Episode 1108 Scott Adams: Portland Badness, Total Collapse Biden’s Chances, Murdered Trump Supporter

Date: 2020-08-30 | Duration: 50:57

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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• Sport-hunting in police-free Portland

• Alice Johnson attacked by protesters after RNC

• Ted Wheeler’s letter rejecting National Guard assistance

• Bill to decriminalize marijuana at the Federal level

• Riots, violence, death because fake news stokes the fire

• Gullible people in a world where all the news is fake news

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 yeah i know it's sunday and most of you should be in church but it could be enough of you here to enjoy the simultaneous sip and enjoy it you will it's the only thing that's almost as good as church i was going to say better but i don't want to start a fight on a sunday so i'll say almost as good and all you need to enjoy the simultaneously well you don't need much that's the beauty of it all you need is a copper margaret glass of tanker chelsea's fine a canteen drug flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure that dopamine of the day the thing that makes everything better except the protests in portland apparently nothing helps those it's called the simultaneous hip and habits now go

[1:21]

well um i just saw a tweet from jake novak who was saying it's 9 35 a.m on sunday and uh real clear politics still hasn't published the results of the blockbuster new
new di poll i don't know what the dipole is showing trump in the lead that came out at 10 pm last night so there is some suggestion that the polls have turned just dramatically for trump now if they hadn't turned dramatically for trump recently i would be quite surprised but apparently there's some hesitation to even print the polls the polls are so big are so bad that they won't even print them so that's pretty bad
and funny at the same time now there was a tragic shooting last night in portland and i would like to do something that

[2:23]

and i would like to do something that you rarely see and this will be so rare that some of you will remember when you saw it for the rest of your life you know sometimes when there's some big event you'll be you'll be like i always don't remember what i was doing when that happened and here's the the rare and special thing i'm going to do i'm going to be consistent in public i know i know it's crazy you don't think i can do it watch this watch this consistency yesterday i said that people who resist the rest they're the problem and that the media has convinced us it's a police problem police could do better everybody could do better at anything they're doing so that's a general statement but it's mostly a resisting arrest problem if you look at it that way and so i was showing not too much sympathy

[3:23]

i was showing not too much sympathy for the people resisting arrest because they were clearly inviting the problems they got if you invite a problem and then the problem comes in because you invited the problem and you knew you were inviting the problem and the problem was exactly the problem you knew you were inviting and now you have a problem i don't have any sympathy for you none i don't have a bit of sympathy for you
you last night apparently there was somebody who knew he was going into a kill zone dressed like somebody that is trying to get killed do i have sympathy for the trump allegedly we don't know the story yet but allegedly there's some blue lives matter or trump supporter who went right into the middle of a violent crowd that was armed and looking to kill people like him
him people like him here's my consistency i'm not going to tell you that i don't care about those resisting arrest people

[4:23]

care about those resisting arrest people regardless of color it has nothing to do with you know ethnicity white person black person it doesn't matter if they're resisting arrest i just don't have sympathy for them don't ask me to if somebody goes consciously and willingly into the most dangerous place they could possibly go and a bad thing happens to them don't ask me for sympathy don't ask me for any sympathy do you think i'm gonna do you think i'm gonna give empathy to this guy because he was a trump supporter or because he was anti-anti-whatever he was anti anti the protesters i don't know whatever he was i just can't go there i just can't give you any sympathy for somebody who brings knowingly brings a problem on themselves i've got enough problems of my own i don't have too many problems actually that's sort of a lie i don't have a lot of big problems
but there are certainly enough problems of people who are good people who are not trying to get into any trouble

[5:24]

not trying to get into any trouble who just need a little you know extra boost somehow i'm happy to help those people those people deserve my empathy i'd rather use empathy than sympathy in this case and i'll see what i can do see how i can help but if you're bringing trouble on yourself don't ask me to be unhappy about it ever alright so that's what it looks like to be consistent in public you may never see it again so remember where you were you were watching my periscope when it happened so we don't know a lot about this person who is shot we think we think just for being a trump supporter or a or a blue lives matter supporter which means to the protesters they would have defined that as a white supremacist there's no evidence that he was or wasn't there's just no evidence on that um so that's a we're still in the fog of war on that um governor k brown

