Episode 1080 Scott Adams: Hey, Grab Coffee

Date: 2020-08-03 | Duration: 1:01:29

Topics

Find my “extra” content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com

Rough Transcript

This is an auto-generated transcript and may contain errors.

Transcript

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• Microsoft may acquire TikTok

• Mental illness and Antifa

• Biden’s VP

• Open the schools, accept the casualties

• COVID19 flare-ups in other countries

• Teacher Unions kill more Blacks than police

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.
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[0:13]

hey everybody come on in hope you had a great weekend it's time for the cake off to the week the thing that's gonna make this just an incredible week one of the best one of the best and all you need does anybody know what you need to get this kicked off i think you do all you need is a copper mug or a glass a tanker chalice or steiner canteen sugar flask of vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite coffee or beverage and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine of the day the thing that makes is everything better it's called the simultaneous step but it's happening now go
ah that was especially good all right for those of you who have been following me for a long time i have an update now for something that you you've been tracking literally for years

[1:15]

tracking literally for years some of you and it is just the freakiest thing you know my life is weird in general all right when when you start getting a little bit famous everything becomes weird but on top of that i have this whole other layer of weirdness which is this category that i would call things that go my way that really shouldn't in other words uh my my statistical sense of what is possible and what is not is completely broken and let me give you an example and some of you know the story so uh years ago i had a neurological condition called the spasmodic dysphonia which rendered me unable to speak so that if i tried to speak it would sound like and would chop off all the words and people couldn't understand it in conversation i couldn't use the telephone for three years basically

[2:15]

years basically so it's about three and a half years of having that problem where i couldn't speak and during that time whenever i drove my car by myself i did affirmations now affirmations is when you just repeat or write down in this case while i'm driving i just repeated it down loud some objective some future you that you wanted that was preferred over what where you already were and i picked the most ridiculous affirmation i mean i picked a ridiculous affirmation and it was this that while i had an incurable at the time it seemed incurable and it didn't look like it was going to change anytime soon an incurable voice problem and my affirmation which i would struggle to get out you know while i drove was that i scott adams will have a perfect voice now what is crazy about that is not just that i had an incurable voice problem

[3:18]

that i had an incurable voice problem right i mean the key word is incurable there was nothing you could do about it nothing um i mean you could do botox shots in your neck but that doesn't give you a good voice you sound like you're on helium but the second part of this impossibility is that i never had a good voice before i had that problem i had a very nasally kind of kind of constricting sort of nasally voice at best i i'm doing a bad impression of my own voice but as you know recently i just this week i had surgery on my sinus area and i cleared out some polyps and i was listening to myself i was recording something just this morning for the locals subscribers and i recorded it and i played it back and i listened to it and i thought i think i have a perfect voice i and it's blowing my freaking mind because this wasn't possible

[4:22]

because this wasn't possible it's not possible that at age 63 i would have the best voice of my life not even close i mean i'm talking about levels above the best voice i ever had at age 25 not even close and if you told me that any of this was possible in the in the real world i just i really could not have wrapped my head around this but the this isn't even the big part of the story the big part of the story is my sense of what is possible is just completely broken and it has been for you know decades really because when dilbert first took off
off i mean the the uh the odds of dilbert succeeding you probably know or one in uh 20 000 or something the odds of me writing a book without having any you know prior experience as a writer

[5:22]

you know prior experience as a writer and having it a number one bestselling book what were the odds of that really i mean i was really really in love with that and you know i just got married to the most beautiful woman in the entire metaverse and none of it seems possible but here's here let me extend this now into the news so it's more about you and less about me have any of you noticed that the things i
i i tend to be persuading toward always seem to happen even weird things and today is a good day to talk about that how many of you remember it was probably in 2018 that i started saying almost you know on a regular basis that we should decouple from china now take take yourself back two years and imagine that you heard this cartoonist saying we should decouple

[6:25]

cartoonist saying we should decouple from china what did you think about that didn't you think that was just the craziest thing if you could pick one thing that wasn't going to happen it would be decoupled from china i mean that would be right at the top of anybody's list of things that just couldn't happen and now we're doing it
what was the first the first person you heard uh tweet or say that tick doc this enormous platform that's one of the most if not the most popular thing among kids in the united states and i said it should be banned in the united states
did you think that was possible really did you think it was possible that tick tock would be banned when you first heard it i mean after a while maybe it started sounding a little bit feasible and then when the president started talking about it you were like yeah probably probably so but that didn't

