Episode 1051 Scott Adams: If You Can Read This, I Have Not Been Cancelled. Let's Push it Farther.

Hey, everybody, come on in. We're gonna fix everything today. Yeah. You may have noticed there are quite a few problems in the world and a lot of people sleeping in today and not trying to solve them. But not me. I'm up early at the crack of 4am Every day, sometimes earlier, trying to fix all the problems in the world. I think I'm getting close. We're almost there. Today, I think I'm going to push it over the edge. Unless I get cancelled. Always a possibility. But first, what do we need to do? You know, it's called the simultaneous sip. It's the best part of your day. It really is. And all you need is a cup of mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the economy, the coronavirus, racism, you name it. It's all going to be better with a sip. Go. Hmm. You know, you might not be able to measure the difference, but I think you can feel it. All right, let's talk about all the things. It's starting to look like. TikTok is toast. So Mike Pompeo suggested that he didn't want to get in front of the President and talking about TikTok, but they're looking at it now. When you say I don't want to get in front of the president, that means he's already decided. They must be just figuring out how to do it. And one of the things that happened was that the stock for Snapchat just zoomed yesterday. Now, full disclosure, I own some Snapchat stock. Not much compared to my portfolio, but I bought it. I don't remember two years ago or something when it was at a low and it just zoomed up. Because I was even saying this yesterday to Christina, I said, why doesn't Snapchat just copy Tic Tac's feature and just put it out of business? Because that's sort of a common thing that Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook all do. If you. If somebody has a killer feature, the others eventually just copy it. So what is there about TikTok that can't easily be copied? Nothing. Except the network. Right? The only thing about TikTok that's hard to copy is that they already have a big audience. So you've got somebody to talk to, but so does Snapchat. The number of people who have TikTok and don't have Snapchat. It's probably not that big snap. Snapchat can just put that TikTok function in there and that's it. That's it. And I would expect that to happen. And again, I own some of their stock, so you should take that into consideration. Meaning I'm not trying to pump up the stock price, but I think that's inevitable. It's going to happen. How about we forgive all dead people and maybe move on with our lives without them? Is anybody in favor of maybe just letting dead people be dead and just say, you know, you weren't perfect, but guess what? In 200 years, when people look back at us, what are they going to say? Do you think in 200 years, people are going to look back at today and say, yeah, you know, in 2020, those were some wise, ethical, morally proper people. I'm sure glad we built a bunch of statues of those people from 2020 because they didn't do anything that we find abhorrent today. I don't think it's going to go that way. So while we cannot forget or overlook the flaws of our ancestors, we maybe we should just forgive them and move on. How about just living in the future or the present? Just don't live in the past anymore. I've told you before that I just can't get interested in symbols. I'm just not that interested in the people kneeling and complaining and the statues and stuff. I'm opposed to statues if they're offensive to a big portion of the public, but I just can't personally be interested. I don't know why. It seems like it's the biggest thing in the country, and yet I just. I just can't find any reason to care if a statue gets destroyed. I mean, at least I don't care any more than I would care about the equivalent dollar value of any private property. I mean, I don't want to see property destroyed, but statues of statue, that's just me. So I'm just telling you that I'm not invested in the question, but I think maybe we should move on and not care so much about the past. I think it's a good sign. Now, some people have said, hey, getting rid of all your cultural references of the past, your statues and whatnot, is step one in revamping the whole system. You know, first you scrub it of all these, all the symbolism, and then you can get down to the gears of it and start changing it. And maybe that's what's happening. Maybe this is step one of some slippery slope. Maybe. But here's the other possibility. The other possibility is that the reason that the statues are being attacked is that that's the only thing they can attack. Could it be that the statues are being. And the symbols are being destroyed because there's nothing else they can do? There's just nothing else. There's nothing after that. Because what do you do next? One of the things which is impressive, in my opinion, is that the Black Lives Matter protesters, not counting, there's always. There's always going to be a few bad eggs and some people had some weapons and stuff, but overall, they're not showing up with open carry. They're not. You know, for the most part, the protests are overtly trying to be peaceful, even though there are bad elements that of course show up and make it not so. Which is kind of impressive, actually, that it's gotten this far. But it kind of tells me that the people on the left don't feel they have any leverage to do anything that matters. And if you can't do something that matters, but you have all this energy and it needs to do something, well, there are only two possibilities. You do things that matter or things that don't matter. That's it. Things either matter or they don't. And if you can't do anything that matters and you have all this need to get your energy out and your complaints, it's going to go somewhere that isn't helpful. Knocking down statues, I suppose that's where it happened. So that's my view of the world, that they're just doing the thing they can do because they don't know what else needs to be done. I've often said that, often lately, anyway, that the biggest problem in the world is that we're all bad at measuring things. Let me say this as clearly as possible. There are no politicians and there are no citizens. Almost no. I'd say 99% this is true. There's going to be the 1% that I'm going to