[6:27]

um governor k brown uh oh so here's what else happened so apparently there were 150 people with gas masks and helmets i think those were the protesters not the counter protesters remember i was saying that why is it that we don't hear about the number of protesters hasn't been odd to you why don't we ever hear the number of them sometimes they say well it's in a small it's you know just in a few blocks and they talk about the real estate but they don't really talk about the number of them and you don't hear it on the media from the left you don't hear it on the media from the right and you don't even hear from all the independents you know like andy no etc who are showing up now maybe i'm missing it that's possible i mean maybe it's being reported and just by coincidence everywhere i look i don't see it but you don't know do you in the comments tell me if you know how many people show up for any of these protests i have no idea let

[7:29]

any of these protests i have no idea let me tell you why this is so important let's say it's 150 people who were clearly identified as protesters is that the right number i don't know but if there's 150 what does that tell you about the solution it tells you the solution is really easy because 150 people is not many people for a protest you know that you could certainly round up enough law enforcement so you outnumbered them if you wanted to could you not find 150 law enforcement people but here's the more dangerous thought not a recommendation i'm not recommending this but it's it's easy to imagine where things are going to go on their own whether i recommended it or discouraged it wouldn't matter it's going to happen on its own and that is if it's only 150 protesters and they're actually destroying the entire city you know not the whole city at once

[8:32]

city you know not the whole city at once but they're they're sort of chewing away and breaking a new storefront every night and
and it's never going to stop at some point the people who are not happy with this will organize and they will say all right how many of us does it take to get rid of them there are only 150 of them and they're not that big could you know could the counter protesters every single night of the year come up with more than 150 counter protesters to shut them down again i'm not recommending this i'm just saying this is a likely outcome so if the reporting told us the number of people we would also know what the solution looked like or we would be able to predict what would happen you know you wouldn't call it a solution if the counter protesters come there to get into a fight that would just be a different problem but you can kind of predict where it's going if you knew how many they were and also if you knew if that number was

[9:33]

and also if you knew if that number was growing or shrinking recently you know what's it look like the last 10 nights of protests exactly same number a little bigger bigger on weekends what's it look like no reporting on that of course
but i guess there were a bunch of pro police people that might have been pro-trump at the same time who decided that going into the middle of this craziness was a good idea now if you didn't see the videos of the trump supporters in big trucks with their flags not all of them went through the middle of the the protest but some of them did i think most of the protesters decided to drive around portland but some decided to go right through the middle looking for trouble and you see these trump supporters sitting in the back of trucks with at least in one case i don't know how many others with a paint gun paintball gun and you'd see the protesters throw an

[10:33]

protesters throw an egg or something and then you see the trump protest the trump guy in the truck who's literally just sport hunting with a paintball gun he's sport hunting you just look at him and it's obvious he came there for the sport and he's got his paint gun he's just like pop up up up up up nobody got hurt i don't think you know probably stung got some paint on him i don't think anybody got hurt i hope not but um it's obvious at least that small group of the protesters that didn't represent all the all the counter protesters but that small group quite obviously came there for the fight club they came there for the entertainment and do i feel sorry for anybody they shot with a paint gun nope don't everybody chose to be there under exactly the circumstances that they experienced they were all adult conscious choices mostly adult i guess

[11:36]

so that was predictable that it would turn into a fight club and it did the real question is now do the counter protesters enjoy it enough that they go back and i gotta tell you i for the for those of you who are watching this who are uh either women i'm gonna make a gross general generality are you ready for this you can tell me if this is sexist or not all right and i will accept your condemnation if you say scott that's a little bit sexist i will accept that that classification but here's what i'm going to say men and women don't quite think the same and women don't really have any idea how dark men can be you don't know because men are largely killers who have been socialized you know we're we're basically killers we're killers of animals in order to hunt and eat we're killers of the other tribe