[7:25]

probably probably so but that didn't look possible to you did it if you're honest with yourself that probably didn't look possible and i have to admit that in the beginning it looked impossible to me
me but i've had so many experiences where things that looked impossible eventually fell if i just kept pushing on him long enough in the case of my voice
63 years it took me 63 years of pushing on the same rock to get it to the top of the hill but damn it i don't give up i've told you this story before my um i have a let's say an operating system within my brain that's always running regardless of what apps are running there's always also an operating system below that and the operating system you all get to program yourself to some extent some of you are born with but you can reprogram yourself

[8:26]

reprogram yourself you know through persuasion and experience and education etc and one of the things that i've programmed myself for and i've told you this is prisoner island and it's a story that's not a real story but i hold it in my head as my operating system and it goes like this you for some of you heard this that if i were let's say convicted for some crime and i were taken to the island of prisoners where there's no law you know it's just the prisoners rule on this island and they can't get off and you drop me on the island on day one they beat me nearly to death on day two they beat me up again nearly to death day three day four first several months it's looking bad for scott beaten up you know almost to death every single day but if you come back in a year maybe three i'll be running the island and everybody who touched me will be dead and that's that's how

[9:27]

will be dead and that's that's how that's my operating system so when i see a problem like an incurable voice problem i don't say to myself well it looks like the prisoners beat me up i guess i'm done i wake up the next day and the prisoners beat me up again and the next day they beat me up again and every day the operating system is running it's like i'm gonna get you i am going to get you enjoy today because it's coming back i am going to get you and today is just a special day for me because i chased this thing 63 freaking years and never once did i give up not even once not once did i think i don't you know that i really can't do it i mean i i certainly had a conscious understanding of what's you know possible and statistically likely in the real world but i never gave up and that's because of the operating system and i think

[10:27]

system and i think that some of that might be just born with it i don't know but i've certainly spent a lot of time trying to enhance it so maybe if you have a little bit of something that you're born with you can you can beef it up a little bit but i would suggest that you find your own operating systems that work for you sort of a story and it's good to put it in a story because stories are so powerful that's um
um you can actually program your brain with stories that's why they're so powerful anecdotes are so powerful in the news you don't want the george floyd story to dominate your understanding of a big complicated situation because it's just one situation tragic as it was but it does because because stories are what program your brain so you can put your own story in there and and the beauty is you can just make it up you know prisoner island is completely made up but because i see it so clearly i've i've held it in my

[11:29]

i've held it in my operating system for all my entire life that it's this is real to me as if i if i had experienced it you know at least mentally so the president's looking at banning tick tock which looks like what that might be is that microsoft would acquire it very interesting which i think is also a a fairly brilliant uh workaround so that the kids still get their their tick tock and it probably would be an election problem if tick tock got killed before election day because there's so many kids who'd be mad and complaining to their parents about trump it might actually make a difference so it's good that microsoft is looking at at least taking that over and i think facebook's wechat is also on the table maybe for banning and when you think about the fact that uh facebook is banned in china you know i don't know if i'd

[12:32]

in china you know i don't know if i'd ever really paid much attention to this this area but the fact that china bans facebook but we had not banned their version of facebook what's up with that to to use the president's phrase what's up with that that's obviously something that had to be fixed you know either either china needs to loosen up on facebook or wechat's just gotta go you you can't live in a world where a country will ban your stuff and you're not banning their stuff you can't live in that world that's just not a well-balanced world it's got to be both or none so wechat's wechat has to go there's just no i would say that's not on the table for serious discussion that has to go that's a that's a no-brainer you know it might be difficult but it has to go it really does
so msnbc pundit can i call him that ali velshi he might not call himself a

[13:33]

ali velshi he might not call himself a pundit so i won't label him i'll just say
say he's a msnbc person a host would you call him a host of a show i'm not sure if he has a show where he's a regular guest but anyway he says in a tweet imagine being president and knowing that discussions are actively underway about whether it's going to fall to the marines or the secret service agents who surround you to remove you from office if you refuse to leave after losing the election it's hard to believe that a serious public figure would send this tweet i suppose we're in a world where nothing is nothing is off the table but i tweeted back that this sounds like a mental health problem no not specifically about ali velshi but he's talking about other people talking about it whoever is talking about president trump not leaving office willingly doesn't understand anything that is such a basic

[14:35]

anything that is such a basic misunderstanding of the world we live in um now now certainly there's there's a question of let's say the election is genuinely just messed up so i can imagine the scenario in which the election is just unambiguously it's just messed up and nobody even doubts it you know the the left is sure it was rigged the right issue where it was rigged foreign countries are sure it was rigged so there is a scenario in which the election just doesn't work so yeah i can imagine some scenario where the president would have to i don't know stay on for six months until we have another election see if we can do it right i don't know what that would look like but even that would be temporary there's no scenario where the president's gonna just try to stay you know and install ivanka as his you know his heir or don jr or something that's not going to happen let me tell you why that's not going to happen because there's this thing called conservatives

