Episode 1262 Scott Adams: All the News, Fake and Real, With Coffee

Date: 2021-01-24 | Duration: 59:32

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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• China’s eventual full control of everything

• Mask risk management

• News Review Board to call out Fake News

• COVID SuperSpreader mouths

• Biden Admin and buyers remorse

• Stalling tactics, desalination and salt brines

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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[0:06]

hey everybody come on in here it's time for coffee with scott adams today will be the
i'll tell you it's been a it's been a tough morning didn't even have my microphone that's better question are you seeing me in sideways orientation or is this another technical problem i'll bet i'm sideways aren't i can somebody tell me if you're seeing me sideways or right side up no okay so uh most of this trip as i tweeted earlier uh because you go to a new environment and there are all these controls and user interfaces and buttons you have to learn i swear half of my life is just figuring out new buttons for example the toilet here has this two-part button where you know depending on your business you push one button versus the

[1:07]

business you push one button versus the other and it has this unique design which is sometimes the button flushes the toilet and when i say sometimes i mean one times out of three and the other times you can jam it as much as you want nothing happens now you're thinking to yourself it's because the bowl has filled or the the tank is filled nope has nothing to do with that or when you do it it's just that it only works one time at a
a three one time and a five and my entire environment is filled with that i'm using a i'm using periscope right now
now the comments are coming streaming sideways so i can't read them very well i'll try but they're sideways instead of the way they normally go why i don't know how many times if i use periscope a billion times but this time it doesn't work oh here's what i could have been doing instead of periscope i could have gone

[2:08]

instead of periscope i could have gone to youtube and live stream on there now you probably know that i've been live streaming on uh on youtube for months and months and months every single day so if you were to say to yourself does that guy know how to live stream on youtube does he know what button to push to make youtube happen and live stream yes he does because he does it every single day except for reasons i don't quite understand those buttons don't exist anymore and i honestly don't know why i open up youtube just like always look at the app look at it on a browser look at it on a different browser and that little button that i've been pushing for months to go live live stream it's not there i don't know where it is now you say to yourself i'll bet you could solve that scott you know you operate in a complicated world i mean

[3:09]

operate in a complicated world i mean you can figure out where that button is and why it's not there might have something to do with being in another country i don't know that does make some of the apps not work but here's the thing if that were my only interface problem yeah i could probably take half a day and google it and figure it out but i'm surrounded by these everything i've touched has become a technical problem today everything every button every every piece of software every device i've got several electronic devices so we've reached the point in civilization where a full 50 of our time in any given day can be given up to fixing your printer reloading your software or figuring out why the car doesn't do what it used to do before so there's your world all right let's talk about the news in california it's reported that the government of california will not tell its citizens what kind of formulas and statistics and

[4:09]

what kind of formulas and statistics and algorithm i guess they use for deciding what to do about coronavirus and the reason they're not telling the public it's reported is and i quote state health officials said they rely on a very complex set of measurements that would confuse and potentially mislead the public if they were made public that's right so in california my state i'm not allowed to see what kinds of information that is used to determine my entire life you know what happens with the coronavirus isn't that a problem now i understand the
the point that it's complicated people wouldn't understand they would take it wrong it would cause some problems but is that a problem with the people is that a flaw in the public because to me it looks like a flaw in how they're measuring things if you're if you're doing big public policy like this and you haven't simplified what it is you're measuring and therefore managing too you're doing

[5:11]

and therefore managing too you're doing it wrong so as soon as somebody says yes we're managing to a complex stop it's already wrong you don't need to hear what even the re the s the the rest of the sentences let me say that better without butchering it if a politician says to you we're we're going to make decisions based on a very complex stop you don't make decisions about public policy based on complexity because if you do the public won't understand it they won't buy into it it won't work so you need to simplify it somehow even at the risk of being less accurate simplicity is really really important so there must be some way they could simplify their decision making down to you know if i don't know school children or people over 65 have x infections or something like that now it would be deeply imperfect but

[6:12]

now it would be deeply imperfect but probably better than what they're doing now
now you know you could be eighty percent imperfect and it might be better than the current situation which is not telling the public why they're doing what they're doing plus we're not so smart that being really complicated in our formulas is going to give us a better result we just don't know we don't know what works and what doesn't so being complicated about it that might be adding complexity to the unknown which is really just getting you further from anything useful so simplify simplify that's my advice um seattle police have made a startling decision this surprised me i think you'll be pretty surprised too so the the seattle police are going to do this thing called uh cracking down on crime you've heard a crime that's when do people do things that are against the law such as rioting and breaking windows and businesses and