[12:38]

and eat we're killers of the other tribe the other country were basically killers who sometimes do some you know procreating and protecting the you know the people involved in procreation but we're kind of murderers at our base now are gross generalizations accurate no no that's why they're gross generalizations i don't mean to suggest that each of the men watching this are murderers or even trying to suppress it i'm just saying that compared to women we're a little bit more willing to pull a trigger it's sort of baked into a lot of our dna not everybody everybody's different and and i even i even completely accept that there are more categories than men and women i know most of you don't but i'm completely open with people being whatever they want to be if it doesn't bother me so um here's the thing when i watched

[13:40]

um here's the thing when i watched those trump supporters paintballing the crowd and then also when i watched the crowd getting all excited about destroying stuff and burning things i said to myself if you're a woman and you're watching this this all looks bad like it's nothing but bad from bottom to top there are no good people there it's just bad bad bad again gross generalization plenty of women would disagree with this and i i understand but if you're a man i probably shouldn't even admit this because this this is not something anybody could be proud of it's just sort of a truth a lot of men could watch those videos of the paintballing and the egg throwing and the fires and say to themselves i wouldn't mind having a little bit of that now not most men you know it's going to be
be less than half but i'll bet

[14:41]

less than half but i'll bet more than half said to themselves i can see why that would be fun i wouldn't personally do it i'm not going to put myself in that amount of danger for no particular benefit that i can see but i can see that that guy sitting on the back of the pickup truck who was just shooting paintball at people he didn't like with complete impunity there was no law there no law it was a police-free zone in which anybody can go there's a scheduled event that's basically fight club people go there to fight and i think it attracts people who find this recreational and i don't mean that as hyperbole i mean literally all of the people there seem to be there recreationally
i i'm not for that or against it i'm simply noting it [Music] um
um so if you assume that it was fun

[15:45]

so if you assume that it was fun and again i realized how disgusting that word is in this context especially when somebody got killed but it did look like these people are there for fun what would stop it why wouldn't you have as many counter protesters tomorrow why wouldn't you have more trump supporters there tomorrow than last night well you'd say well one of them got killed that's a reason not to go
go i don't think you understand if you think that's going to keep people from doing doing this then you don't quite understand men that actually made it a little bit more attractive not to everybody everybody's different you know but but there are a lot of men who looked at that and said yeah i think i'd like to get a little bit more of that so who knows where that's going of course the guy who got killed is already being branded as a white supremacist who knows what he is i'm not going to say he is or is not any particular thing

[16:45]

say he is or is not any particular thing i'm just going to say i don't know but i don't think there's evidence of that you know the story about rand paul getting jostled by the protesters when he left the rnc but apparently alice johnson got the same treatment alice johnson african-american woman you know pardoned by
by the president and even she was attacked by the black lives matter protesters think about that and apparently she was quite scared about that there's there's another part of that story that i need verification from but there's there's a more alarming part of the story not in terms of danger but uh i'm gonna wait for a confirmation before i mention that in public all right um could president trump and the trump campaign be any luckier and again lucky is hard word to use in this context because people are getting killed but luckier in the sense of if you were running for election

[17:47]

running for election and the biggest complaint against you let's say two of the biggest complaints against you are number one you're some kind of an authoritarian dictator so that's a big worry about trump uh number two that he may not be competent just managing any kind of situation so those those are two of you know they're they're not the only complaints about trump but those are two of the biggest ones i would think and among those two big complaints ted wheeler and also the the governor whose name is the governor whose name is yeah you know whatever her name is anyway mayor ted wheeler of portland he uh wrote a letter didn't have to put it in a letter this is this is where the democrats are just completely playing into trump's hands he didn't have to put it in a letter but now he's formally and publicly