[15:36]

conservatives have you heard of them have you heard of conservatives they like this thing called the constitution and the constitution's pretty pretty clear about this election business and if you think that that conservatives you know as a they're crazy people everywhere but as a whole if you think conservatives would be okay with the president and even their own president losing an election and staying in office i don't think you understand what a conservative is yeah that's that's the opposite of his party now of course they'd be sad they might you know put up an argument for
for why he should stay there but i'll tell you what's not going to happen what's not going to happen is somebody having to militarily remove the president from the white house there's no there's no adult scenario in which that can happen

[16:36]

can happen anyway so that does feel to me and i mean this literally that anyone who is thinking seriously along those lines may have a mental health issue that they need to deal with and let me expand that point expand that point um we we're dealing with uh antifa like it's a semi-political movement i don't know if anarchists are considered political i guess in their own way or anti-political you've got the black lives matter movement etc and i would i would argue this that especially among the violent protesters you know you've seen a lot of pictures of the mug shots of the ones that are causing the trouble not the not the peaceful people because there are lots of protesters who just really want a better world they genuinely do and so and they should be respected for their freedom of speech as well as their intentions but when you see the people who got

[17:38]

but when you see the people who got caught is it my imagination that they all look like they have mental illness i don't think it's drugs i mean there might be some drugs too but it looks like that we're we're treating a mental illness problem as some kind of a political movement antifa is about 80 mental illness in my opinion now black lives matter is not black lives matter in my opinion shows not even a trace of mental illness would you agree you know you could say their priorities are different or you know what they want is reasonable or unreasonable those are all fair questions but i've never seen anything come out of black lives matter from an actual black citizen of this united states that looked even slightly crazy right it just seems like different priorities different understanding maybe than you have about whatever what needs to be done but none of it looks

[18:39]

needs to be done but none of it looks crazy it looks completely reasonable for their point of view antifa doesn't register that way to me because first of all what the hell is anarchy what what is anarchy exactly if you were to sit down and i don't recommend it but if you were to sit down with one of the the antifa um let's say a leader or even a member and say all right all right i get why you're i get what you're trying to do but can you describe how that works out for you in the long run describe your life after you get what you want what's it look like because i think the government is gone right that's the whole point of anarchy and i think law and order are gone which means the food supply is gone which means the anarchist dies so the the anarchists and antifa

[19:42]

the the anarchists and antifa in my opinion are have mental illness and they are suicidal but they're not very brave or or they're not brave enough or they don't have whatever it takes to i i'm not let me withdraw brave because i don't want anybody listening to this to think that this would be brave to end their own life that's that's not the message i'm trying to tell i'm saying that the anti-fog people look like they want to end themselves but the way they're doing it is by playing out like they're ending the united states there's nothing on the end of that process that they would want you know they're now saying when we get this it'll be a good world it it really is just let's break everything and maybe i'll get killed in the process it looks like that to me so i think maybe it would help us to imagine the anti-far as more of a mental health issue mixed in with some domestic terrorists and some people have actual

[20:44]

and some people have actual plans for power i suppose
what do you think of the hollowjoe as i call him hashtag hollowjoe what do you think about him debating and i tweeted yesterday that i think democrats are slowly waking up to this realization that there are two things that biden could do debate wise he could actually have a debate in which case i think most people think that would be the end right because biden seems pretty good when he stays on script and he has friendly people asking him easy questions and he's got his note his notepad but what happens if you put him in a debate with trump and trump throws him off the path and how long would that take it would take one second for trump to push him off his game because his game is very narrow now like he can only talk about the things he's

[21:45]

he can only talk about the things he's sort of ready for and prepared for if you give him anything he didn't prepare for it's going to be a disaster and trump is just going to show up on stage and give him
him nothing but things he didn't prepare for it's going to be the most unpredictable situation in the world so if you're biden's advisors and backers do you want to see hollow joe with his very narrow game that's narrowing every day
day get on stage with the the person in the world who has the biggest game probably the biggest game we've ever seen with the most variety the most provocation the most maddening you know just just everything the most energy that anybody has ever brought to this job
job is trump is literally the worst matchup i could even imagine for biden biden actually could do well against the standard republican you know