[7:12]

breaking windows and businesses and vandalizing and stuff and up until now um i didn't know this but
but apparently they were just spectating so the police were more of a spectating situation but now they've decided they're going to crack down on riders who damage businesses and i'm thinking to myself now i would like to have been in the brainstorming meeting for that right wouldn't you like to have been in the brainstorming meeting okay your comments are going sideways but i can see that a lot of them have the word s.i.p in them and i think that means that you're telling me it's time for the simultaneous set and i believe it is if you'd like to enjoy it to its full potential all you need is a copper mug of glass canteen jealous no a thing more things that liquids will go into without spilling there are several of them with different names and blah blah blah the dopamine of the day it's the best part of the day

[8:14]

of the day it's the best part of the day join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous up
go are you ever frankly amazed that i can't remember the thing that i say literally every day you shouldn't be because it's actually completely normal you know within the landscape of my brain one of the things that christine and i love talking about is the differences between what she can do and what i can do things her brain can do that mine can't she can she can memorize you know beethoven's moonlight sonata and three acts which has how many notes i don't know a lot of notes thousands and thousands of notes in a specific order and she can memorize that i can't memorize the thing i do every day it's just a few sentences so different brains anyway

[9:18]

the china has decided to ban the trump administration from our ex-members of the trump administration from ever entering china to which i say to myself is it getting a little bit too obvious that china and the democrats are sort of you know hand-in-glove now you can say to yourself but scott that's not then it's not they're not working together they just both don't like the same thing there's nothing unusual about that but every time we see a situation where the democrats and china are on the same page there should be a little flag that goes up in your brain that says huh maybe ought to look into that a little bit more so uh honestly i think there's an inevitability to china's control of our information and our and our government i think because it goes like this whoever has the most money wins just in general eventually just because

[10:20]

just in general eventually just because of the sheer size of china if they just grow at some normal rate and the united states grows at some normal rate china's going to be bigger and it won't take long because they got more people so
so that's all it takes when they have immensely more money than anybody else they can start bribing like crazy and they can send millions of people to embed themselves in other in other governments and other countries until eventually they have full control of everything so they're really only i guess three things you'd need for china to control everything uh immense amount of money check you know they they have immense already but even more coming um will are they willing to send millions of people into undercover you know jobs around the country or around the world yes we already see them doing that and then third they have to be willing to do it they have to think it's a good

[11:21]

to do it they have to think it's a good idea and a high priority and just willing to do it and they are so if you take those things what's going to stop them from eventually having a at least a financial direct or indirect control over everybody take me i'm you know giant critic of china but even i have business that goes through china indirectly not my own personal business but if you look at my publishers or my you know people i work with they have china business so pretty much everybody's got something to lose or will have something to lose if they speak out against china that's where we're heading where you won't be able to criticize china because they'll have too many controls in too many places what would it take for china to control cnn
cnn what would that take i think all it would take is to open up their market and say yeah you can you can have some news here but

[12:21]

news here but after you've got a nice profit there and your stockholders like it we're going to say you know maybe you can't stay here if you keep talking the way you're talking about that story so china has a whole bunch of different ways to directly and indirectly apply financial pressure or incentives to people so i don't really know how they could ever avoid having full control of everything just by money without firing a single shot i don't know whatever what would stop that i can't think of anything the only thing that would stop it is what trump was doing which was looking to decouple our business it looks like biden is probably going to reverse that i think and therefore we will have no plan compared to china's long-term strategic plan which is largely guaranteed to work in the long run
run the only part you don't know is how long it takes you don't have to wonder if it happens it's how long it takes

[13:22]

if it happens it's how long it takes i say the same thing about the integrity of our election system and i'll say it about every other country any country that has an election system and enough openness that you know people can get in and mess with it if they if they had a reason to eventually i would think any voting system would be compromised by the intelligence agencies of either their own country so that the intelligence agencies could have more power or by an outside force and again it's exactly the same question it's not if it's going to happen it's guaranteed it's just when has it happened already or is it in our future that's the part we don't know but it has to happen there's no there's no way around it in the long run um of course there could be surprises right so a straight line prediction of anything is always is always the worst prediction so when i say it has to happen that assumes nothing's different between now and whenever it might happen

[14:22]

now and whenever it might happen but things change so there could be lots of things that that would get you off track there all right um we're seeing calls for fox news to be banned from the white house now this of course would be the mirror story for trump banning cnn for a while i don't know how long that lasted but um the the call for banning fox news you knew that was coming but of course the stories that talk about it will give examples of of the things they say fox news got wrong and riled people up and blah blah what they don't talk about in the same story is how many things cnn got wrong and how many things msnbc got wrong because the claim is the fox news is a special brand of wrong news i don't see it i don't see it at all the criticisms that you know they leveled sort of