[18:48]

now he's formally and publicly uh denounced trump's offer to send in the national guard and they say they got it under control now
now what could be more perfect for trump because every day that he doesn't overrule the local mayor think about it trump is the president of the united states he's the commander-in-chief of the most awesome military force in the entire universe that's how much power trump has ted wheeler can't even walk outside in his own street without getting accosted by his own people or protesters he's allowed in his town ted wheeler's own apartment is under attack by the protesters ted wheeler
stops the president from bringing in any kind of force with a letter that's it a letter this little mayor who has no power over his own citizens or his own city

[19:49]

or his own city stopped this giant dictator authoritarian with the most massive military on earth stopped and called with a letter he wrote a letter and that's it and did trump say that's just a letter i don't recognize your authority i'm going to make some excuse to send in the military anyway nope trump just tweeted i keep offering you keep saying no anytime you want i can clear this up it is so brilliant it's simple i mean it's such a simple thing to do to simply follow the rules and and not overrule the local mayor bo while offering to do it in a way that other people think is fairly credible because i think the public believes that trump actually could stop this in an hour i mean that's a little bit of an exaggeration but he could he could stop it quite quickly with enough military presence especially if they're only 150 people

[20:49]

only 150 people how hard would it take any military unit to stop 150 people if but i need some kind of a fact check on that number because if it's really that few people it's very misleading and it would be easier to stop than it looks all right um [Music] here's one of the reasons that you can't know who's doing a good job in the coronavirus thing
you can't know because there are so many variables involved and it's you know it's apples and oranges but here's one of the biggest variables that you wouldn't even think of typically if you're trying to decide okay which of these national leaders did the best job you wouldn't even think of this but you should because if you leave it out you haven't done the analysis right notice that trump used i'll call it the excuse or opportunity of this virus to go hard at china you get you know he has a built-in

[21:50]

you get you know he has a built-in reason to be mad at china because of the virus so that gives him some justified and it's the justified part that matters he can get really mad at china in public and it's not sort of an insult to them personally because they kind of know that this is real so because the coronavirus really did come from china and nobody's doubting that that that's you know now a settled fact he can go hard at china but he can also use the opportunity to claw back the manufacturing which he's doing so he's using the crisis if you will the coronavirus he said okay here's an opportunity that doesn't come along all the time i can now say publicly and aggressively we're going to pull back all the manufacturing american manufacturing that we can in whatever schedule we can from china how big a deal is that well if you're talking about the future of the united states it's a really big deal it's one of the

[22:50]

it's a really big deal it's one of the biggest things that's ever happened let me say that again trump starting to bring back manufacturing from china isn't just a good idea it's one of the biggest things that will ever happen in this country it's that big it's gigantic it changes the whole nature of you know the world and the balance of power would he have done that and would have been able to get away with it as as effortlessly as it's happening had we not had this crisis and here's the key part would another leader in the same situation put into joe biden for example and say he was president at this time would joe biden have said whoa here's a chance to pull back all of our manufacturing you know we'll do the easy ones first like pharmaceuticals because that's just obvious the pharmaceutical part's just a no-brainer there's nobody in the united states i don't think i don't think there's anybody in the united states who's saying yeah let's leave that over there and china what could go wrong

[23:51]

and china what could go wrong so you do the easy one first so bi didn't might have done that one because that one's kind of a layup of course you do that one but would you have gone beyond that and said now i'm going to start paying other companies giving them incentives to also come back i think not so if you're looking at trump's performance during the coronavirus you cannot take out of that the fact that he acted in an opportunity that i believe most presidents if not all of them you know democrat or republican most presidents i don't think would have seen that opening and i don't think that they would have as aggressively pursued it and gotten away with it so far it looks like it's it's going to be successful it's early so how do you so when you're saying okay the president messed up on the coronavirus what you mean is that people died who didn't need to die i think we'd agree that that's what you mean how do you count the number of people

