right?
So Ryan Peterson tweets the following, and I'm going to read the whole tweet, if you don't mind, because...
Normally I would summarize it, but I don't want to get anything wrong.
And I think that this is important, not only because you can see a citizen doing the work of government here, basically, but...
You'll get the whole picture.
I'll just read it. So this was tweeted yesterday by Ryan Peterson, CEO of Flexport.
He says, Yesterday I rented a boat and took the leader of one of Flexport's partners in Long Beach on a three-hour tour of the port complex.
Here's a thread about what I learned.
So the first part is, he went in person.
He didn't read the Internet.
He went in person to talk to the people at the port.
So I keep asking, can anybody explain what the problem is?
And nobody can, right? Have you noticed that?
Nobody can explain what the frickin' problem is exactly?
They think it's drivers and all kinds of stuff.
Well, here's what he found out.
He goes to the port.
I guess he went to two of them.
The ports of L.A. and Long Beach are at a standstill.
In a full three-hour loop through the port complex, Passing every single terminal, we saw less than a dozen containers get unloaded.
So in three hours, they only saw fewer than 12 containers get unloaded.
Okay? So did you think it was about trucks?
All right, we'll keep going.
There are hundreds of cranes.
I counted only seven that were even operating, and they seem to be going pretty slowly.
Okay? So it's not cranes.
Got lots of cranes.
Okay? It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals.
The terminals are simply overflowing with containers.
And he'll say later that's mostly empty ones.
Which means they no longer have space to take in new containers, either from ships or land.
It's a true traffic jam.
He says, right now, if you have a chassis, so that would be the truck with nothing on it, with no empty container on it, you can go pick up containers at any port terminal.
However, if you have an empty container on that chassis, they're not allowing you to return it, except on a highly restricted basis.
Meaning the government.
Here it is.
Government problem.
If you can't get the empty off the chassis, you don't have a chassis to go back and pick up the next container.
And if nobody goes to pick up the next container, the port remains jammed.
Ask yourself, have you heard anything like this until now?
All of the news you've read...
All of the people speculating, has anybody told you this?
It's the first time I heard it.
I'll go on. With the yard so full, carriers slash terminals are being highly restrictive in where and when they will accept empties.
So I guess you can bring the empty to the yard.
Also, containers are not fungible between carriers, meaning, you know, one carrier can't use somebody else's container.
So the truckers have to drop their empty off at the right terminal.
This is causing empty containers to pile up.
This one trucking partner alone has 450 containers sitting on chassis right now.
450 trucks they can't use.
That are perfectly good trucks, presumably with drivers.
And they can't use them because they have empty chassis on them and no place to put them because of government regulation.
You see where this is going?
All right, this is a trucking company with six yards that represent 153 owner-operator drivers, so he has almost three containers sitting on chassis at his yard for every driver on the team.
He can't take the containers off the chassis because he's not allowed by the City of Long Beach zoning code to store empty containers more than too high in his truck yard.
This was tweeted yesterday.
Today... Today, the mayor of Long Beach just announced that they're going to allow them to pile the containers more than too high.
So this government regulation, it looks like it was, at least in Long Beach, so we don't know about L.A. yet, but it looks like they'll pile them high.
With the chassis all tied up, storing empties, they can't be returned to the port, there are no chassis available, blah, blah.
Oh, okay. And with all the containers piling up in the terminal yard, the longshoremen can't unload the ships.
Right? So there are literally just too many empties.
They just can't unload the ships.
And so the queue grows longer when now over 70 ships containing 500,000 containers are waiting offshore.
The line is going to get longer, not shorter.
Right? This is a negative feedback loop, you know, so the worse it gets, the worse it gets.
All right, how do we fix this?
So now he talks about solutions.
Now when I talk about the solutions, and when Ryan Peterson talks about the solutions, here's the attitude you should take toward it.
Not necessarily that this is the exact solution, but directionally, okay?
So if you can tell yourself this is a directional area to go, you won't get too wound up about the details of it.
He said, what we can do that's fast, basically, he says.
When you're designing an operation, you must choose your bottleneck.
So here's a design note.
You have to choose your bottleneck.
If the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't choose it, you aren't running an operation.
It's running you. So he's saying it's poorly designed by its nature.
You should always choose the most capital-intensive part of the line to be your bottleneck.
Now, he doesn't explain that, but capital-intensive presumably means it's easier to flex your capital, in other words, get more money, than it is to get more people or more anything else.
