Episode 1097 Scott Adams: Ask Me Anything Today

Date: 2020-08-19 | Duration: 1:00:38

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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• Kamala Harris has talent and ability to learn

• Likely outcome of Seattle and other cities

• Election result unrest, delayed result or redo?

• Native American issues and recognition

• Homeschooling

• The Democrat convention, day 2

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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[0:09]

hey everybody come on in here it's time for coffee with scott adams the best part of the day i know it is for me and watch how some of that good feeling transfers on to you that's how it works so i'm in a good mood you're in a little bit better mood and today we're going to do an experiment yeah something exciting normally i'm very prepared when i get on these periscopes i've looked at the news i've checked my twitter today i just woke up so the question is can i do this periscope with no preparation whatsoever well we'll find out and i'm going to be taking questions as part of my strategy for being unprepared does it really matter today nope there's no news today if you check the news which i did briefly you will notice there's not really any news it's just made up stuff about somebody may have said something done something somebody feels bad about something

[1:11]

somebody feels bad about something somebody's personality is bad they're worried about somebody might do something their character is bad somebody's loyalty nothing there's no news but first the simultaneous hip and all you need is a gupper mug or glass tanker chelsea sign a canteen jugger flask a vessel of any
any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day the thing that makes everything better it's called the simultaneous up and it is sure good
ah how did i predict kamala i'm going to take that question first even though you are not a guest yet
yet if anybody wants to ask a question on here you can see guest mode has appeared at the bottom of your screen if you have a mobile device it doesn't work on a laptop and you can press that and put you in a waiting list for me to accept you as a guest so the question

[2:13]

accept you as a guest so the question was how did i predict kamala harris and i almost hate to tell you
you a lot of it had to do with her look because we're a very visual species and the way people look makes a difference if you were you know short and bold could you be president of the united states talking about myself now um not too easily not too easily if jeff bezos ran for president could he become president well he has every skill in the world right so you'd think well if jeff bezos can't run for president who can and the answer is uh it might it might make a difference uh how you look kamala harris has the look and the look is not before you say oh it's because she's female or attractive or something like that

[3:13]

that no it's not that at all now she has both of those things she's female and attractive for age you know everything has to be highlighted or everything has to be normalized for age but that's not it the part that uh set set her apart is that she has a predator look about her now she can obviously she can be giggly and happy and smiley she can be a prosecutor the senator or an attorney general so she's got a good talent stack but she has a predator look she is ambitious which weirdly people are trying to make sound like a negative talk about your sexism a do they ever say that about men has anybody ever said we don't want that man to be a vice president because that man is too ambitious nope i've never heard that you know maybe somebody's said it once but i've never heard it

[4:13]

heard it um but they said that about kamal harris as if that's a negative that she's ambitious so if you put predator and ambitious and has the right look but it's also the right demographic i thought she would be a strong match up for trump what i didn't see coming in the primaries i didn't see this at all complete blind spot and say she was terrible at campaigning just terrible and that was reflected in the results she was one of the first to drop out but um the thing that i could tell about her which is obvious is that she's smart and remember the ambitious part if you are smart and ambitious you are also coachable coachable meaning that if she really really wanted something she would go find somebody who could teach her how to get it in fact you know she's had mentors all her life right you know that that's part of the

[5:14]

right you know that that's part of the good and the bad part of her story is that she's had the advantage of mentors willie brown in particular so if somebody can learn then if you were selected to be in on the ticket you would be coached by the top coaches in the world whoever is coaching uh kamala harris right now let me tell you something with complete certainty it's not her sister because her sister was the campaign manager i guess when she was in the primaries and everything that caballeros did seem wrong something that a professional would have said how about less of that and maybe more of something else and that never happened in the primaries but as soon as she became she sort of disappeared for a while and then she started talking again and there were some things that she fixed which i had predicted because that's the obvious way this would go is that she would get better help and she would get better at doing public

[6:16]

and she would get better at doing public stuff and she stopped being jumpy if you used to watch her shoulders would go up when she talked and it would make her look less confident she'd be like well i don't know why we're not doing something about this and why don't we do this and that largely stopped now think about that that was a lifelong habit that just sort of stopped somebody's coaching her and she's practicing right if you can find somebody who's a learner keep them and i'll tell you an anecdote about that in a minute um so she was she had the right look she had the right demographic person of color woman she was a senator um and she could be coached up to a higher level and then when biden became the likely candidate for the top spot it was sort of obvious at that point now let me offer this challenge to you i think it was i might have been i don't know if i was the first