[24:51]

how do you count the number of people who lived because something that important for the future of the economy got fixed and nobody else would have maybe seen that opening or at least pursued it you got to count that what does one percent better gdp mean for how many people live or die in the future it means a lot because there's a very direct connection between your economic well-being and how many people die um you saw it in the coronavirus war suicides crimes up so the the worst you know the worst people's situation is the more more death there is just it just always follows that way and that's just one of probably dozens of things that you really can't sort out and i and i always say this and it gets really quiet when i say this in order to say that trump did a bad job you would have to say that if you took a leader from some other country just as a mental experiment said all

[25:52]

just as a mental experiment said all right let's take the leader of south korea or new zealand and imagine that they're the president of the united states at the time that trump was and and they're the leaders and let's say that they knew everything about america the way trump does but it's just that personality and that talent stack from these other leaders you put in that position what what ends up different because i'm not aware of anything that trump did that wasn't what the experts recommended would one of those other great leaders who has such good control over things would they have known in advance that the test kits that the cdc made at first were bad would the pres would the leader of new zealand if they were our president said oh wait wait a minute i'm getting some uh esp signals i can see that the test kits that were made that we had ready they're defective they don't work how would any of them how would trump

[26:52]

how would trump have known that how would eddie have leader known that now you can say to yourself oh wait wait wait scott you know a good leader would have made sure that had been tested we're ready would have made sure we had you know supplies which leader did that were there any leaders that did that
i i don't think there are any leaders who are smart enough to know if their test kits were the right kind that's not really a leader thing the there you you can imagine that nobody would have gotten that right um and as long as all of the leaders would have followed the advice of the experts and by the way as a correction trump often says that that he was the only one who wanted to close the travel from china and i think fauci says that he was asked about it and agreed so fact check that on me but i think even the closing of the travel

[27:53]

even the closing of the travel although it seemed to be trump's uh idea it didn't come from the experts rather it came from trump but i think fouchy agreed i think he did so fact check that on me i might be wrong but let's see um there's a bill in the house to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level and then put some kind of a tax on it five percent tax on legal sales and here's the thing uh many of us have been surprised that trump didn't do this himself or advocate for decriminalizing marijuana at the federal level because he talks about it being a state problem and if he talks about it that way why would you leave free money on the table and it could be that because trump has such an anti-drug uh entire history it just could be something you just you just can't go there which i would understand i don't hate

[28:54]

which i would understand i don't hate the fact i do not hate the fact that we have a president who doesn't drink and i don't think that gets nearly enough attention imagine that is this our only president who doesn't drink because people drink and they're still president and the odds of you you know at let's say 11 o'clock on some saturday night the odds that you have a drunk president are pretty good do you think hillary would never have been drunk um during you know on her time off but presidents are not really ever completely off duty right if something comes up so i think that's a way bigger deal than people give him credit for but he's so anti-drug anti-drinking that maybe he just he just couldn't be the guy who initiated it and i i could understand that at a human level at a human level and a role model level you can i doubt you'd do it for the role model reason but

[29:54]

reason but you can understand it but it leaves this big opening for the democrats to be the ones who initiated it so they can get most of the credit but i ask you this will it pass in the senate there could be some you know problems with the details of it that makes it unsignable but what if the senate passes it and the house passes it what is trump going to do uh i think trump probably signs it because i think 66 of the public is in favor of it i don't think it'll hurt him might help him a little bit people are going to ask why he didn't do it before but again he's the only president we've ever had who was this clearly against mind-altering substances and i don't think we should lose that that's just such a big deal you know you always talk about the the bad role model things he does with his mean tweets and the other something to that i'm not going to say that there's nothing to

[30:54]

going to say that there's nothing to that there's something to it but there's also a lot to the role model part of not being a drinker and not being a drug guy all right um so let's hope that trump does sign that if it happens um here's a we keep learning more about kyle rittenhouse and how close are we to the point where he will be unambiguously just treated as a hero because that's not a safe place to be because that would really inflame tensions because you know some portion of the public thinks he's a white supremacist as far as i know all the evidence suggests he's not the evidence that we have strongly suggests he does not have any kind of association like that that he was actually just a good citizen pro police trying to help it just seems like all the right