[15:23]

that you know they leveled sort of depend on magical thinking which is let's say they know that fox news is wrong about some things that you couldn't know they're wrong about they might be wrong but you couldn't know they're wrong so i'm not going to get into the specifics of that because i don't want to get kicked off of social media but um you know it's amazing that in my opinion i think it's true i don't want to be a mind reader but i believe it's true based on observation see what you think about this that the people who are saying that fox news should be banned from the white house and
and you know taken off the air or whatever else they're saying i think they actually believe that cnn is giving them real news don't you think i don't think that they they think that cnn is you know biased propaganda but it's on their side so that's okay i don't think they think that

[16:24]

that i think they're completely unaware that all of the news is the same they're just differences on topics but there's no such thing as one of the news that's nailing all the stories correctly that doesn't exist in any world but i think they think it does and i'm going to get to that point in a little bit we'll say more about that in a bit all right um i was also reading on cnn which i read for entertainment not news an opinion piece in which somebody smart was on the air saying and this is a direct quote from cnn quote and this is an opinion person not a news person uh who they had it was an opinion person that they had on on to talk about it and this person said it's it doesn't matter who it is it's the point that matters it's been very clear from the data that states that have implemented strong mass policies have a slower increase in the number of cases or even a decrease but it's not mask

[17:26]

or even a decrease but it's not mask alone says this person it's masked in combination with other measures such as measures such as distancing and improved ventilation and hand washing etc now i don't know if that's true or untrue it's my personal opinion based not on science the masks probably work and why i say probably 90 percent you know nothing's 100 these days but i'd say just my personal opinion not an expert not a doctor and not in not even looking at the studies just the fact that if if a mask slows down the spread from your mouth and that's the problem it just makes sense it probably works and
and social distancing how do you get something from somebody you're not near right so it makes sense to me that these things work but why have i never seen a reliable study or set of studies

[18:28]

a reliable study or set of studies that say that doesn't that seem missing is it because of my news sources because the
the the gentleman who made this claim didn't point to a source how many peop how many people believe that there that this is a true statement that science has looked at the data and they're quite quite certain based on what they've seen in a scientific logical data-driven sense that masks work where is that data now again i believe they do work i think you should wear your mask until there's you know some some proof that they don't work and we don't have that but where is the evidence that they do work doesn't that feel sort of suspiciously missing it's just the most obvious thing right if wearing masks is so important why doesn't cnn and anybody who wants us to wear masks point us to the data and say look we're

[19:29]

point us to the data and say look we're not making this up you know this is not us just trying to guess on science we're looking at actual studies here here are the studies you can look at them yourself you take your skeptics in look at them and you can see that these masks work now democrats believe these studies exist i think they might i'm not saying they don't but why don't i know that at this point yeah and i like to use myself as sort of a you know canary in the gold mine or the in the coal mine situation which is i follow the news pretty closely compared to the average citizen pretty closely i follow it on the left i fall in the right every single day i check both cnn and fox and compare their stories every day as part of what i do here and i don't know where i would look to find the

[20:30]

where i would look to find the definitive um you know study or studies that confirm that masks are lowering infections now i have seen lots of studies of laboratory tests if you've if you've seen a laboratory test where they say a mask doesn't have the the density to stop the virus because the virus will pass through do you know that those are worthless because you might not if you only watch news that's sort of right leaning you could test all day in the laboratory but it's not really testing the real world situation i'm pretty sure the only way you would know if masks work because obviously air is getting out somehow you couldn't exhale unless the air was getting out of some hair right uh
anyway my my bottom line on masks is that it's not just that we don't know it's that they're not pointing us at an

[21:30]

that they're not pointing us at an authoritative source that's got to bother you right if if they want us to believe masks work and the science is unambiguous that's what the claim is how come they don't just point to it and say here it is and and every time the subject comes up joe biden says look i know there are a lot of doubters but here's a link go look at it yourself ask your best data people to look at it it's really clear it's right here i don't think that exists now part of the problem is that i don't think you can measure it i don't think that we have the ability to know that a certain let's say city or state had better or worse performance because of masks i don't think we can know that i think we can only know what happened we can't know why now statistically you could often you know tease out a cause but there are so many variables going on