[22:47]

against the standard republican you know you just put a boring republican up there and and have him talk and the boring republican says predictable things joe is ready because it's predictable things might look okay you know the audience might not know there's anything wrong with it but you put trump up there and the first thing he's going to do is throw him off his game make him angry get him flustered brain shuts down it's it's not gonna be pretty but what if he doesn't suppose uh joe biden doesn't debate what happens then well then he loses the other way because if you don't debate i think that's that's essentially meaning you can't do the job right if you don't debate and you're running for president you have admitted that you can't do the job of president i don't think there's any way around that and it's hilarious to watch joe lockhart who used to be the spokesperson for was it bush and

[23:51]

was it bush and he's writing opinion pieces on probably cnn i think and his opinion was that joe biden should not debate but here's the reason oh not because joe biden is incapable of debating but rather because president trump lies so much why would you give attention to a liar and i'm thinking to myself well that's trying a little too hard joe it sounds like it's like it sounds like uh you know the democrats were just desperate for some kind of a narrative where it makes sense that the biden doesn't debate because if he just doesn't do it that's really the end of his that's the end of his chances but if he if he could find some bs kind of reason why he wouldn't do it that has nothing to do with not being good at it and that's what lockhart was trying to present if that was their best play was that their best play what lockhart said that

[24:51]

their best play what lockhart said that why would you debate somebody who doesn't pass the fact checking and i'm thinking that's sort of exactly who you want to debate if i told you hey you're going to go into a debate and your opponent is known for not passing the fact-checking do you say i'm bringing the facts or do you say oh i can't deal with that i'd better quit i don't want to debate somebody who says things that aren't true and can be proven to be not true and the next day the news will only cover all the lies that he told i don't want that of course you want that that's exactly the person you want to debate so that was the most transparently ridiculous excuse for getting a weak candidate out of a debate but it's it was kind of funny because it was so weak here's my prediction i believe that the polls will tighten before the election day and not because of anything the candidates are doing

[25:52]

doing so that's my prediction the polls will the polls will narrow right before election day maybe sooner but it won't have much to do with what the candidates are actually doing it'll have more to do with the fact that the polls were rigged in the first place and i it looks like it's just a repeated 2016 where the the primary polls are showing a gigantic gap and that's the message they want to send apparently so but they also still want to be in business as legitimate pollsters so they're going to have to get rid of the rigging toward election day so that it looks like well we only missed it by two percent that's not bad right something like that so that's the prediction um i saw that there were at least two polls that seemed like they're already turning in the president's favor but they were the lesser known polls and i'm not gonna i'm not gonna mention them i'll just say that there are at least two polls just in the last 24 hours that would

[26:52]

just in the last 24 hours that would indicate a dramatic shift toward trump but it could be just a difference in the way they measure it because the the question of whether or not there are so-called shy trump supporters out there is now getting ridiculously obvious that there are now in 2016 you could be forgiven if you were a democrat and you did not believe there was such a thing as a shy trump supporter but now that you saw trump win you know unexpectedly is it only because the polls were not exactly as precise as they could have been especially in the midwest is that the only reason we were surprised or were there some hidden trump supporters so here are the conditions to create a massive amount of trump hidden supporters that the polls are not catching at the moment the first condition is that everybody has to ask that model

[27:53]

is that everybody has to ask that model in their head in other words if you're a trump supporter you have to have it in your head that there's an option the option is to be a hidden trump supporter so just saying something's an option and talking about it makes it more likely to happen it's just the way we're wired we're we are mimics and if anybody is doing anything it will cause probably more people to do that thing just because we we imitate so you should expect that all things being equal there would be more shy supporters this time just because 2016 proved it's a thing and if it's a thing it's an option and if it's an option and it's in the front of your mind when the pollster calls it's a little more likely that you'll say oh a lot of people are doing this i think i too will be a little cagey when i answer the poll questions so then add to that uh three and a half or more years of the uh the supporters of the president

[28:54]

the uh the supporters of the president being beaten up on camera how many videos do you have of a of a mega hat wearing person being slapped around and abused on camera you've seen it a lot now maybe the left has not seen it but that's not relevant to this question because the shy trump supporters have all seen it all right everybody who's a trump supporter has seen plenty of video if they're on social media plenty of video of trump supporters getting abused and physically does that make you and we all know the stories of people being fired fired from the wall street journal or acquitting in that case um and we've seen how much social oppression there is so if there are not it if if it turns out i don't know if we'll ever be able to measure it but if it turned out in the future that we learned that there were no such thing as shy trump supporters for this election

[29:55]

election or that it was minimal i would be amazed because every condition to create a lot of them is in place and strongly in place and has been in place for a while it's it's dangerous to your career it's dangerous to your health you know it's a thing you know you can easily do it by lying to the pollsters it's a thing trust me it's a thing and i believe that the folks supporting biden are slowly worrying that it's a thing i don't know that they're convinced they still might believe the polls but you know they're worrying about it it's it's starting to get in their head and i'll bet you'll see a lot more about this from you know from people trying to deny it or whatever but it's definitely in their head and they also know that biden can't survive either the debate or the skipping of the debate so they