[7:17]

know if i was the first or near the first to say that biden had a mental disability meaning that there was something happening with age can anybody confirm that because i'm not going to make the claim but i don't remember anybody in public here we're just talking about public people i don't remember anybody in public who was as early as i was because it was a long time ago when i said uh are you listening to him it's not all there now it's a little more obvious everybody can see it but i think i might have been among the first so if you take the fact that he can't make it all the way but he's likely the nominee add to the fact that she would be the perfect solution to that and they had some personal connection there and that apparently kamala harris was a favorite of some of the old school you know the hillary clinton people were her some of her staff in the primaries so it all just kind of made sense that she would be the puppet of the puppet

[8:18]

she would be the puppet of the puppet or she would be the double puppet play so there you go you want another real answer it's none of those i'll tell you the real reason that i predicted it and it's none of the things i just said they're all true and i did go through that thinking process do you want to know the real reason i could just see it the real reason i is i could just see it i could see it like it was the hand in front of my face now probably that feeling that i could see it which was identical to the feeling i had when trump was running it wasn't that i was predicting it exactly i just saw it i could just see it just like i was looking at it like it was right in front of me now probably that's just imagination fueled by the fact that the requirements for that to happen were in place and my brain wasn't quite processing it logically but it it presented that little movie for me

[9:18]

for me because they had done the work it just hadn't explained it yet so the explaining it is what i did to you so there is a there's a logic and a structure to it but the real reason i just saw it just saw it like it was right in front of me
now you all watched or some of you tried to watch the democratic convention i tried to watch a little bit of it but it was just painful and useless and didn't have any point uh aoc is the big story today because she uh she said she endorsed joe she endorsed bernie sanders in her one minute speech um not endorsed she said she [Music] what's the other word doesn't matter anyway apparently that was just a procedural thing because she sort of had to say that but that she does endorse biden but it certainly looked a little suspicious gotta admit she was not legally legibly speaking i don't know

[10:21]

legally legibly speaking i don't know what you're talking about yeah uh so you know i've warned some of you before i'll probably start blocking for this in the future so i want to warn you so there's somebody in the comments who's making a a kabbalah harris kneepads joke and the knee pads joke they're funny the first few times you hear them you're like oh i get it it's because of this and that well actually it was never funny funny but at least i you could understand why somebody would say it the first time if you're still making that same joke about willy brown and kamala harris it's time to let it go it's just not funny it's not it's not even a little bit funny it's not clever it's not insightful it's just bad form so eventually i'll probably start blocking people for making that comment because i just i sort of just don't want it in my universe it's not that i'm offended per

[11:21]

universe it's not that i'm offended per se
se i don't get offended on behalf of other people it's just so boring just really find something else to say oh nominated was the word thank you so aoc used the word nominated not endorsed all right so let me take a question or more
we got lots of people who want to ask questions let's see if we can get somebody who's really lively i think flip
all right somebody named flip is going to be interesting
can you hear me flip hey do you have a question for me flip i do uh so james altucher friend of yours uh wrote a really interesting article about the death of new york and how unlike the financial crisis or september 11th now we have bandwidth so there's no reason for the offices to fill back up or people come back so i'd just be interested to see who

[12:23]

so i'd just be interested to see who your perspective on the future of cities in america specifically new york but generally just cities yeah you know let me give you some context a long time ago when the radio was huge and television did not exist the television was invented and it obviously was catching on quickly and then quickly then soon there was a color tv and everybody said hey i guess radio is going to go away because why would you have this radio in your living room that you all gather around to listen to the radio shows when you have a television makes perfect sense right like radio obviously will be extinct but instead radio got bigger it just moved it moved to the automobile it wasn't obvious that that was going to happen and then radio became you know the rush limbaugh's and the howard stearns it became huge and i say that only because we are really bad at predicting we meaning all people so if you look at new york city and you take the most

[13:24]

new york city and you take the most obvious prediction the most obvious prediction would be why do we need retail stores at all we have amazon why would anybody go back to a place that's crowded and congested it's hard to do anything it's expensive and now law enforcement has gone away or it's not enough to protect your store so the the straightforward walk right down the highway that has no nobody blocking you is new york's going to have a lot of trouble at least with the business part of it but going back to my radio versus television analogy the other possibility is that new york will find a way to be a different new york so for example all that retail space could get picked up by tech companies i don't just just one example and then suddenly it's not so much retail stores but you got your googles and your amazons maybe that sort of thing so it's completely unpredictable more unpredictable than anything what i think is the least

[14:25]

think is the least likely outcome is it will go back to the way it was i think it'll have to go back to something different um but personally i don't know why anybody would live in new york city at this point and i think that the cities are might be they might be coming to a close faster than they would have i think you're going to find that building homes that people can afford at very low incomes in places where there were no cities and no towns before should be the future and that would leave some big questions about what do you do with the stuff that's already been built that nobody can afford to live in and at that point supply and demand should even things out and then it will be cheap to live in new york and people will live there because it's cheap that might be that might be what happens to it oddly enough so that's just one possibility so i don't know if that came anywhere near uh answering it but i think in the future cities will move to small structures maybe even single story things that people could