[22:32]

so many variables going on and we don't understand the interplay of all the variables and they're big ones we just don't know i mean you know until recently we didn't know that it's hard to get the virus from a surface we didn't know until recently that the super spreaders are really the the problem right if you could get rid of all the super spreaders you'd probably get on top
top of this pretty quickly so there's a whole bunch of stuff that are really really big variables that we didn't know just recently until recently and i would argue there's probably a whole bunch of variables we still don't understand so i don't believe it is scientifically logically possible for us to know that masks have worked by observing them in the field i don't think that's the thing that feels like confirmation bias that said it's my opinion that masks work and you should do what you can to wear them all right and i say that in terms of a risk management calculation

[23:34]

management calculation maybe they don't work i mean it's a strange world i could be surprised but the risk management is that you know there's not that much risk of wearing it it's just a huge pain in the ass but if it saves lives well maybe all right the other the other news was uh it was a new york times had an article that the uh the blood plasma idea was saving lives now the idea is that you would take some blood into somebody who had already recovered and had antibodies you pump that blood or some condensed version of it into somebody and they would acquire the antibodies from the person who got them and then they would be better off i was very happy to see that for five minutes that's how long it took somebody smart to debunk it now keep in mind this is in the new york times and it took five minutes to debunk it now when i say debunked i don't mean proven that it was

[24:35]

i don't mean proven that it was incorrect but i do mean proven that you shouldn't necessarily believe it i still think it almost certainly works if i had to guess it would be hard for me to imagine it not working because you know it's a well-known process that's been used for other things there's just no reason it shouldn't work but as one of my twitter buddies who's uh really good with data anatoly lubarski he follows me if you i think if you just google him you can find him he's an excellent follow he's a game designer but whenever there's this data kind of a claim it takes them about five minutes to debunk it and it doesn't matter what the claim is and it's really actually it's impressive to watch and i hate it i hate it love it because i often will be
be tweeting uh tweeting studies that i think are a big deal and it's good news and
and hey this is great and we've learned something and then

[25:36]

something and then anatoly lubarski comes in five minutes later with the counter claim and the other study that shows it's and i think not again got me again so i don't know if the plasma situation actually works i do know that there's some at least one study as anatoly said that showed it didn't so now we have a study that shows it didn't a newer study that shows it does but apparently the newer study that shows it does according to anatoly was small study and not well constructed so we just don't know if it works i would say i don't trust any of the studies until you've had lots of confirmation of them here's one of the things that oh and let me uh back up to uh something i've been talking about before i told you i was going to form a news review board if you will it's a brand new idea and the idea is to find

[26:38]

brand new idea and the idea is to find some independent thinkers who you could rely on to tell you what fake news is fake news now uh that should be helpful for people on the left and the right right it's not about just calling out cnn it's about calling out everybody so it doesn't matter if you left or right and at first i thought i would organize it meaning actually have you know group of people who talk to each other and they they know exactly uh you know what the topic is and then they rule on it or something like that i'm starting to think maybe i should just create a list of trusted sources and then you can do what you want you can go follow them and you'll get you know just follow them and you'll get better ideas i'll tell you who's on the list so far uh four different topics all right uh andres backhouse michael shellenberger michael tracy eric weinstein christopher hill uh who also is great at just using the logic of anything that's

[27:38]

logic of anything that's technology related and then i'm going to put anatoly lubarski on there now none of these people asked to be on my list and and they may not be happy to be on the list i don't know i'm just saying that if you were to follow the people i mentioned and i'll add to it as i go you would get the point and the the counterpoint to a lot of things which you've only seen the point to if you've only seen a claim you don't know anything so these are the people that you would rely on to look for to know where the counter claims are and to look at the counter claims and the claims and give you a sense what's crazy and what's not right doesn't mean that these are the people who will be right every time it does mean that they're very smart and they have independent minds and they have a background in history of being wherever the data goes very rare they're very rare to find people who will follow the data and the logic and we'll do it in public and we'll do it consistently i named a few

[28:40]

it consistently i named a few i'll be adding people as we go all right so that's where that's at i don't know that it needs to be organized maybe you just need to know who these you know better minds are and you can follow them all right we've learned recently that the super spreaders are the big problem and that those people who are super spreaders literally have more virus in their mouth and nose so you can find that some people just have a big dose and when they talk or sneeze or whatever they do or cough they have more virus to send down and that's worse here's a question i ask and i assume this is not possible but i just like to think of fun optimistic things sometimes so don't take this too seriously if a gigantic amount of virus in your mouth means something could you invent is it possible a lozenge