talk about, but this is 99% true that you and I and all the people watching this, we're not good at analyzing things, but we kind of think we are because we latch onto some statistic that came from our side. We go, oh, well, that's the one thing I need to know, that one statistic. But if we've learned anything in 2020, it's that the data is wrong. I don't even have to tell you what topic I'm talking about. I'll just make a general statement and watch how right I am. Here's my general statement. That data you just showed me, it's wrong. I don't even know what the data is. I didn't even need to look at it. I don't even know what topic we're talking about. But can I say with some confidence that your data is wrong? Yes, I can. Unfortunately, I can. Would you bet against me, the very next person who comes to me, like I'm just sitting here in my chair, and would you take this bet that the very next data I'm exposed to, whatever it is, I either look at it on the Internet or my friend mentions it to me, whatever it is. Would you take this bet that the next data presented with is not real, it's fake or misleading or out of context? I will take that bet that it will be wrong or misleading almost every time. Almost every time. Certainly over 90%. Way over 90%. So we live in this absurd world where we're all arguing at each other. You must use data and good reasons. Use your data and good reasons. Here's my data. Oh, by the way, it's all unreliable. And here are my reasons. And oh, by the way, I never learned how to have good reasons and analyze things. But we must use data. We must use our reasons, even though we don't have data and we're not good at reasons. That's the weird world we're in. We're shouting at each other to do something that we all know is the wrong thing to do. Now, in theory, if we had good data and we knew it was good, and we had people who were good at reasoning, good at analyzing, well, that would be exactly what you'd want to do. You'd want to take your smart people, you'd want to give them your accurate data. You want to have them wrestle with it and come up with some good recommendations. You don't live in that world. Nothing like that ever happens. The data is all crap and the people analyzing it are all liars or unqualified. They're either unqualified or lying, and you can't tell the difference. So what do you do? It seems to me that there's something that he's evolved in society that would have made the founders of this country, the Thomas Jefferson types, come up with a slightly different plan for government. And it looks like this. Do you notice that there's a function missing in government? It's the smart person. Why don't they have a smart person in government? Now, when I say Smart person. I'm just being provocative. What I mean is, let's take for example, Nate Silver. So Nate Silver, I tweet him often because he is extraordinarily good at not only understanding the statistical pluses and minuses of any situation, he can find the errors, he can explain the error as well. So he's not only good at analyzing, but he's really good at communicating. Kind of rare to have those two skills, but his talent stack includes that. So he understands politics and statistics and he communicates well. There should be a permanent government, maybe a cabinet post that does nothing but analysis. Now, I know you've got the management, what's the MBO management, Budget Office or whatever. So I know there are entities within the government that analyze things, but not really. Right. The Treasury Department might look at taxes and somebody else might look at something else. And, you know, HUD would be looking at some stuff of its own. But are all the people in all these groups trained to look at things? Are they trained to analyze data? Are they statistically trained? Can they put it in a larger context? Probably not. I think there should be. Now, let me propose this. Imagine President Trump said the following. This will just blow your mind. This isn't going to happen. But just imagine it because it would lock down the election for Trump. He could lock it down with 60 seconds of saying what I'm going to say. Now, we need a cabinet position for analysis. We need a cabinet position for. For analysis, for all of the big topics. I want a cabinet that will dig in and tell me, can you tell me what's going wrong? You know, what's wrong with this situation? Can you tell me if the data is right? Can you compare it to what other people are saying about the data? Can you tell me, do a Snopes like thing, do a fact check on it and make sure everything's transparent so the public can weigh in. Because even the experts are going to be wrong sometimes. So even your cabinet position of data analysis, a Nate Silver like skill set, even that will be wrong sometimes because that's the nature of the world. So you want the public to be able to weigh in and have counterpoints and have a robust process. But suppose the President said, you know, our biggest problem in the world is we're not good at comparing things. We're not good at comparing anything. Just nothing. We're not. Now, if you want more a deeper dive on that point, you should look at my book Loser think the newest one. But I'll give you some examples of that as we go, all right, here's an example. How many of you can answer this question? I just tweeted this this morning. How many adults who graduated high school, at least high school, with at least a B average were shot by police in 2020? How many people who had at least a B average in high school and graduated later as an adult were shot by the police? Do you know the answer to that? What's how. How many of them? The answer is you don't know. You don't know. Do you know why you don't know that? Because we don't have a cabinet position where there's somebody who knows how to look at data and can figure out what actually matters versus what doesn't matter. Does it matter that we would know how many people with at least a B average in high school were shot by police? In my opinion, that might be one of the most important pieces of data the country. I don't even know if anybody collects that data, but I would think it's important. Why? Why do you think that's important? Because the assumption that needs to be tested is that if you are educated and you have options and, you know, you have a certain kind of. Let's call