[31:55]

it just seems like all the right incentives and actually even a good person who got in a really bad situation now you could argue that he should not have tried to step up and be useful in the way he did it you know bringing a a weapon to a place where it was dangerous in the first place so i'm not going to support the fact that he showed up at all with a weapon but i don't think that he had bad intentions and once more comes out about what he did or didn't do and it seems clear that it was either obvious self-defense or arguably self-defense which should be good enough to not get him committed uh convicted on any murder charges but i worry that he's actually going to become a hero
and it would be easy to happen and that would be so divisive but i think that's where we're heading because it's just such a divisive time all right here is a question for you if the fake news did not exist

[32:56]

news did not exist with these protests and all the violence that comes with it the looting etc would any of that happen without fake news i would say with complete certainty that these riots slash protest looting would not happen without fake news ginning people up now by fake news i'll include social media which is built on an outrage model so now you have the you know the formal news the television news let's say uh mostly television that is designed to take a side and make you hate the other team that's their business model the business model model of both fox news and cnn msnbc especially they're those three their business model is tribal to make you love your team and hate that other team on top of that is social media which works on clicks

[33:59]

social media which works on clicks the more clicks the better and what gives you more clicks than violence and getting people to have their hair set on fire so under these conditions of the fake news plus social media's business model this had to happen it wasn't even a case of
of these things are supportive of those things happening no it's way worse than that this or some version of what you're seeing had to happen once social media and the news had enough cumulative impact on people's brains so our brains have literally literally been literally this is not hyperbole actually physically rewired i guess that's not technically literally but your brain has changed your actual structure of your brain the chemistry or brain has been programmed by these two kinds of business models the news and social media to be different than it was and it was programmed to be

[34:59]

programmed to be more confrontational and as long as that continued and it was cumulative and you were more and more confrontational it was very predictable that the people who would let's say the ones who would go first the most gullible and and i hate to say it but it is the most gullible all right the people believing the news the people who believe that the president called white supremacists in charlottesville fine people if you believe that how would you act imagine you lived in a country imagine i'll take myself imagine if i believed that the president had actually said that would i be in favor of him being removed by any means whatsoever well i might not say it in public but if we
we actually had a white supremacist president and i believe that that were true i might not say out loud that some kind of uh non-election removal

[36:01]

some kind of uh non-election removal was at least okay with me i i might say in public no gotta follow the constitution but privately just as a human i might be thinking you know i don't care what it takes you know if if somehow we accidentally got a hitler in charge i'm not that concerned about the legal process whatever it takes to get rid of a hitler you know sometimes you got to do what you got to do right so i could easily see that if i were as gullible as i don't know i think the ratio rasmussen found that something like half of democrats actually believed that to be true if i believed it i i think i'd be fairly sympathetic with the protesters you know i wouldn't be sympathetic with the damage and the violence but i'd be sympathetic with the with the movement more than i am so yeah it's definitely

[37:03]

more than i am so yeah it's definitely fake news and social media's business model that's causing this but i think you also have have to have on top of that a complete lack of competence in local management meaning the mayors and and the governors of
of some states not all of them because it's not a coincidence that there are certain places that these protests are are thriving and there are other places where let's say they wouldn't last as long you know what i mean there are more red red cities if you will that this just wouldn't happen and if it did it wouldn't happen as long so you need incompetence locally and you need a lot of incompetence you need probably foreign funding if it if it turns out that someday in the future we have never learned that these protests were funded by non-americans i would be kind of amazed now i don't have evidence you know no direct kind of evidence that there's some