[15:26]

single story things that people could build themselves but are really good to live in and have schools and everything else you need all right that was my answer uh thanks for the question flip thanks scott all right let's see what else we got here how about
jill see if we can get jill to connect jill can you hear me oh
kamala harris pick was brilliant when you said it because i know she just lost and he made the prediction anyway and i said you know scott sees there's free money and he's picking it up because it's like what do you have to lose if kamala harris doesn't get anywhere further you lose nothing and if kamala hales harris does win big in this which he has then you you you look like a god right no i i i would uh i would say that that would have been true with my trump prediction in 2016

[16:27]

with my trump prediction in 2016 because at the time nobody thought of me as a political um pundit and nobody thought of me as someone who could predict anything but when i got the trump prediction right you know that wasn't as special because lots of you got that right as well i think what was different is i said it in public which maybe stand out a little bit uh but with the kabbalah harris one once i had been established as somebody who talked about politics if i had been wrong on this one i would have been mocked forever i would never have been able to turn on my periscope without a troll coming in and say why should we listen to anything you said you picked kabul harris to be the nominee and that's the dumbest thing that ever happened you know i never i would never hear the end of it i love predictions that are out on the edge because they they stand the greatest reward and that certainly did right there and i loved it and as for the cities going away i think the original reason cities became in existence in the first place

[17:29]

became in existence in the first place in civilization was for protection against marauding um wild people that were on the outskirts of the cities and i'm not sure that would not go away in the new future with um antifa and antifa like groups and marauding people who are that's stuff that i i love that point because yeah the earliest cities had walls around them and they were fortified for defense as you just said but today we might still want to put the wall around new york and seattle but for a different reason to try to keep all the marauding people on the inside don't let them get into the countryside i live here in seattle and it's not so bad just the north end of seattle you know we have some protesters on the corners and that was great you could go down there and talk to them and there's nothing really in the um in the in the areas that aren't right in the middle of the city so right in the middle of the city is where all the protests have always concentrated so it's not so bad as you might think what about these the retail stores once

[18:31]

what about these the retail stores once you get out from the the epicenter of it are the retail stores open and functioning the retail stores are open and functioning a lot of them are low in stock because they were raided by some organized criminal activity that went through and just looted them all at once to just just dilute the police presence they got a bunch of their windows busted in and we're ripped off majorly like best pie for example was practically cleaned out i went down there to shop the other day and there weren't any products on the shelf that i wanted so i had to order them off amazon so so those retail stores are good except for the fact that they don't have any products to sell that's it yeah all right that could be better all right thanks for the question thank you sir all right all right let's take another one that doesn't sound like an ideal situation they've only been robbed once and have no product to sell but otherwise they're terrific let's see if i can get this to work

[19:33]

if i can get this to work okay that one didn't work that was for you just oh but you went away how about will i think will
might be here will you have a question for me
good good thanks good um i was kind of writing it down and didn't get finished with it but um we've seen the far left causing mayhem uh it's it's gone on across the entire globe from europe uh to to here we see antifa um really causing a lot of trouble in the cities and um it just it seems like we may be headed to a place where the normal people get fed up with this and take up arms against the far left and i'm afraid this could be a worldwide little pockets of civil war um do you think that there's any possibility of this um you know i'm i'm hesitant to predict

[20:33]

um you know i'm i'm hesitant to predict because it yeah you could get canceled pretty easily for for making it sound like you're promoting violence right so let me let me be as careful as i can by starting out saying i don't promote any violence and i don't hope that any of this happens but if you were just going to connect the dots and say what is the most likely outcome of what you're watching it does end with some firearms that would be the most likely outcome because it doesn't look like the protesters are going to just burn themselves out by making their point and moving on because the ones who just wanted to make a point about systemic racism i feel like they made their point there's no more point that needs to be made the the ones who just want to destroy everything and tear down they don't have an end date because there's no reason for them to stop they're having fun it seems like it's a social event gives them meaning so what would stop the worst of them the ones who were there for

[21:34]

there for uh anarchy not the ones who were there for social justice what would stop the anarchists from just going until everything's gone nothing except force and it does seem that the uh the citizens don't seem to want to put up any force in in the cities where it's happening and probably because it's not that close to their personal homes uh as soon as this moves close to homes that's when you see like the the couple who brought out the firearms that'll happen everywhere so as soon as the protesters leave the zone where it's just a business where there might be some business insurance people have a different investment you know emotionally a different investment in their their work than they do in their family but boy you get you've seen a few anecdotes of you know the few times that antifa has gone into a little bit more rural or suburban area the mccloskeys he had the couple that brought out their guns in rural areas you know my neighborhood