it brainwashing. As a child, you have a. You have a school that brainwashes you in the right ways. Let's say they brainwash you to be polite to authority. I'll call it brainwashing. But wouldn't you like your children to be brainwashed? To be polite to authority doesn't mean they have to, you know, they have to trust authority. But just being polite. Now, when I say brainwashed, I mean, because children kind of need to be just brainwashed. They can't make decisions like adults. And in fact, adults aren't good at decisions either. So you just need to brainwash them because it's a good program to have running in your head. All right, so my assumption is that people who have at least a B average and graduated high school had something like a good brainwashing beginning. And I use brainwashing provocatively because I want. I want it to. I want it to bother you a little bit because that's what makes the memory stick. So I'm intentionally bothering you just a little bit to make this stick. It's good brainwashing. So if you don't know that, then you don't know how much. Do the actions of the person who stopped by the police have an impact on the outcome? That's right. We're actually talking about whether it matters that Your actions have an impact on your outcomes. Can you believe that's actually a statement that I have to make? 20, 20 to other adults, I have to say, you know, maybe the things you do actually are part of what influences the outcome. So I said this in my attempt to get as close to being canceled as I can, and I got no pushback from this. Think about this. I'm going to restate it today, but think about what I was allowed to say. And I say aloud, socially allowed, without getting cancelled, meaning you're still listening to me. So I haven't been cancelled yet. It goes like the whole police are abusing black people during police stops appears to be a completely fake story, because the thing we don't measure is whether the people stopped all act the same. We act as though we analyze the situation and we say, no, we don't even need to measure the different ways people responded to being stopped, as if that wouldn't matter to the outcome. We don't even wave our arms at it and say, well, maybe people act differently. Do you think that police would have a different response based on the way you act? How about just the physicality of it? How about just that? Is there a reason that women don't get killed by the police so often? Well, yeah, it's probably because the police don't perceive that they themselves are in danger. And if the police don't feel like they're in danger, they're not going to be as aggressive. Human nature. But say you grew up in an inner city. If you grew up in an inner city, would you put a priority on looking tough? I would. Wouldn't you? If you lived in the inner city, wouldn't you put a little extra attention to making yourself look tough? You might dress a certain way. You might make sure that you've got some muscle definition. You might talk away. That suggests you're part of a tougher group. You might actually. Your body language might come to conform to what you think is the right way to act in the situation. So is there any chance that the people being stopped by the police are acting in similar enough fashion across every demographic that the only thing you have to measure is their race? That's stupid. That is just stupid. Now what we need is a cabinet position. Somebody has the skills to look at data and say, well, if you're not studying how people are reacting to the police, stop. You haven't studied anything. You actually haven't studied anything. You've only studied one variable in isolation, when obviously the biggest variable is how people Act. Nobody will dispute this point. The biggest variable is how the person acts. Nobody disputes that. But we're acting like it's not true because it would feel racist to say, well, what are the odds that black people act the same as white people? If you're dumb about how you present it, yeah, it sounds pretty racist. But if you do it the way I did, which is if you come up through a different experience, you should be acting differently in the same situation than somebody who has a different history and background and experience. Why wouldn't you? I mean, it would be irrational to assume that people with completely different context and completely different histories and feelings about the world would respond the same in given situations. It just doesn't make sense. And if you haven't, if you haven't measured it and nobody has, it's never been measured. I don't even have to check to know that. Then you don't know anything. We have protests that are destroying the country almost entirely because people don't know how to measure stuff. That is my opinion. How about, here's what I think is the biggest problem in the world. There are some problems, let's say, in the racism realm, in which you can't fix them too well if you wait too long. That's true of problems in general, right? If you've got a small leak in your roof, the sooner you fix it, the less damage there will be. So it is true of things in general that the sooner you can get on them, it's quite common that that's the best time to fix them. And so in race relations in black America, the soonest you can fix something is early school and childhood experience. If we fixed school such that everybody of every ethnicity has something like a good experience and they get brainwashed, right? And I just like to use this one experience, be brainwashed to be polite to authority. They don't have to respect it, but you have to be polite, otherwise you get your ass kicked. So what happens if we fix school? And why haven't we. Why haven't we fixed schools? Well, one of the reasons is that we don't understand that cause and effect seems to matter. You know that Republicans like to get rid of government regulation and red tape. Democrats are trying to get rid of the laws of physics, right? The laws of physics say that every cause has a specific effect. So Republicans would say, well, yeah, every cause has an effect. So if you want a certain outcome, you have to act the way that that cause will create the outcome. Let's say, for example, not going to Jail would cause you to have a better life. Staying off drugs would cause you to have a better life. Studying causes, you have a better life. So