[29:41]

is it possible a lozenge that would turn color or change taste if you had the presence of a lot of coronavirus
is that possible now the first thing i say is uh the the cheap fast tests are a chemical reaction in which something changes color right so are those deadly chemicals are those chemicals you would never want to put in your body they should only be in the in the chemistry test or is there any way you can make a lozenge that would you suck on it for a while and then you take it out and look at it and
and find out if it changed colors and you could just take one every day just take a lozenge every day now suppose there was also a logic lozenge that you knew would kill coronavirus and you said hey everybody we don't know if you have coronavirus or not but why don't you just maybe chew on some of

[30:41]

why don't you just maybe chew on some of these lozenges a few times a day would that make a difference if you used the right mouthwash would it get rid of the coronavirus in your mouth or do you need something more specific to get rid of a virus in your mouth and secondly if you could get rid of your virus with mouthwash or a lozenge or just some physical process how long would it take for your mouth to be full of virus again in other words if you killed everything on the surface of your tongue on the inside of your mouth would it be five minutes later it's full again or is it tomorrow because that's a big deal right if it's tomorrow all you need is mouthwash to end the pandemic right am i wrong about that but i don't think it's tomorrow it's probably closer to five minutes than it is to do tomorrow how long it would take to produce more virus to live in your mouth
yeah so people are are joking about bleach

[31:41]

bleach it does seem to me that have you ever seen those uh teeth cleaning lights where that you put the solution on your teeth and then they shine this blue light on you to help the chemical do its reaction it does seem to me like you could have some kind of a uv light if it's the right kind i think is far uv or something or uvc that you could just stick in your mouth literally like a flashlight in your mouth and just go ah stick it in there with a uvc light and clean in you know maybe 30 seconds clean all of the virus that's at least on a surface and in your mouth would it hurt you i don't think the far uvc light would hurt you i think other kind might but here's my main point if the biggest lever that you could pull turns out to be
be finding and stopping the super spreaders who have a lot of it in their mouth why

[32:41]

who have a lot of it in their mouth why don't we go after that directly and just make everybody put something in their mouth that kills it three times a day and see what happens after three weeks so anyway i just put that out there i doubt i doubt there's any scientific thing there that would work or else we probably know about it all right uh here's another positive thing there are now new super let's say air purifiers prior to the pandemic there were hepa filters and air purifiers but they were not quite up to the task right you couldn't just turn on your purifier and everything's good you needed a leap of technology and now apparently those leaps are happening so there's a company called active pure which i believe they do as one word active pure so you can google them if you're interested and they make this um box that looks like just from the picture it looks like it was it would fit on a tabletop

[33:44]

was it would fit on a tabletop you know portable thing you just plug in and apparently it's really really good in terms of removing the virus from the air and killing it and it's so good that it might be the difference between opening a restaurant and not that's actually how good it is now these are claims you know you have to be careful about who claims what but what if a restaurant was willing to get one of those or more than one depending on how many zones they have i don't know what they cost but you know people are going to be willing to pay some money to get back in business what what about a rule that says if you have one of these per whatever square feet they handle because they they only handle a certain amount of square feet what if you had the right amount of these is that a good enough reason to reopen a restaurant i feel as if we should we should push to get an answer on this really quickly either

[34:44]

really quickly either an up or down right and i'll make a direct call to the biden administration and say uh dear biden administration if you have somebody who could do a quick look at this device and look at the science look at the data they have and just give us an up or down i think the public would like to know that we'd like to know if we can get back to our indoor spaces especially restaurants and recreational things that entire industry has been devastated and we would like to get that back on on track so biden administration up or down are these things do they make enough difference to to maybe recommend and maybe fund maybe biden would say let's uh let's give you some financial aid to get some of these into probably senior citizen homes and restaurants and anywhere that we need them now all this depends on the fact that this technology works i'm not the one who can guarantee that i i'll just tell you there are claims

[35:45]

i i'll just tell you there are claims and there have been at least some research and studies all right you've probably seen the video if you're on social media in tacoma that there was a police car that was set upon by a mob and the mob was jostling the police car and they surrounded it and the police car decided that it would have none of that and just drove forward and it looked like they ran over completely one of the protesters so at least one person got hurt and i thought it looked like i saw the tires go over a person like all four tires i thought i saw that but it was hard to tell in the video that might have been an inanimate object of some type that they were going over but it looked like a person and this is what i'd have to say about this do we all agree we don't want violence if you can avoid violence nobody promotes it nobody celebrates it we're all adults here we know that violence has no place