[22:36]

in rural areas you know my neighborhood there are a lot of guns around here i mean people don't bring them out but i can tell you for sure this this neighborhood's pretty strapped and
and people would take out take out their self-defense at the moment the antifa showed up so but that alone isn't going to stop anything because it will just go where it's a softer target right if if they get resistance they'll just go somewhere else because they don't have a reason to quit but what would give them a reason to quit is if something bad happens and again i'm not promoting it so don't cancel me i'm not saying you should do this but the odds of one let me tell you what it would probably look like one military veteran who has some skills and i'm not gonna i'm not gonna say more than that right just one military veteran who just says you know this is going beyond protest this isn't the first amendment i would die for the first amendment if it's just freedom of speech i'll die

[23:38]

if it's just freedom of speech i'll die for you that's you know a military person might say such a thing but if you're destroying my country i have a vow to protect it and i don't see anybody else doing it so the odds of somebody with a military background getting almost activated if i could say that because remember if you're in the military you're programmed you know you're actually wired differently than anybody else for good or bad you are wired to be a different creature and i think some of that lasts i would assume i mean if ptsd can last i would expect that also that you know the the rest of the training or experience would have some lasting benefits and it would only take one event again i'm going to speak generically just one event that would make it a really bad idea to go out in the street and be identified as antifa because they would think it would happen again now it might happen to have to happen more than once before people say oh it's a trend it

[24:39]

before people say oh it's a trend it happened twice but i see that as the likely outcome that there'll be somebody with a military background who will say not my country i'm looking around not my country the media would would paint that person as far right and they would become a villain in in the uh you know the entire news media is run by leptus pretty much other than fox yeah yeah it would become a story about the crazy republicans yeah you're right it would become one of those stories it doesn't necessarily have to be a republican or even a conservative who might just have enough it could be just somebody who lost their store you know it could be somebody who was a victim of it somebody who you know a friend got beaten up by antifa it could be just somebody who's had enough uh but in all likelihood if there's let me just say this these things don't stop without force unless the group that's doing the bad stuff has a reason to stop on their own

[25:41]

stuff has a reason to stop on their own and they very much don't the the the ones who want anarchy only want to stop when everything's broken so only force will stop them and the government has indicated that it doesn't want to use it at least the local government and because we don't have a dictator it turns out we don't have a dictator surprise trump's not a dictator the federal government won't move in and we'll let the local people just destroy their own city if they want to so the only way anything stops is with force if it's not going to come from the government and be sanctioned and the the appropriate kind it will happen it will just come from another source and then that's when the bad stuff happens so uh that answer your question it does great thanks a lot thank you all right let's take another if that don't get me canceled what will

[26:44]

all right cryptic are you there hello can you hear me cryptic do you have a question you have a question for me scott how do we save music how do we save music and art so what what's to say if it looks pretty good to me let me elaborate um so if well actually have you developed that uh that thing where when you look at an artist's profile and you kind of you kind of say oh i can i could tell that they're an artist and and that um is there anything that you're kind of developing with that like a theory with why that's so because i'm actually a rapper in austin texas and i feel like with my background in uh business degree economics and all that i feel like i'm really singled out and i'm just like looking at everyone around me and it's it's insane it's like the way everybody is like in the music business like you know super like black lives matter like supportive and stuff but do you do you know why that is

[27:44]

you know why that is yes i do uh in fact my book loser think is
is on that exact question it has to do with your has to do with your talent stack so as you said if you have exposure to decision-making fields business economics you know law medicine to some extent you know the engineering any of the fields that teach you how to think you're probably going to do better in understanding your world and dealing with it the people who become artists have two problems one is there's a self-selection thing so the people who decide hey i think i'll be an artist it might be because they're good at lots of things that they chose that but it's also a lot of people say i just don't like math math isn't going to be my thing i don't want to sit in an office so there's a self-selection thing and then there's a non-exposure because they're not doing the things that would teach them how to make decisions and then there's the associating with other artists which is likely if you're in that world so they have three things working against them

[28:45]

have three things working against them self-selection who they hang out with and then lack of exposure to decision making so it's pretty straightforward these are people who are either unable or untrained to look at things rationally and i feel sorry for you if you're in that world and you have to deal with them because have you have you tried to have any kind of a rational discussion with your peers that you're talking about and and is it just head shaking that's not just a different it's not just a difference of opinion is it there's something else going on right there right it's it's literally like i'm watching two like two movies on one screen like say like my own movie and then i'm watching them have discussions that like i just want to jump in there and just you know just say what why are you why do you guys think this way but i like i just have to like bite down and just kind of accept it sometimes because i feel like it's just it's just so overwhelming the difference in opinions