[30:55]

or the skipping of the debate so they have they basically have a dead man candidate walking now let's get to the vice president pick uh the my certainty that it would be kamala harris has been challenged recently but not for the reason you think now i do know that there's a lot of buzz about you know susan rice etc i have trouble thinking it's going to be susan rice as vice president and the problem is that she's got the worst case of rbf any politician ever had and you know what i mean right you can look you can google rbf which is basically a a resting face that uh looks unpleasant now when she smiles she looks very pleasant and apparently i saw a report that she's smiling more maybe because she's jockeying for the vp job but
she has a unfriendly look that is frankly scary um i saw karen

[31:57]

scary um i saw karen karen bass recently uh on an interview and i think the cuba stuff is is pretty bad i don't think she can get past that um so my guess would be well let me let me give you the big picture there are two things happening one is we think that the vice president pick for biden will be important because biden may not be a two-term president well actually he said he would not be a two-term president and that puts that person in the first spot to be considered as you know to run for president next time but here's what's different i think biden is failing faster than maybe we even we know and that his advisors may be calculating this they may want to pick a vice president that is not kamala harris wait for it so that when biden is replaced before election day they can bring in a top-tier candidate

[32:57]

they can bring in a top-tier candidate who's more like the presidential candidate because the thing about kamala harris is she always looked like she could be the president which is what makes her a strong candidate for vice president when you think of karen bass do you think oh she's already ready to be president you don't think that you're not familiar with her enough about susan rice do you say to yourself she's ready to be president i don't think she's been elected to anything before we don't know much about her haven't seen her campaign so it seems to me that there's at least a small possibility now i'll put this in the in the anything's possible category this is not a prediction in the anything possible category one of the reasons that the biden vp choice might be delayed which is what we heard it's going to be delayed again it could be that they want to pick they want to put in a strong vice president but not one who's too strong

[33:59]

but not one who's too strong because they might want to save their strongest candidate which in my opinion is harris to replace biden himself at the top of the ticket before the election nobody else has told you that have they which would really blow your mind wouldn't it and uh harris is still unpredicted as a possible top of the ticket i don't suggest betting on on the basis of what you just heard but i just put it out there she's still unpredicted all right
did you see the new trump campaign ad it's really good it's really really good one of the things that people were complaining about is that uh it's one thing to say bad things about joe biden but what's your positive image you know positive message for the country and the trump campaign just turned out a really inspirational feeling uh you know pro optimism

[35:00]

you know pro optimism pro america everything's everything's going to get better and better and i think they nailed it just in terms of the the skill that went into the the ad i'd say a plus it's one of the better ads i've seen you actually feel something when you when you watch the ad and that's that's kind of hard to hit right you know not every political ad makes you actually feel something but that actually that ad literally you just feel it and it feels good which is the point um speaking of optimism and feeling good so when you see the ad you see a version of trump that's his best self in my opinion optimistic trump is the best trump which is also my explanation for why he did not get the messaging as perfectly as he could have during the coronavirus because the coronavirus situation the pandemic absolutely requires something closer to

[36:01]

absolutely requires something closer to pessimism you know that pessimism or a little bit just a slight pessimism was exactly the right note to sound for leadership in a pandemic it's like uh i got to tell you it's going to be bad but you know we'll get through it but i got to tell you it's going to be bad so that's the message people were i guess they wanted to hear a lot of people said that and president trump is not really the one he's just not optimized for bad news he's optimized for what this campaign ad shows which is hey let's get on board and rebuild this thing so let me put her let me put it in a larger context i don't believe there's any such thing as a good president or a bad president i believe that what you need is a president whose talents are the right match for the times and that's why i was more pro obama than probably just about anybody who's watching this right now because i thought he was a good match

[37:03]

because i thought he was a good match for the times and i think trump is a better match for these times with the exception of the pandemic he was not a good match to that so if you say president is good or bad i think you're missing the larger picture that they're all good i mean by the time you become president of the united states you're you're a high functioning person you're smart yeah you care about the country they're they're all in that category of smart capable successful care about the country i think that's all about equal but they are different in how they fit so in my opinion president trump was not the best messenger and i'm talking only about the message part he was not the best messenger for the coronavirus stuff but as we're getting closer to the other side of it i don't know when that's going to come but we're certainly getting closer to the end of it