I'm guessing that's what he means.
In a port, that's the ship-to-shore cranes.
The cranes should never be unable to run because they're waiting for another part.
Oh, okay. So the most capital...
I had that wrong. So the most capital-intensive part is the cranes, And they're not running, so that means it's not a well-designed system.
So the bottleneck right now is not the cranes.
It's the yard space.
So we've got to get rid of those empties.
All right. And he says that, and here's somebody who knows what they're talking about, right?
So he knows systems and he knows this industry.
So listen to this advice.
In operations, when a bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't design for it, so in other words, it's not in the crane area because they're designed for it, I guess, you must overwhelm the bottleneck.
Overwhelm the bottleneck.
In other words, you don't want to peck away at it.
You need to basically just drop everything and throw everything at the bottleneck.
So how do you do that?
He suggests an executive order, in other words, Biden, effective immediately overriding the zoning rules in Long Beach and Los Angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to 6i.
It looks like we got that 24 hours later.
I don't know if this is just because of Ryan's involvement, but I do know that the government heard about his tweet the day he tweeted.
So I made sure that at least some productive people in the media and in the government were aware of this and are very aware of it and are Looking into it, etc.
So I can confirm that productive parts of the government are looking into this.
And maybe this is why it happened fast.
I imagine that it doesn't happen that fast.
So in my imagination, probably they were already thinking about this, stacking up the containers, and it just happened.
So that's good news.
Then, Ryan says, two, bring every container chassis owned by the national...
Guard and the military anywhere.
Oh, so if the military and the National Guard have trucks that they can carry different chassis or that they can carry different containers on to employ those, create a new temporary container yard.
So you need probably 500 acres, he thinks, and it could be government land or something near the ports.
So you need a ton of land temporarily, ideally temporarily, somewhere near the ports.
How hard would it be to get 500 acres available on short notice?
Well, if it's government land, maybe that's fast.
They can say, hey, just use this government land.
What if there's no government land?
Here's what I suggest.
If this is really something we need...
If we really, really need this for the health of the country, this is basically a war-level problem.
It's a war-level problem.
People don't act the same when it's a little problem as they do when it's a big problem.
People don't act the same in the pandemic.
As they do when they get a cold.
So I believe this is a non-problem.
Because if Joe Biden ever went on TV and said, you know, we can solve this thing if we get 500 acres near the port, how long would it take a patriot, a farmer, landowner somewhere, how long would it take at least one patriot to say, I got 500 acres?
Hell yeah. Bring it over here.
National problem? The whole country's in a jam?
I got 500 acres.
Absolutely. Just help me clean it up when you're done.
I feel like that's a very solvable problem in the context of a crisis.
People would just step up, I think.
Like I would like to think of that of my fellow Americans.
Ryan says, also bring in barges and small container ships and start hauling containers out of Long Beach to other smaller ports that aren't backed up.
Now, this is not a comprehensive list.
So as I said, think in terms of all the different ways that you can get rid of the empties.
Don't get obsessed by these specific suggestions.
But he does make the case that you could probably do it.
And you could probably do it fast if you had the will and the leadership.
I don't think it's a money problem.
I don't think it's knowing what to do problem anymore.
I think it's just a willpower, leadership, brute force kind of situation.
So we could probably power through it.
And then he's got some other...
He said he'd be happy to lead this effort for the federal or state government.
Well, there you go. You even have somebody who understands it and is already a CEO... Just volunteered to lead the effort.
And you probably need somebody who has this level of understanding about the whole system to really do anything productive, because any change to one part of the system is going to ripple through the rest of the system.
So you need somebody who knows what kind of changes aren't going to break the system somewhere else.
So where's Pete Buttigieg?
And why can't he make Ryan Peterson the...
Port czar, just until we get this over with.
I know. So I'm going to put this in the category of citizens doing what the government couldn't.
Do you remember the story I told earlier today about the dads just saying, okay, the school is failing, the government is failing, how about you and I put on these dad shirts and go fix the school?
And so they did, because the government couldn't fix it.
So the dads went and fixed it and succeeded.
So the government was, so far, pretty close to worthless on this whole supply chain issue.
So a citizen says, well, maybe I'll solve it.
I'm saying the same thing.
Like, literally, right now, what I'm doing is making sure that enough people have heard this idea.
Why? Because the government isn't doing it.
Like, I am literally doing the government's job right now.
For free. And I'm happy to do it.
Because I'm a patriot, and the country has a crisis.