[29:45]

in opinions it's wild so so uh just for fun try this the next time these topics come up with your friends if you don't want to out yourself as the one who disagrees just try to give some clarification and say you know suppose suppose the protesters got everything they wanted you know in social justice etc who how would it be paid for and if they say well we'll get the top top .01 to pay for it right then you say why would they stay around like what what would what would it why would they stay in this country if if they're being pickpocketed anyway see see how that goes back to me oh yeah move to austin i'll see you here whenever you eventually move over here well it's not impossible thanks thanks thanks for the question take care for sure take care all right how did i get so many listeners for taking questions i'm surprised all right let's see if uh daniel has a question

[30:48]

daniel has a question daniel hey daniel you have a question for me
uh the last question in a way um i wanted to ask you about education um a lot of us don't really like the idea of college these days uh i've been i really didn't like learning that everything had to be understood through the lens of race class and gender so um so i kind wanted to ask you as far as like a liberal arts education or learning how to think um what would you recommend as a starting place for like a personal system for that well for learning how to think um if you want to understand the people who don't think well and i think that's a good start google persuasion reading list so you'll find my list of books they're in the persuasion and influence realm so i'd say that's a that's a good start because it tells you what is irrational and why people are

[31:48]

what is irrational and why people are like that then uh the the fields that get you to think better are economics law engineering you know science anything that has any kind of a structured process for figuring out what's true and what's not is going to get you there in economics you spend a lot of time figuring out which variables matter and comparing two things to other things so you end up just automatically building a brain that does that reflexively so anybody from i use this example all the time if you if i talk to somebody who's not experienced with economics had no influence and i say is this president whatever president doesn't matter which one doing a good job or a bad one they'll say oh yeah good job or they'll say oh terrible job he's botched everything but if you ask an economist hey economist is this president doing a good job or a bad job the economist will say compared to who right because that's the starting point compared to what there was no other

[32:50]

compared to what there was no other president doing the same job at the same time under the same circumstances so that you could see how they acted compared to this one sure everyone makes mistakes but on that is one of them going to be better than the other you don't really know it's unknowable so the economist is just completely on a different page with the person who hasn't studied any of that so i in terms of college i would say that the softer the skill the less useful it is okay the the uh english literature you know russian studies of literature i suppose uh you can tell just just go for the ones that have some decision making elements to them and you'll you'll do better but do do take some kind of a writing and speaking course those are good for everybody all right thanks scott appreciate it all right take care
yeah college is gonna be really different in a few years i'm glad finally all right let's see if michael's sweet has

[33:51]

let's see if michael's sweet has something to say michael do you have a question for me
that is uh anticipated in the chaos yes go ahead if there is uh no result from the election by the time uh inauguration comes down i think it would go to the house of representatives do you think that's so or and how do you think that would play out well i'm no constitutional scholar but i would think that if we don't have a result by not by inauguration day that our options would be to either postpone the election or to have it again or postpone the result and the inauguration or to to redo it and i don't know the legality of any of that but i imagine we could make it past we could make it past legal muster because i think the supreme court is going to say no the constitution says these are your

[34:52]

the constitution says these are your deadlines but the supreme court is humans not a machine so if you say to the humans on the supreme court but you know this year we just couldn't do it it wasn't an option i think at that point people just get flexible and they say well you know okay we're we're originalists and
and we don't like to deviate from the the constitution but the intent of the constitution was to get a good result that people believe that would be easy nobody would argue with the fact that the intention is to get a credible result and that and the republic requires that it's not optional it's not optional that people believe it was a real election not in our system that's not optional so you're going to do whatever you can to make that problem go away and i think that's going to be either delay or just redo it just wait uh so you might get a few extra months of a trump administration that the other side didn't want uh if he lost which i don't think is going to happen so that that's where i

[35:53]

going to happen so that that's where i think it will go i think people will just get real flexible but i also think that there's really no chance of having a credible outcome in the first pass it just doesn't seem possible it doesn't matter who wins just doesn't seem possible so the one and only outcome i could see that would be credible enough to avoid election related mass unrest is if trump won by a landslide or i suppose if joe biden won by a landslide so if either of them won by such a margin that even whatever whatever stuff happened with the mail you could even say okay two or three percent of that which would be a lot right if you had two or three percent fraud in the national election that would be a lot of fraud but if one of them wins by 10 percent you you can let it go so anything short of a major landslide which is not really common in our our

[36:55]

which is not really common in our our system at least lately uh is going to be trouble and i think that means delay or redo so that's my guess great thanks scott thank you appreciate you always appreciate your perceptions thanks all right let's see who else is here how about sammy the dog sammy who has a icon like a dog are you there sammy sammy may have been watching on a device that doesn't work for this so we're going to try dd dd whose name is two parts that are the same dd do you have a question for me
pleasure it has to do it has to do with the word chaos i recently uh observed many democrats using that word joe biden kamala harris bill clinton used it