[38:04]

who would you rather have as president to rebuild the economy i mean think about it seriously if you could pick any president of all the presidents from the beginning of time you know you'd have to adjust to make them modern thinking can you think of a better president to rebuild us from a pandemic which basically kept all our assets in place largely but we had to think our way through it you know you had to try harder you had to be optimistic that's what drives the economy optimism you couldn't come up with a better president for this moment oh no not this moment the the next moment so the next moment we're getting into that's trumpville all right here you are entering trumpville you're not in it because the pandemic is just not his strong part but man you don't want joe biden to be running the next phase

[39:04]

joe biden to be running the next phase if you ask me would joe biden have been a good pick for the the current pandemic i don't think so because i don't think he would have closed china soon you know i think he would have done some other things wrong but it wouldn't have been a disaster probably except for the closing china part maybe
but you don't want him rebuilding america that's just the wrong guy for the job
i keep reading on cnn that trump has no plan for the pandemic and i i keep asking myself what's wrong with me that i think he does let me tell you what i think is the plan for the pandemic which seems crystal clear to me and i don't know why it's not crystal clear to everyone because we're all watching the same news i didn't i didn't go
go research it i just watched the news completely clear plan of how the united states is handling the pandemic now if you do you think it's clear i'm going to go through it what i think is the plan

[40:04]

the plan but is there anybody here who would say they don't understand the plan i want to see in your comments when they they catch up to real time so here's what i think the plan is they were always very clear from day one that keeping our health care system intact was going to be and keeping people fed were the top priorities everybody's on board right it was very clear we're going to make sure we feed everybody and we're going to make sure that the health care doesn't collapse and then we executed that plan did it work yeah yeah it not only did it work when things were far more uncertain but it looks like it's going to continue working so that's the first part of the plan hospitals and food and nailed it i i would i would give our country as a whole you know more credit to the health care workers of course but the country as a whole for that part of the plan a plus a plus for all of you not just the

[41:07]

a plus for all of you not just the president um trump is very clear about wanting to open the schools how much clearer could the president be that he wants the schools open how is that not completely clear now the states of course have individual you know powers that they can do what they need to do but it's also clear that the president has has acknowledged that the states are the ones to make those individual decisions but he's giving very clear guidance about the the federal priorities and i believe that that is correct because states have a slightly different mission than the federal government the states are not responsible for national defense president trump is responsible for national defense in addition to everything else states don't have a national defense motive they're they're more about making sure you got food and medicine and stuff and i would argue that trump from the

[42:09]

i would argue that trump from the national defense phase trying to keep schools open keeping the economy as open as we can you know with some pullbacks as needed those things go right to national defense and the president's completely clear about them got to get kids in school got to keep the economy you know humming which helps to have kids in school and that the economy is sort of the lifeblood that makes everything else possible and if you don't if you if you break the economy more than it is then nothing works nothing works so from a
a you know keeping the whole country intact it makes complete sense that the president's preference for opening the economy opening the schools with casualties with casualties nobody is kidding themselves there will be casualties but also casualties no matter what you do so i think that's clear and it also makes as i said perfect sense that the federal

[43:10]

as i said perfect sense that the federal government has a different view of it than the states and they have exactly the views you'd want them to have you want the states focusing on the people you want the president to focus on the people but also national defense so there's your difference um the president has said forever as have the experts that we're gonna rapidly adjust we're gonna try it adjust try it adjust have you seen that happen yeah yeah we've tried things and we've adjusted tried things and adjusted still doing it is that smart is that a good plan yeah that's not just a good plan that's like the best plan you could get you come up with a better plan in the face of complete unknowns come up with a better plan than trying things and quickly adjusting there isn't one that's the plan it's the best plan it's the only plan and then but there's this bigger question about you know sort of an end point you know what how does this get resolved is any of what i've talked about getting

[44:11]

is any of what i've talked about getting us to something that could be described as an end point we're trying to get because i think that's where the disconnect is and here's my take although this may not have been said explicitly it seems obvious to me that the priority is to keep the economy alive as long as it takes to get to any combination of herd immunity therapeutics that really you know kick butt or a vaccine that really works but the therapeutics and the vaccine are optional you get that right so the plan is to get all three of those things in a good place get your some herd immunity some therapeutics some vaccines we don't know you know what that mix will be or exactly the timing but it's very clear that the you know with this warp speed process that the president put together that's crystal clear that we're rushing

[45:12]

crystal clear that we're rushing i don't want to say rushing we're speeding the um the vaccine thing trying every thera therapy funding everything that looks promising just throwing the kitchen sink at anything that could work but if none of it works any better than what we already have if we never get a better therapeutic than we have if we never get a vaccine it's still the same plan we just get there through herd immunity we get there the hard way so i don't see how this could be any more clear is there any part of this that isn't number one exactly what you'd want your government to be doing and number two working in the sense that it's being executed just the way it's described and number three it has an end point a very specific endpoint we don't know the day but that's that's the real world right you don't know when it's going to end