[38:03]

some foreign influence china russia soros you know pick pick your boogeyman whoever you want just pick whoever you want and oh yeah somebody said 59 of democrats actually believe that the fine people oaks um but they also believe the green new deal is a good deal they believe that the president once uh suggested drinking bleach to cure coronavirus they believed a lot of things and if you're that gullible you don't want to live in a world where all the news is fake uh that's a bad combination all right so but i think the other coincidence that had to happen was the coronavirus i don't think that without the coronavirus well if the coronavirus was not part of the picture i think the demonstrations would happen but would be smaller and wouldn't last there's something about being able to wear a mask without being a masked person in other words i'm just wearing a mask because it's a

[39:05]

i'm just wearing a mask because it's a pandemic i'm protesting during a pandemic of course i'd wear a mask i believe that wearing a mask emboldens you
you and that although the the so-called black bloc part of antifa was wearing masks to begin with they were the ones doing all the bad stuff but what happens if you say all right now everybody wears a mask because it's a pandemic well suddenly anybody with a mask is going to be bolder because there's one less risk all these cameras around and you're saying to yourself well i don't know if i would throw this brick with all these cameras around if i had my face you know visible but if i've got a coronavirus mask on and i've got a brick in my hand maybe i throw it so i think you had to have the corona virus you had to have terrible local uh leadership you had to have complete fake news you had to have um you know gullible people but of course that's a given and you had to have the right weather

[40:06]

and you had to have the right weather right you had to warm enough weather had to be the summer so it had to be an election year it's basically every possible thing that could line up to create this situation has lined up which is why trump will win in win handily it looks like all right uh
that is oh every once a while because i'm a cartoonist and part of what makes things funny is oversimplifying them so you take a situation that everybody understands and they're mad about it but it's a complicated situation and you find the way to summarize that big complicated thing in just a few words that is often funny because you shouldn't be taking a complicated situation and dismissing it with just a few words and if you do and if those few words actually sound like you hit the heart of the problem even if it's wrong just you know your bias says oh yeah that's what's

[41:07]

bias says oh yeah that's what's happening with that complicated situation uh you've got something funny and i read on twitter i didn't write down who said it
it but that black lives matter is now just teachers and felons teachers and felons and i thought to myself first of all that's not anywhere close to being true you know if you took all the protesters most of them are not teachers most of them are not felons they might become felons during the protests but that's you know they didn't show up that way most of them but as a simplification that just captures that whole vibe when you say that black lives matter is nothing but teachers and felons and again the felons part is not a racial thing because they're i think there are more white people and black lives better than there are black people so saying they're felons doesn't you know that doesn't have a racial component if you imagine there is you're imagining it but uh teachers and felons and i thought yeah it feels right even

[42:08]

and i thought yeah it feels right even though i know it's you know not close to true um [Music] all right those are the things that are happening it looks like there's not much else in the way of news uh brandon straka and his walk away rally is an sf golden gate on the golden gate bridge this morning somebody is saying
somebody says that they appreciate that i do this i don't know what this is exactly you might be talking about a specific opinion or you talk about the periscopes in general yeah now how have you been enjoying how often i have been tweeting a hashtag artist when somebody comes after me on twitter and they're completely irrational and they demonstrate that they don't understand anything about the situation that they're mad about i always check their profile that's usually a musician or a writer

[43:09]

usually a musician or a writer or some kind of visual artist and i just say hashtag artist now you should adopt this method if you're attacked online don't argue with artists if they're artists who
who demonstrate that they don't have critical thinking there are plenty of artists who are artists in addition to have doing to doing things that gave them some critical thinking some people are just born able to do it there are some people who are just born able to do critical thinking it's just somehow they have it they could also be artists so there are no 100 general generalizations that work but once you see that you're not the problem is not what they understand or their priorities or anything it's literally a lack of their talent stack their talent stack simply doesn't have the skills that would allow them to have the same opinion as someone who has skills and they don't know it so as long as the