[36:47]

violence has no place except in defense can we be adult enough to say that in self-defense nationals for defense as well that violence unfortunately is a necessary tool in some cases and there's just no way around it this is one of those cases i would like to see a lot more i hope i can say this on social media without being banned but i think the best thing that could happen to tacoma is a whole whole bunch more police cars running over a whole bunch more people who surround police cars on top of that i think citizens should be doing a lot more of it too but unfortunately they're going to go to jail if they you know if the if the judgment is that they they could have done something else but i feel as though this this trend of cars being surrounded and attacked needs a solution and i don't see the government being involved do you have you seen any government

[37:48]

do you have you seen any government action that would make any difference to this i haven't so the only thing i can imagine that would stop the trend is that every time you see one of these stories it goes like the tacoma story a car was surrounded and then the car ran over the people in front how many times do you need to hear that story before it stops happening so now we've heard it once and maybe it's happened a few times in the past it needs to be every time and and those people need not to be punished in fact here's what i like i'd love to see our government say that we don't plan to prosecute anybody who gets out of a situation that way if your car is surrounded you have the right of self-defense let me put this out there uh sooner or later there will be a you know there's somebody's going to be prosecuted for this right there's going to be a trial in which somebody's car was surrounded and they got out of it by running over somebody and injuring them or killing them i want

[38:51]

and injuring them or killing them i want to say this in public as part of their defense so they can actually use this video later to me as a reasonable human this is my opinion not my legal opinion right i'm not a lawyer in my opinion as a reasonable person this is self-defense and it's unambiguous self-defense and the reason i say this in public is that i'm a reasonable public figure and that if you're a jury and someday you're wondering to yourself was this person being reasonable that person can call on this video and say look other people are reasonable and they say the same damn thing that in this situation it is self-defense even if you're not let's say let's say the windows haven't been broken and so arguably you could say you're not quite in an imminent threat would that be the the argument it wasn't imminent enough because your windows

[39:51]

imminent enough because your windows were still intact not good enough because the time it would take between breaking a window and dragging your body out is too short all right too short that's like saying a gun is pointed at your head but they haven't pulled the trigger yet it's still imminent right you can kill the person who has a gun at your head that's fair and i want to add to that that the car being surrounded is identical in my reasonable citizen mind so any jurors who are looking at this in the future i would ask you does it seem unreasonable to get into that situation with force i think you will agree with me that if you were in that situation you'd want to get out of it before the windows were broken so i support the police officer who did that i would be terribly disappointed if there were any charges about that they obviously have to look into it but that's a police officer who served the public that somebody deserves uh

[40:52]

deserves uh a commendation baby quietly but accommodation
um here's the funniest but most tragic part about the story in the news today not that story but the the world is that democrats who voted for biden will tell you in many cases that they were really voting against trump now what is the downside of having a strategy where you're voting against somebody not so much for somebody could that ever come back and bite you in the ass well one way that could go bad is this the person you you voted for was not quite as stellar as you would imagined in your mind and now we're going to see that start to to play out and you can guarantee that's going to happen there will be buyer's remorse because number one people didn't really care too much what biden was going to do

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much what biden was going to do so they didn't look into it that clear that that much i i think that's a fair general statement that people didn't care so much what biden was going to do they just cared he wasn't trump they say that directly i'm not not reading minds people say that pretty directly so now you're going to watch what he actually does and the first week a little rough um and none of this is funny by the way uh
uh because they're real people getting hurt with this stuff but let me give you some we'll walk through it and this is where you learn the difference between an opinion and a half opinion now i made up this word a half opinion to cover the situation where people will look at the cost of something but not the benefits or they'll look at the benefits and not the costs and democrats do that all the time it's almost a defining feature of the left that is not as common on the right on the right people will say well if you do this

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do this it's going to have this cost so let's balance that on the on the left they'll say let's do this let's do this because we like we like fresh air yeah fresh air is good let's do this but they haven't figured out what that's going to cost them they're starting to learn that via a process called the news
be it as it may uh so here are the things going on so so biden does the 60-day moratorium on new oil and natural gas leases and new mexico the state of new mexico is saying yay yay joe biden who we voted into office as a blue state yay joe biden wait you're doing what you're gonna our oil industry and so apparently new mexico has started to realize that if joe biden does exactly what he promised to do and apparently is on uh at least on oil drilling etc that they will lose a ton of money in

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that they will lose a ton of money in their tax base that pays for their schools and their health services so new mexico just realized that they had been suffering under a half opinion and they just figured out what the other half was you lose your school funding you lose your state funding you lose your jobs but is new mexico the only ones no because the biden also is going to cancel the keystone pipeline which should cost a lot of jobs and the unions that supported biden are going to lose a lot of union jobs and they're now realizing it why because it turns out that get rid of the keystone pipeline was a half opinion now they've learned that if they had an entire opinion they would have anticipated this loss of jobs and
and loss of tax revenue now do you think that trump didn't understand that the keystone pipeline had an