[46:12]

you don't know when it's going to end but it has to have an end herd immunity will get there if the vaccines and the therapeutics and everything else does not now here's a prediction that i made that you're already seeing come true in a small sense we'll see if it's a trend i predict it will be in what world can some other country get this under control and keep it there there is no world there's no rational logical way that some other country from the united states let's say australia is going to get the virus under control and keep it that way under current conditions it's not even a thing so every time i hear the news talk about some country who did well i just shake my head and i say ah they didn't do well they did not do well because they're going to have a flare up all they did is tamp it down and hurt their economy more than they needed to we did the opposite you know we kept our economy a little more open

[47:14]

economy a little more open we could have tamped it down further but that was a rational choice because all the countries that hurt their economy and close down to get rid of the flare-ups it's all coming back everybody who closed their economy completely to try to get something like zero infections in their country was a complete waste of time because it's coming back you know until you have until you have some technological breakthrough or something i don't think it's going to happen quickly enough so you're going to see flare-ups in other countries that by election day will make the president's performance look better by comparison because remember that the curves are not timed with each other so at the moment australia is having a pretty bad flare-up and they have somewhat draconian measures apparently only one of one of your members of your household can leave the house once a day

[48:15]

house once a day what somebody says apologist you must be new here uh miles carney so somebody's calling me an apologist all right you get blocked for that but
i decided that the lowest level of political understanding is calling somebody an apologist well calling me an apologist would be the lowest level of understanding all right um
so did you have you are you following the uh ai stuff there's a artificial intelligence program i guess you could call it called gpt-3 i think this is elon musk's and other peoples and it's available to some people who are playing with it and you get to see the results so i've seen the results of a number of experiments and the idea is that the ai is now so smart that you can you can ask it a lot of

[49:18]

that you can you can ask it a lot of eska to do a lot of different things and you don't know exactly what's going to come out of it which is the the freaky part that you don't quite know what it's going to do because it's sort of making up its own mind how to add a deal with your request and it can do some amazing things one of the things that was demonstrated is it was writing its own ad copy for a product to which i say uh
that's pretty freaky isn't it writing advertising copy ai now what it did was is i guess they seated it with you know one statement about their product and then the ai gave it a variety of different uh options that say the same meaning but they use different words and different emphasis and there's a second part of that which is that the ai can then rapidly test it in the public

[50:19]

test it in the public so now that you know that it can give you different advertisements you could you could arrange them on a page differently you can change the words it can go test that with a thousand people while you're sitting in front of it so you could be sitting there saying all right ai uh fix my advertising and you'd watch the screen you know change until there's there's you know several different options and maybe photos and arrangements and stuff and then you could say all right ai go uh
uh a b test until you have the best one and it would take five minutes for it to have tested all of its messages around the world you know by running ads just to see what people click on and it would tell you the best one that would just absolutely rewire people's brains and it would do it to five minutes and you wouldn't have to do any work you would just sit there and say give me an advertisement go test it that's scary stuff now if you're

[51:20]

that's scary stuff now if you're thinking that the robots are going to take the manual jobs well of course they will but they're also going to take the copywriting jobs the advertising jobs i think the advertising industry's got some challenges coming um do you know uh bernard carrick bernie carrick uh was he the police chief in new york city at one point and he said this which is really interesting he said must begin looking at who is bailing out these people meaning antifa uh and the protesters i strongly believe you're going to be able to connect the dots back to their organizers and funders making this a federal crime now i don't quite know uh the the legal details of that but i think he's saying that if it's more of a conspiracy looking what would what is it that they use for the mafia what is the rule there's a law they use

[52:21]

what is the rule there's a law they use for the mafia where if it's more of an enterprise the feds can go after it than if it's just one person acting alone so and i thought to myself that is really interesting because what if this is a thing suppose we do find that whoever is paying for the the bail for these people are connected and organized does that mean the feds can take down antiphon i don't know um somebody tweeted a little clip from marshall mcluhan in 1968 and now if you're a certain age you've heard that name marshall mcluhan in the 60s he was super famous as being sort of the you know the intellectual who would talk about how the media how the media was programming us basically and marshall mcluhan said this which i'm going to disagree with he said when humans face too much information they resort