[44:11]

and they don't know it so as long as the people who don't have talent and i'll say talent and decision making you know say economics business risk management you know real world mathematical risk taking understanding if they don't have that they also don't know they don't have it which is the problem if they knew they didn't have those skills they probably wouldn't weigh in so angrily imagining that they did so that's actually what's happening between the fake news and the social media the people they're riling up is what i'll call the artist class because the rational people the people who have bigger talent stacks they've seen more they have a better understanding of how the world works are just not falling for all the gullible stuff as much all right um looking at your comments
somebody says you're the only artist i argue with

[45:15]

well you know i've never called myself an artist so even though the thing i do cartooning and writing certainly fall into the category that i would call art the way i do it doesn't really fall into that category the way i draw the the quality of my artistic talents if you will is so modest that calling myself an artist it doesn't even sound right to me i've always called myself an entrepreneur who tries lots of things cartooning is one of the ones that worked so other things have worked you know i was also a highly paid corporate public speaker for a long time now was that art well i don't know this is giving a public speech and art sort of a skill maybe i don't know somewhere in there but um
i just look he has some comments going by you small restaurants going bankrupt half of

[46:17]

small restaurants going bankrupt half of them somebody's saying you know let me tell you something about small restaurants that you probably didn't know
half of them are always going bankrupt and 90 of them are going to go bankrupt if they're not going bankrupt at the moment there there's something going on that nobody wants to say out loud so i'll say it out loud a large number of the businesses that failed or are failing or will fail because of the corona virus were going to fail anyway it did speed it up but um as other smart people have said all of our trends got accelerated you it looks like if you look at it quickly you say oh these things broke well yes a whole bunch of things broke and people went broke and bankrupt that's true but what really happened was a trend that had to happen just happened a little quicker such as telecommuting

[47:17]

telecommuting i don't think there was any chance that telecommuting wasn't going to be a bigger deal because traffic got worse and rents and living in the city was bad etc but it got accelerated and most of those restaurants would have gone out of business now here's why i have unfortunately restaurant experience if you have an independent restaurant and you've got let's say so much market demand and you get your share you're doing okay you're not getting rich if you've got a restaurant an independent restaurant with a few exceptions if you have a celebrity chef i suppose but they're not getting rich all right they're just sort of getting by as soon as a cheesecake factory shows up within driving distance you lose 10 of your customers because the cheesecake factory just absorbs from all the restaurants the day it goes in is bigger has more seats and it serves so many types of food and it does a

[48:18]

so many types of food and it does a really good job the food is excellent i would say the service food ambiance cheesecake factory does a really good good job now if they don't go bankrupt maybe they are i don't know but if they don't they were always going to be the walmart or the amazon that put that small restaurant out of business when i closed my
my uh two restaurants a number of years ago it was right after the cheesecake factory moved in and also pf changs if you want to hear the worst luck that a restaurant owner ever had this happened to me so i had two restaurants at one point i was a co-owner and one of the restaurants right across the street they opened a mall of restaurants it was a mall of nothing but restaurants an entire complex of nothing but competitors to me across the street

[49:18]

the street who had no competitors until then not within walking distance so i had a restaurant that was in a busy area but you couldn't even walk from that restaurant i don't think yeah you couldn't even walk to another restaurant it was that far away from another one and directly across the street not just a good restaurant not just a couple of competitors which of course i would have expected but a mall of restaurants i didn't even know that was a thing have you ever heard of a mall of restaurants who has that happened to him
him anyway the point is that the small restaurants were doomed anyway it was a matter of time so the long-term economic fallout from this is going to be less than you think not more because the things that failed were going to fail and they weren't making much money anyway so maybe some of those people got were free to work on something more productive something that had more lasting ability

[50:24]

all right cheesecake factory next to moles is bankrupt yeah if you put a cheesecake factory in a mall and the mall itself died you do have some big problems
all right you got lots of comments today uh but i don't have much else to say it's sort of a weirdly slow news day has anybody seen joe biden lately no um all right that's all for now and i will talk to you later