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that the keystone pipeline had an environmental risk of course he did that was the whole point but he also understood it had these other benefits he weighed them and then he made a choice that i would call an opinion a full opinion with the costs and the benefits considered well democrats are getting a quick lesson on what an opinion is and the half pinion is not serving them as well as they had hoped when they voted for biden so and then then we learned i don't know the details yet that more troops are moving into syria for what why are their troops moving into syria now presumably there's a you know somebody on the ground an american general or somebody said we need these troops for some specific thing but let me ask you this which is your safer situation a president who says no to what generals ask for even with good arguments or a president who says yes because he

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or a president who says yes because he trusts the experts which is your dangerous situation because trump was the one who would say no to the generals and even basically called them idiots biden is the one who would say yes to the generals and would call them the experts which one
one is the dangerous one well i would say that trump also took the advice from the experts about how to do the rules of engagement in that example trump taking their advice probably matched his own opinion so i'm not sure he took their advice so much as they gave him an opinion that matched his own and then he could say yeah we'd like to be a little little tougher on those rules of engagement but what if here's the scenario that's scary your general comes into the president says president we need a bunch more troops to do this or that that's what generals do
do the general is never going to ask for less stuff the general is never going to say

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the general is never going to say everything's done let's go home the general is a fighter and the general might want a job in the private sector which would be very happy to have a little more war so do you want the president who knowing the incentives of a general the way a general is going to conduct things which will be more more and more just like any leader any good manager in the company is going to go to their ceo and say i need more those other departments they don't i don't know about them but i need more that's every manager in every organization so general is going to be one of those they want more they need to do more that's how they get their their own career does well that's how they get that job later in private industry so it feels like trump had been saying no to generals i'm guessing that's just a guess pure speculation i feel as if trump has been saying no to generals for quite a while

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while as in maybe you don't need that many people in afghanistan because there's nothing there that we need to protect it's going to go wherever it's going to go no matter what we do maybe it went something like that but as soon as you see biden immediately sending extra troops into presumably harm's way what happens to the people who voted for him did they say yeah that's what we wanted what we wanted was cranking up the war machine is that what the left wanted i don't think so i think they're just finding out what they voted for and war is definitely you know one of the things that i would expect to end of a
a regular politician but less so anne of a trump who's not a regular politician so uh mike cernovich tweeted about this phenomenon about the uh the democrats learning about what they just bought and he worded it in a funny way so i'm just going to read his tweet so mike cernovich tweeted it's been less than a week and biden's voters are

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than a week and biden's voters are outraged it's a treat it's a uh i think you meant testament but it's a testament to how low information they are that any of this stuff surprises them
that's exactly the case they are low information voters who just found out what they voted for and i feel like republicans largely knew what they voted for they knew what trump was but they also knew what biden was so so they're not so surprised but more generally i'm finding that it's way more fun to be a critic than a supporter and watching this develop in slow motion even though the events that are happening may be bad and i'm not going to minimize that there could be some bad outcomes i don't want to make light of the outcomes but in terms of the process it's kind of fun it's kind of delightful that i can just sit back and criticize biden for things and i don't have any responsibility for

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and i don't have any responsibility for him because i didn't support him or vote for him so being able to criticize without the without the burden of responsibility it's way good it's way better than the old way and those who were criticizing trump for four or five years now i get why it was so much fun like i understand how much they enjoyed it because i'm starting to enjoy it myself with biden all right here's just a thought just going to complete a thought here
when we think about climate change we tend to think in binary ways the binary ways are we either go hard and do a green new deal size thing that's gigantic and changes civilization and you know it's it's a real drastic thing or you don't do enough which looks closer to doing nothing so we we got to have this you know do nothing and die in the long run according to the climate change scientists or we do

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climate change scientists or we do something really aggressive and we kill our economy and there are other there are other problems but probably there's some kind of middle ground and what i mean by middle ground is something that's a stalling tactic something that just puts off any potential problems now i understand that many of you watching still believe that climate change is not real i'm hoping that you will evolve out of that belief at some point for the good of the world now we could be surprised and anything's possible but my take on it is that climate change is something you have to address now uh here's here's a stalling tactic should we need to stall and this is a tactic which uh might be good to do whether there's a climate change risk or not so ideally you would find strategies that it wouldn't matter if climate change is catastrophic or less than catastrophic it's just something you'd want to do