Of course I want to help.
So does Ryan Peterson.
So does somebody with 500 acres somewhere.
So does anybody who's got a truck and can put an empty on him.
But, just for fun, I'm going to take it to a new level, right?
What follows is my whiteboard presentation...
Of what to do with all the empties.
Don't take this too seriously.
I'm going to present this in the spirit of just stretching your mind a little bit.
I wouldn't say this is a practical idea, but it's fun.
It goes like this.
Let's say you've got a port.
Here's your port.
You want to get rid of all these containers.
Let's say that not too far away there's a mountain.
Right? I'm going to solve all the world's problems at once.
You ready? Just all at once.
You're going to take these containers and line them up on the mountain butt to butt until you have the equivalent of Of a tunnel.
A tunnel. Now you'd have to open up the, you know, once you stuck them together, you'd have to, you know, weld an opening between them.
But then imagine you do that.
So you open them up.
And you've got this big-ass tunnel that goes up the hill or the mountain.
Have you ever heard of a heat chimney?
Have you ever heard of that concept?
Heat chimney. A heat chimney is when the natural rising of warm air is put through a chimney.
So basically, if you built this all by itself, it would start sucking in warm air.
Because warm air rises and it would suck it into this pole and it would exhale it out there.
And if it was a big enough entity, it would be pretty fast.
Now, wait for it, wait for it.
Why would you do this?
Because you're going to build a CO2 capture facility on the top.
CO2 capture facility.
Alright, we know that we have technology.
I don't think you can even see this, can you?
Let me fix that a little bit.
Alright, so, if you were to build a CO2 capture device that pulls air, that pulls the CO2 out of the air, what is the biggest part of the expense?
The biggest part of the expense, I think, you'd have to fact check me on this, is energy.
So the biggest part of the expense is these big fans that move the wind.
So you have to move the air, force it through the filters to get the CO2 out.
But what if you didn't need the fans?
What if nature was your fan?
What if the warm air was warm enough at the bottom that by the time it got to the top it was just like a hurricane?
I'm not sure if the physics worked to get enough airflow, but could you get enough airflow to build a cheap CO2 capture on the top of a hill?
Boom! Solving climate change and the shipping container problem at the same time.
Now... Is this a practical plan?
No. And it wouldn't happen fast.
But I just like to put two ideas together now and then because it's good for your creativity.
Sometimes... Sometimes...
It's useful to hear what's called the bad version of the idea.
I've talked about this before.
It's a Hollywood trick. If you don't have a good idea for, let's say, a script, you know, what does the character do now?
If you don't have a good idea, throw out the bad one.
Because the bad one will make somebody say, well, that won't work, but it does remind me of something that will.
So he says, do you realize we still need those empty containers?
We'll make more. We'll make more.
Because, you know, we're not talking about enough containers that it would change the global container situation.
And I'm not talking about really using containers for this, because there's got to be an easier way to make a pipe than containers.
But the only question that I ask is this.
Could you create a situation...
With a heat chimney on a hill, because it's easier to build it on a hill because you don't need to support it, you know, laying something down on the ground is easier than building a structure a mile high, right?
You just lay it there.
Now, would you be able to get enough airflow to power a CO2 scrubber?
Engineers? Engineers?
Anybody? Anybody?
Anybody? I know a huge percentage of you are engineers, and I'm waiting for you to weigh in.
Come on, tell me why it won't work.
Okay.
No, I know it's not practical to fix the container problem, but...
Yeah, but the CO2 capture is useless.
Okay. Spotted owl problem, yes.
Solar would be cheaper?
Maybe. Homeless houses?
You know, I also thought about that, but imagine if you put $500 Containers turn sideways in a field and just let the homeless people camp out in it.
It'd be better than being outdoors.
But I think we can do better than that for the homeless.
Elon Musk's boring tool.
There you go. Yeah, so let me do that.
So imagine, instead of using containers, that's probably a better idea, isn't it?
If you use the boring company, B-O-R-I-N-G, So instead of laying down a pipe, you just bore a tunnel.
Yeah. I don't know.
Maybe. Maybe.
Maybe so. All right.
Let's see what else we're going to talk about.
That was just for fun. But you see this pattern of citizens doing the work of the government, don't you?
What's that about? I think we've never seen it before.
It has something to do with social media.
It makes it possible, right?
Because it just wouldn't be possible without it.
All right, here's my other favorite story.
I have a new favorite athlete.
Ines... I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right.