[53:22]

information they resort they resort to pattern recognition and then went on to say that the world is getting more complicated so therefore people can't sort out the complication so they just default to pattern recognition and when i first read it i thought i feel like this is half right i feel like it's rico thank you it's the rico laws i'm wondering if that's what bernie carrick was referring to with wrapping up the antifa people as an organization rico thank you um so marshall mcluhan says that when we have too much information and we resort to pattern recognition pattern recognition of course is confirmation bias if you do it wrong if you do it right then you're just being smart if you do it wrong it's confirmation bias and i would like to modify marshall mcluhan's opinion because i think it's dated he said this in 1968 and it sounded brilliant and um probably quite provocative back in

[54:22]

um probably quite provocative back in those days but here's what i think he gets wrong it has nothing to do with how much information people have it has nothing to do with with how confused you are or how much information you have we always use faulty pattern recognition and then we and then we explain it to ourselves as if we had made the decision logically the only time that we use logic is when the the situation is really simple and there's no emotional uh there's just no emotional input to it at all so i think he was close to the truth but i don't think it has to do with how much information you're dealing with i think we're just always always looking for the pattern recognition and we're not necessarily good at it um so i i tweeted something that i thought i would get more pushback from and didn't i don't think i got any imagine what i'm going to say right now that i got no pushback from that i've

[55:24]

that i got no pushback from that i've seen and tons of retweets so this is very popular with nobody pushing back yet and i tweeted it's time for all americans to join together in fighting our common enemy the teachers unions and then i provocatively went on if you think they haven't indirectly killed more black americans than the police you haven't been paying attention because education economics and safety are linked so my contention is that if the school unions have been doing their job for the last few decades the education of black america would be far better because it's not it's not that the teachers don't do a good job individually it's that the teachers unions prevent competition which means that there's a limit to how good anybody can be there's no competition so if you would if they had not existed and there was competition and education had improved in the way you would expect in a competitive environment

[56:26]

a competitive environment imagine how much better off the black community would be and everybody who was in a low income situation so we don't even need to limit this to any group but because we're talking about black lives matter i'll just i'll just say that the black lives matter people have been duped into pursuing their lowest priority they have been duped now imagine imagine even i don't know even a month or two ago that i could say this without being canceled and the only reason i can say it now without being cancelled is everyone knows it's true all right until everybody knew it was true i kind of couldn't say it and it's this if you think that if you think that the police killing of black people is a high priority or even should be let's say should be a high priority for the black community you don't know how to count because the total number of people that will ever be

[57:27]

number of people that will ever be killed by the police will be a pinprick compared to how many people how many lives are destroyed by the school unions the teachers unions restricting the ability for teaching to become good better than it is and they're not even close in terms of death count we're talking about you know education being the alpha problem for everyone basically for everyone you know not just the black community but if you don't get that right the education part you don't get your economics right you don't get your good quality life you don't get your national defense the country's done as bad as the tragedies are in these police incidents and very much we should work on it right there's don't interpret anything i say
say as we should not try to make that the best situation we can make it and experiment a little bit there we should but let's not confuse it

[58:29]

we should but let's not confuse it for the top priority for anybody it's not the if you think black lives matter that's not the priority if you think black lives matter you would you know you'd say well i hope we do better on this police stuff let's let's talk about the teachers unions that's when black lives matter so i don't think i could have even said that directly a month ago but i feel like you know now that now that the temperature is changing a little bit and we're seeing that the teachers unions are basically holding our children hostage think about think about the fact that the teachers unions are basically
holding our children hostage yes it's crazy all right
speaking of competition if you're wondering how much better could education be if you had free markets and competition i would uh i would point you toward elon musk's rocket which uh his astronauts just

[59:31]

rocket which uh his astronauts just returned safely yesterday and i may have the numbers wrong but it's something like this the mission that he that he accomplished for less than a billion dollars was something that nasa said would cost 26 billion so when nasa did not have competition they were proposing to spend at 26 billion dollars to do a thing that once competition was a thing cost 1 billion that's the size of the potential gain in education and i think he did it years earlier than that it was going to do it wasn't even close all right those those are my points for today um yeah just looking at your comments
can't thrive without addressing the teachers unions yeah so let me tie this back to the very first part of the periscope if those of you
you were there in which i said have you been

[1:00:32]

were there in which i said have you been surprised that some of the things i advocate for happen as unlikely as they seem and i don't think i've been advocating anything harder than the teachers unions need to get fixed or moved out of the way
way or at least stop us from having free market and competition and uh i would predict that you're going to see a lot more pressure on the teachers unions and maybe some alternatives popping up for education so i'm going to keep pushing on that i appreciate it when you boost me on twitter if it's some topic you think is good for the good for the country and join me on the locals platform if you want to see my special extra provocative stuff it's locals with an s.com and i will talk to you