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it's just something you'd want to do anyway such as clean energy you'll want to do that anyway so you don't need a crisis to do it
it but here's an idea suppose you get your generation 4 nuclear power plant and you put it in the middle of the desert in northern africa and because it's in the middle of a desert you don't worry if it doesn't work you know it's a little safer there if you had a new design for a nuclear reactor and something went wrong well at least it's in the middle of a desert but let's say you you it works and you're getting lots of power you use that power to run desalination desalination uh plants next to the ocean and you pump in the water and you start growing stuff so you need more than water to grow things you need uh reforestation you know plans et cetera but it can be done and let's say you take it you take your goal to reforest the the desert areas in africa now

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the the desert areas in africa now if you grew a lot of stuff where there used to be desert would you not have you know more carbon capture because plants capture carbon so that part's good right so you'd have more plants but there's also another benefit which is and i'll need a fact check on this it's something i've read and i believe it's true but if if i'm off base i'm sure somebody will tell me my understanding is that atlantic hurricanes form because of the tempered temperature differential between northern and africa during a certain part of the year and the ocean and that temperature difference is what gets the wind going which gets the hurricane started so if you were to lower the temperature in northern africa by vegetation would it reduce the power of the hurricanes even if it didn't do much else about climate change
that would be a stalling tactic because the hurricanes are you know one

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the hurricanes are you know one predicted problem that you know maybe in 50 years they would be much worse than they are now but if you started now and tried to increase your vegetation and cool down the
the northern africa could you make a dent in it
it you know could you could you do enough in time to make a difference well the so i just put that out there as a question now somebody asked me when i mentioned this the other day what about all the salt brine that's created by desalination and that's a problem because you don't want a bunch of basically condensed salt you don't want to throw that in the ocean it'll even though the ocean is saltwater you don't want too much of it in one place so the way they get rid of it now is they've got an expensive process where they spread it out and it goes back into the ocean but they spread it down so it doesn't matter apparently there's a new process where you can fairly easily trans change the salt brine into something

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change the salt brine into something commercially useful and oddly enough some of those commercial uses are making desalination plants more efficient so you can actually you take the salt brine brine turn it into sodium hydroxide and uh it's a caustic soda blah blah and it can be used to pre-treat seawater going into the desalination plant and pre-treating it uh helps the process not gum up the works so apparently they can make money on the soul brine and what they don't use themselves they can sell because it has some commercial value and one of the big problems with desalination plants is that they go offline and this will help them not go offline so
so i'm just going to put that out there i have no idea if this is just dumb ideas or not but there probably are some some stalling tactics that would be good no matter what right wouldn't you like to have fewer hurricanes sure wouldn't you like to be able to

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sure wouldn't you like to be able to reforest a desert make it more useful sure so maybe reasons to do it anyway um
yeah salt brine not salt brian somebody says give it to elon musk well i think first you need the the nuclear power because the the desalinations is it desalinization plants yeah desalinization plants or desalination which word is right you know what i'm talking about all right that is uh all for now let me show you what it looks like outside it's looking good out there
i think i'll go out and try to enjoy this day a few more days here and then back to life all right um am i are we still in the golden age i think we are we just don't know it i

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think we are we just don't know it i think we're going to realize it the pandemic threw us a loop but uh we'll get on top of the pandemic and i think we're going to i think we're going to learn so much from the pandemic that it's going to look like a better world when on the other side let me give you just a small example restaurants and hotels now instead of giving you a physical menu that's often on a date will give you a barcode so that your menu appears on your phone i love that and oh here's a feature at this hotel so i met the four seasons at bora bora and a feature that the four seasons has is that you just use an app to text them for anything you need so anything from room service to you know making uh let's say scheduling appointments for things during your your stay you can just send one text always to the same person so you don't even have to worry what department you're sending it to and so i sit over here and i just say uh

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and so i sit over here and i just say uh can you give me some coffee and some bagels or whatever for breakfast and a text comes back immediately 30 minutes when it shows up and i think to myself every way that this was done before needs to be eliminated the only way i want to deal with my hotel is by text it's great and maybe this is how this becomes permanent and the only way i want to see my menu is on my phone that's great and i wouldn't mind having air purifiers in my restaurant anyway right i don't care if it's the the normal seasonal flu or somebody's got you know rabies i guess that's a bad example or tuberculosis or something i wouldn't mind having one of those active pure air purifiers in every restaurant no matter whether there's a pandemic or not so there are a whole bunch of things that are going to be better because of

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that are going to be better because of what we learned from the pandemic so yeah i think the golden age is still on track but delayed and that's all for now and i will talk to you tomorrow