E-N-E-S. Is it Ines or Enes?
Ines Cantor?
Apparently he made some comments about China.
Um... He made some comments about Tibet and China's treatment of Tibet, and China started pulling NBA broadcasts, which we think is in apparent retaliation.
So what does NS Cantor do when he said something that has cost a lot of money to his employer, the NBA, and caused an international problem?
Does NS... Oops, sorry about that.
And I guess I'll go away now.
Does NS apologize to China and say, ooh, I'm sorry about that.
I guess I went a little too far.
He does not.
He does not.
Here's what NS does.
He makes a new video.
So instead of complaining about Tibet, he goes after the Uyghur situation.
He makes a video...
Hammering China about the Uyghur situation and lays out the whole brutality of it.
Here's what he says.
I'm calling you out in front of the whole world.
Close down the slave labor camps and free the Uyghur people.
Stop the genocide now.
Well... There may be a lot of NBA players who are kneeling for the anthem, and I don't care about them at the moment.
But, Enes Kanter, I give you a standing ovation.
Standing ovation. And what is Enes Kanter doing?
The government's job.
He's doing the government's job.
He's doing what Biden should be doing.
Trump would be doing this.
I think. Wouldn't he?
So, three examples in the news today of citizens doing the job of the government because the government wasn't doing it.
There's something going on.
Is it because people are noticing that we don't have a coherent government?
No. Because it seemed like the citizen participation was also happening under Trump, but it looked like more of a collaborative thing than a desperation thing.
At the moment, it looks more like desperation.
We don't have a government. We better do this ourselves.
But under Trump, it looked more like, oh, he actually listens to what people say.
So if you have a good idea, maybe it'll get implemented.
And sure enough, I've told you the story of submitting a good idea, and the next thing you know, it's an executive order.
So... Mr.
Cab is asking if my hair is growing back.
Interestingly, it did grow back when I was on prednisone.
Not permanently. But even the bald spots started filling back in.
That's scary. But it was temporary.
Do you know before federal tax, tariffs were imposed on ships?
I don't know the relevance of that yet.
All right. So, in a New York Times opinion piece, Paul Krugman says China has big problems coming.
China has big problems coming.
Big problems ahead.
It feels like the wording of that sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Have you heard that from anyone before?
Is there anybody who's been saying in public that China has big problems coming?
That's the headline. Big problems coming.
Does it sound familiar?
It should. Because China has big problems coming.
I think I've mentioned it before.
I believe I've mentioned it before.
Yeah. Yeah. And one of the big problems, among the big problems, are they...
Apparently they tried to hide their economic situation by building massive real estate projects that didn't get used.
Nobody moved into them.
Oh, yes, I did say that.
Yes, I did. Have I told you how I track my influence?
Now, of course, it's not scientific and not 100% reliable, but one of the ways I track it is by language.
You know, if somebody uses the same term, you say, hmm, I wonder if two people came up with that at the same time, or one was influenced by the other.
So you can never know.
It could be that it's just an obvious phrase, so you see it more than once.
We'll see. But Paul Krugman, who I know is certainly...
People on the right, political right, don't think his predictions have been so good.
But he says they've got big trouble.
Big trouble coming.
And I think he's right.
You know, have I told you the interplay between economics and psychology?
That economics is, unless you have a physical constraint, like the ports have a physical constraint, economics is mostly a psychology issue.
If you think things are going to be good next year, you invest.
If you think the prices are going up because of inflation, maybe you buy something now.
So basically, your expectations and your psychology drive the entire economy.
What happens to China's economy when everybody understands that it's not safe to do business there, and that they've got big problems?
It's a problem. If the psychology breaks, the economy breaks.
What would it take for China's psychology to break in a way that breaks the economy?
Well, it might take Paul Krugman, a Nobel winner for economics, to tell you that you're in deep, deep trouble.
I mean, he could be right or he could be wrong.
But the more people with his credentials who tell China they're doomed, the more somebody's going to believe him, right?
The more people talk about problems...
Somebody's saying I looked like that character that was once on Babylon 5.
I assume you know that I was on Babylon 5, right?
That's why you're saying that? There's an old sci-fi show called Babylon 5.
I had a small part on that, because I'd said some good things about the show, so they invited me on to be a character.
I was not a good actor.
Um... Yes, and COVID is coming for China.
So apparently China has an outbreak in several provinces.
I don't see any way that China doesn't have a big, big problem coming.
Because I just don't think you can keep it out.