[37:57]

kamala harris bill clinton used it michelle obama used the word um this this chaos do you think it's a an effective branding word or do you think it's weak um well you know i've been asking myself the same thing because they they use it all the time i do think that uh people have a sense that everything's unbalanced and that things need to be rebalanced so chaos definitely gets you there it's like hey this president is full of chaos so i think they're using chaos like they use dark you can take anything he does and say it's chaos how about the way he dealt with the middle east well it's just chaos so it's a word like botched where you accept it uncritically if somebody says well this manager is not managing as well as this other manager you might say to yourself well i have a different opinion let's look at the variables let's look at you know really compare these but if somebody says that that one person creates chaos you feel like you're done

[38:58]

you're done right because you're never going to want the chaos anything it's it's just an automatic no chaos thank you now thanks for offering i don't need any chaos so dark chaos botched any of those words that have in them a sense of non-specific badness are very good because they don't have enough specific badness to work with so as long as they can keep using these general words about his personality his credibility is his chaos they don't have to explain exactly what he did wrong or what they would do better and that's bad for them you know if they have to explain the details because the details don't work in their favor uh the what the democrats want first of all they don't agree with each other so if you're if you're a democrat and you're trying to sell the national unity hey everybody vote for this one person it's better if you don't get too specific because if they do their own team will leave

[39:59]

leave as soon as they say we're going to do this or that people who are democrats will say wait a minute that's not what i signed up for exactly i wanted something way more left to that so the democrats have to hide their intention from their own side as much as they have to make a case against trump so that word works really well for that i would say now i've i've often said that trump has the reverse message which is law and order now law order is not
not punchy like you know botched or chaos or dark it's it's a little too boring and ordinary so if the tru if the president could come up with a a response word and he the best play for the president would be to use the word against them because remember how fake news the president took the gun out of their hands and flipped it around it's just like that if you look at the rioting it's chaos so you could certainly make the case that the republicans are the anti-chaos

[40:59]

that the republicans are the anti-chaos team and the democrats or the chaos team i th i'd be i'm kind of surprised he hasn't done that yet because it's such an obvious play so maybe you'll see that all right thanks for the question you're welcome thank you bye
all right let's see what blues lover has for us today blues lover can you hear me do you have a question
for podcasts i am a former california person moved to south carolina and i'm also an enrolled member of the choctaw nation native americans and i feel like i feel that native americans are not being acknowledged in the current climate with mention of the 1619 program and also watching a young girl in georgetown saying black people used to live here encouraging white people to move out but

[42:01]

encouraging white people to move out but so did my people [Laughter] good so yeah my tribe is actually from the southeast uh complex of mississippi and alabama so although i'm a conservative and i'm really against identity politics i want to know how native americans can become part of the conversation of lifting people up or just our general acknowledgement of our
our of who we are in their education or economics well that's a good point uh it was only a few years ago that i thought i was a native american too i had the elizabeth warren problem my family we had all been raised to believe that we had some proportion of native american blood but when i did a dna test it turns out it's zero exactly zero and i've heard a lot of people since then say that they they had a similar situation so i guess it was trendy

[43:01]

it was trendy to say that you were part native american which is part of my answer is part of my answer native americans have always had sort of uh a positive image in the standard you know uh european based person who came over to the united
so st would often say hey yeah we were one of those too because it was so positive you like to claim it as part of part of your identity so you have a little different situation you don't have apples and oranges here with the black community but of course uh if you notice last night um as each of the states had got 30 seconds to do their nomination of biden that there were a number of native americans who were selected to represent their state and i only watched it for a little bit but i think i saw a three out of maybe 10 and i thought wow that's really very high recognition of the

[44:02]

really very high recognition of the you know the native american populations in those states and uh but you're right you're right the the problem with the black lives matter movement is that if it works it's self-destroying because if it works it would cause extra attention to go to one part of the public and the rest of the public would say
say wait a minute we weren't in favor of extra attention so much we just wanted equality so you can imagine that anything can overshoot the mark so i think black lives matter will uh destroy itself because it has a message that has a timer on it right yeah if ever yeah the is sort of you can see the the fuse is burning and you're saying okay this isn't going to last much longer when the leaders of black lives matter are saying let's uh or even members are saying let's kick these white people out of their house and give it to black people and stuff like that so it's sort of

[45:03]

and stuff like that so it's sort of self-destroying so let me say this um is what you're looking for more attention because you would want more resources to go in that direction or is it more just a recognition that you're looking for
for i think a recognition but also perhaps uh resources trump has been great for the native americans he's signed the murdered missing indigenous people um
um bill as well as allowed tribal lands for us to leave it to other people in the tribe which previous presidents had not signed obama so he's done a lot it just doesn't get attention so i as somebody who let me just say for you and your audience when i hear people say we're a nation of immigrants it like kind of bothers me a little bit and i don't i don't like identity politics but i'd like us to be acknowledged at the table as just being equal not being better than

[46:03]

equal not being better than or original or anything just at the table but you know uh to my to my other statement do you find that there's much day-to-day any kind of discrimination against native americans is that is that even part of your experience well i i have blonde hair part of the colonization so there is um some discrimination for indians that don't maybe fit the complete bill um by the way we don't go by dna uh we we do go by genealogy so you know we have actually there's a card that people get if you're an enrolled member so um so it's kind of interesting but i i we i think we are being discriminated against with the 1619 project oh that's true yes well in the sense that uh your your uh your place in history is minimized by that yeah you have a good

[47:05]

minimized by that yeah you have a good point or being great yeah yeah like like the beginning well yeah i can see that so um you have the disadvantage of numbers right what percentage of the united states is native american is it two percent one percent i i i it's under three yeah it's under three yeah so having numbers would help everybody who's in that one or two percent is going to have trouble getting attention in this world uh so your point is well taken thanks for the call thank you all right
interesting all right let's see if we've got
another caller here whose name i will not try to pronounce hello caller can you hear me hi how do you pronounce your first name okay ching do you have a question for me yes uh so my question was about

[48:06]

yes uh so my question was about building good habits like um sometimes like i have bad habits like uh i don't want to get out of bed and like then i just make myself more more miserable and i know that every time i don't procrastinate i just get up and i do my meditation or do anything i'll feel better but for whatever reason sometimes i just keep slipping back into those bad habits now when you're in it and you let's say you're laying in bed and you're saying i should get up but i'm just not is is that the situation where you you know you should and you're just not doing it yeah i know i should and then i think i just i start tormenting myself with like all these thoughts all right try this so this is a tip from my book loserthink and uh it has to do with how to how to how to break couch lock because i have

[49:08]

how to break couch lock because i have this myself i'll be sitting on the couch and i'll be perfectly happy but i know i'm supposed to be doing something else i just can't get myself off the couch i just my brain is having a conversation with my body and saying you know you should be doing something else and my body is just like nope gonna sit in the couch here is the hypnotist trick for breaking that you wiggle your pinky just wiggle your pinky because it's your your brain won't have an objection to that and neither will your body so you just wiggle it and then you let that wiggle the finger go to the rest of your hand and you just move your hand as soon as you move your hand you'll be able to move your arm and you can stand up so in other words you take agency over your body because for momentarily it's as if your body and your brain are disconnected it's almost like they're having a conversation with each other hey get off the couch not really so as soon as you take control of the smallest part of your body just wiggle your pinky it uh it reactivates your connection

[50:10]

reactivates your connection and it tells your body who's in charge and then your executive function can say off the couch and now we're on to something else that's the first thing second thing is you should develop a system a consistent system of rewards for anything you want to do more of so if you want to exercise more make sure that when you're done immediately after you're done exercising is always a reward i like to have a you know nice smoothie that is delicious spend some time looking through my phone and just have some down time and not work and to me that's like a delicious little you know 35 minutes there and so that reward just trains us like dogs to seek the reward even if we're not consciously thinking it so there's a book called uh habit by charles duhigg d-u-h-i-g might be two g's i forget um and he he teaches you how to develop habits so i would recommend the book habit try the pinky trick and give yourself a

[51:11]

try the pinky trick and give yourself a real reward for whatever you want to do more of and that will get you started okay thank you scott you're welcome
and that was a very functional question because there probably a lot of you who are saying you know i'd like to hear the answer to that question let's see if taylor has a question taylor come to me your technology has failed taylor we will go with amy
are you the amy who recently sent me something in the mail no i'm the amy who told you that uh fitton was not a lawyer oh yes that was quite a shock to me because i just assumed he was i think it's because the the person who had his job before that was a lawyer right i don't know about that he's been doing that a long time i just like the fact

[52:11]

that a long time i just like the fact that he's got pecs and buys you know he's he's pretty uh strapped with that yeah and you know you well you're a little bit younger than i am and so um but you know we're fighting to keep our young appearance and all that kind of stuff particularly as a woman it's really necessary as you might not know or do so anyway i do have i i've been struggling with this sending kids back to
to indoctrination centers from people on the right and people on the left wanting to keep the kids home which you would think that they would want to keep their kids indoctrinated or in that so i've been struggling i have a grandson at home and he's going in person two days a week and i've got him home three days a week which has been wonderful because now i can see what he's not getting and it's scary as all get out it really is