And I don't know that they can vaccinate fast enough.
So I don't think COVID will be the thing that takes them down.
I think it'll be something else.
Have you seen Raised by Wolves on HBO? No, but I just got interested in that yesterday.
Remind me what that was about?
I remember that the title of it, Raised by Wolves, was completely misleading.
It has nothing to do with anything like that.
What is it about? Yeah.
No, I was in Babylon 5 for one episode in which I played someone who...
I played a guy who was looking for his dog.
Wait a second. Somebody actually posted it here.
So the people on Locals can see it, but let me show you.
Let's see if you can see it here on YouTube.
If you watch the show, that was me when I had hair in a scene with Mr.
Garibaldi, who was playing security in the scene.
Now, here's the funny part.
You see the Minbari alien behind me over my shoulder?
So that was my long-time girlfriend at the time, Pam.
And Pam is, you know, Japanese-American, and...
So, you know, they made her as a Japanese-American minbari.
And she had like six hours of makeup or something to get that look.
And her only role was to stand back there and carry my briefcase.
And I had, I think, two lines or something that I blew.
I believe, yeah, somebody said Garibaldi is the poor man's Bruce Willis.
That's pretty funny. I think he passed away, if I'm not mistaken.
I think... I think that actor passed away.
So I'll tell you just a little actor story.
So the reason I was invited to be on the show as sort of a guest character was because I'd said it was my favorite show at the time.
So they liked it.
I said that in public, so they invited me to be on as a character.
Yeah, Jerry Doyle was the name of the actor.
And I did my lines a few times and blew them, even though it was like two lines.
If you're not an actor, it's a lot of pressure to get that right.
And I finally got the line right.
But it happened to be exactly when the entire cast decided to prank me, so it ruined the scene.
So I forget the details.
I think they all... The rest of the cast, of which there were just lots of them, you know, because it was in a cafe scene where there'd be lots of extras and stuff.
So they were waiting to some part of the scene, and then everybody just, like, rushed...
Rushed us. It was just like this big crowd just went, ah!
And it was just a prank, you know, to play on the new guy.
But I think that was the first time I got the line right.
They ruined the scene. But I eventually got it.
Yes, and they did not hand me a hot gun.
These pretzels are making me thirsty.
What's that from? Oh yeah, the Minbari were the best aliens ever.
If you haven't...
By the way, I'll tell you my favourite scene.
I'm blanking on the name of the showrunner who wrote...
I think he wrote every episode, there was one guy.
And there was one bit of the writing that I just thought was brilliant.
There was a scene in this TV show in which the Minbari, you know, the head Minbari person, was almost killed in an attack.
But it turned out it was Minbari who was trying to kill their own Minbari leader, and the person who stopped it decided not to tell the leader We're good to go.
And therefore kept that information from her.
Because he didn't want to ruin his leader by turning her against her own people.
And I really... I just love that part of the scene.
Oh, I'm watching Dune right now.
I'm three quarters through it.
I can't watch a whole movie at once.
But the original Dune...
Was maybe one of the worst films ever made.
I tried to watch that so many times, and you get...
It's just so slow.
But the new one, it looks like they fixed the bad parts.
It's good.
I'm enjoying it. All right.
Looks like it's time for us to say goodbye.
And... It's kind of a slowish news day.
How was this episode?
I can never tell.
Alright, some people liked it on locals.
Good. Just looking at your comments.
Oh, okay. Well, on locals, people liked it.
How about YouTube?
Sophistry hour. You know, the sophistry people, I don't know.
There's just something wrong with everybody who uses that insult.
I don't know if anybody has ever accused anybody of sophistry without themselves being defective in some way.
Maybe. I don't know.
I think usually it's a cognitive dissonance when people use that word.
Because there's something that they didn't agree with that they have to imagine there's something wrong with the speaker.
And sophistry is one of those words you can just throw in there because you don't have to defend it.
Well, I don't have to defend it.
It's just sophistry.
Soporific is the word.
Oh, I lost you on the heat chimney stuff.
Now remember, the heat chimney stuff wasn't serious.
But I thought it would be interesting to learn a couple of concepts.
If you learned about a heat chimney...
And you learned about CO2 scrubbers.
That's all I wanted. You need to expand your news sources.
I think I do. But the news sources, where would I expand it to?
I have a horse wiener pointed at me.
All right.
That's all for now.
And I will talk to you tomorrow.
And if the government doesn't fix things, we'll do it.