[53:11]

is yeah i don't think a lot of us i was speaking for myself i don't think we knew how bad it was i i was opposed to public school because i saw um the destruction of just putting kids in that environment because kids are terrible to eat to each other and you're guaranteeing that you're putting your kid into a bullying a bullying situation unless they are the bully so there's no there's no good answer there so it's a very cruel world and i've i've spent a lot of time trying to think well would it be better to home school because then you don't get the socialize socializing unless you really work on making sure it happens i don't know on ballots i think public school is bad for kids on balance you know given that you could educate them a different way well my grandson is on the spectrum and one of the things that is nice now is that they aren't demonized as they were like when we were in school and we didn't really even know

[54:13]

in school and we didn't really even know what we were dealing with back then in the late 60s and 70s and so there is a lot of understanding but then again he's he's for the socialization but as a literalist i'm afraid that he's going to suck all this stuff and turn into something that really won't serve him best in the long run so yeah oh you know i think i think it's going to go the other way because uh you when you say on the spectrum are you saying on the spectrum like he'll he'll be an engineer someday or like he has more problems than that no that's that's the goal because he he truly is a math genius and he has perfect pitch so he's a music genius as well right so i i wouldn't worry about him i don't because here because here's the thing he's he's wired based on what you're saying he's wired for rational thought and if somebody tells him something that

[55:13]

and if somebody tells him something that he can't see and observe i just don't know he's going to be gullible so you you may have raised somebody who is unusually resistant to the very thing you're worried about well that's what the hope is that's what the hope is because you know dad has a degree as a master's in computer science and we've got another son with a phd in chemistry and you know and and i have a stem degree and my husband has a stem degree so i mean they don't have a chance they don't have a snowball's chance in hell of going to the left i hope well we'll see that all right thanks for the call well thank you all right take care
[Music] all right uh let's do one more
we'll take uh donna and then we'll rap if donna's technology works donna are you there
good morning what's your question free i'm curious if you read the new york

[56:13]

i'm curious if you read the new york times article or any of the other responses to the thousand page uh senate report i i i glanced at it and it looks like they're trying to make an opposite claim of reality but saying you know about trump's campaign ties to russia et cetera et cetera i'm having trouble making all of that mesh with everything that you've been talking about um and you know i want to be able to talk about it with people in a way that makes sense so i'm curious if you read it and if you have any comments on it um i don't read the new york times because i don't because i don't trust it um as being a credible news source anymore i hate to say that i mean it's just the worst thing in the world and i don't say that as a partisan i i say that as objective fact the news just isn't really giving us news anymore so i i don't read it and if it's beyond a paywall i'm not going to like pay to read something i don't trust so uh you're saying that they're making the case that uh the the trump had been the trump

[57:15]

that uh the the trump had been the trump campaign did have connections to russia is that what you're saying what it said was that some people in trump's campaign talk to some russians but that's true so yes so the claim is that because there's a lot of information about people in trump's campaign talking to russians that that proves everything that they've been talking about since the beginning yeah well i i think you just have to dismiss that as uh the fake news doing what the fake news does you know the the most normal thing in the world is for an incoming administration to have people that they know in the russia sphere keep in mind that russia's objective is to make sure that whoever the administration is or even if it's a a maybe administration coming in that they would give them as much contact as they possibly could because the more contact the better from russia so remember you got russia doing perfectly legal things which is

[58:17]

doing perfectly legal things which is have a phone call have a meeting talk to somebody create a channel so it sort of would have to look like this under under every situation i believe it would look like this it wouldn't matter what the administration was so the way i would answer it is you realize that whoever is the next administration after trump whether it's you know this year or some other year whoever is next is going to have a lot of
of initial contacts and past contacts with russian russian folks so you should first explain it away as normal and say it's going to be like that for every administration regardless and always has been i'm sure there hasn't been a past administration that didn't have some serious contacts with lots of russians they have an embassy they have a reason to have contact we have a reason to have contact with them there's nothing unusual about it so there's no story there is what i'd say gotcha okay thank you scott i appreciate it all right hope that helped

[59:18]

it all right hope that helped okay um i don't want to go any longer but i was surprised that we got as many people here to watch this let me just wrap up on the um on the democratic convention last night it's obvious that this recorded speeches and stuff just doesn't have the same pizzazz as anything live but i thought they you know did a little bit better job last night i don't know who the candidate is who's running because i don't you know it seems like he's a non-entity except for his name and uh everybody's just waiting for the moment that joe biden has to talk to somebody without without looking at a teleprompter everything else kind of doesn't matter so we've got to see that before we know anything so bill clinton uh talked and got mixed responses and even even cnn one of their panelists was making a big deal about uh why isn't he cancelled already and

[1:00:20]

uh why isn't he cancelled already and that that question just lingers so um oh is tonight the nomination official nomination tonight all right well i don't know if that'll be interesting either
and that is all i have for today and i will talk to you tomorrow