Republicans accept the laws of physics, that there is such a thing as incentive and cause and effect, but they don't like all the government regulations, the artificial stuff, so they accept the natural laws of the world, but not the unnatural stuff of government. Just a generalization. Democrats are literally railing against the laws of physics. They're actually railing against the laws of physics because the assumption that is below everything is that the way people act is not having that big of an influence on their outcomes. The Black Lives Matter frame is that the big variable is the unfair system. That's what Black Lives Matter needs you to believe because their messaging requires that to be the biggest problem. So that's where you focus now, is it? How big is the problem of racism? In it, let's say the average black person's life, how big is the problem of racism compared to. And we all acknowledge it's big, right? So I'm not saying it's small. I'm saying it's big. But how big is it compared to the impact of their own decisions? Which one of them is bigger? In my worldview, it's 100 to 1. The things you do are 100 times more powerful than racism, which is also pretty darn big. Racism isn't small. It's big. But your actions are 100 times bigger. They're not even close. So it's like gravity. If you were to measure gravity, you'd say, well, gravity is pretty strong. I can't even get off the earth. You need a lot of energy to get a rocket into space. So gravity is really strong. But actually gravity is a super weak force if you look at it in a different way. If you were good at measuring things. So strategy matters. And let me say this. If we change the schools one of two ways. Actually, let me make a more complete picture, as many of you have been prompting me in the comments. Comments which I saw going by. The big problem for the black community is that the schools are bad. If you gave any kid a really strong first several years of education up through graduating high school, if you get that right, everything else is going to be a lot better. And the main thing that is preventing that from being right is a lack of competition. And the reason there's a lack of competition is because the school unions are very strong. And it's better if they don't have competition. It's better if they just negotiate to keep things Uncompetitive, which is the current situation. Now, on top of that, there are a lot of schools. If there are a lot of schools, it means there are a lot of teachers and there are a lot of people who are related to teachers and families of teachers. So because there are so many teachers, you have quite naturally a big union with a lot of power. And that's the problem. So institutional racism is, I would say, 95% the teachers union. If you were going to make a chart and say, all right, here are all the elements of institutional racism. You've got your judicial system, you've got your economic system, hiring, firing, so you make the whole chart. I would say that 95% of the impact of a person's life would be the teachers union. So that would be the one thing that destroys 95% of your life. And then all of the other things added together, including the judicial system, the justice system, the cops and everything else, all of it added together would maybe be 5%. So that 5% still pretty big, right? If you had a 5% problem in your life, you would be bothered by it all the time. 5% is pretty big for a problem, right? But 95% is because you didn't get it right in the beginning with the first years of education. And that's all the teachers using now specifically, any situation that doesn't have competition is going to become a bad system. That's what the teachers union does, they remove competition. So if you put that back, let's say that the coronavirus caused a resurgence in new business models for online education. I think that's going to happen. Suppose that instead of having every teacher who works today becoming just an online teacher, which would be the worst idea in the world because you'd be taking teachers who are bad in person and videotaping them, which makes them even worse, basically. So of course, if you're going to online, the model you should end up with is that the best teachers in the world are something like best selling class makers. In other words, there'll be teams of professionals. The way that movies are made, they'll, they'll make a class, they'll sell it on Amazon or somewhere else and they'll get a dollar per student, but they'll make millions and millions, just like a best selling author would make. Now in that world, how many teachers do you need? Not as many. Right. If it's digital, then everybody who takes a fifth grade class might choose from, let's say 20 different teachers who have been identified and reviewed as just the best Teachers with the best class. So you might only need 20 good teachers for fifth grade American history. That's it, 20 teachers. So digital online education should decimate the number of teachers. In the long run, this is not something that happens next year. But in the long run, which should make the teachers union less important, which should introduce some kind of competition, which could be the biggest solution to institutional racism ever. But how do you get people to actually study and do online education? Well, not everybody has a screaming Internet, WI fi, and a brand new laptop. So I don't know that every kid can learn digitally. Plus, there's a behavior issue. There's a lot to be worked out. But in the long run, I think there will be fewer teachers just because one teacher will handle millions, you know, the best teacher. And that should break the. Break the hold that the teachers unions have on the schools, which should be really helpful in getting rid of institutional racism. All right. And I think that also there should be introduced a strategy class, a life strategy class. I always talk about my book how to Fail Almost Everything and Still Win Big. But I talk about it as an example. There are other books that tell you how to have a strategy for life that makes sense. Now, I want to do a better job of explaining why I say that companies, when they talk about a strategy, it's just BS but people need to have a strategy. I thought of a better way to explain this. In the business world, you wouldn't say it's a strategy to have an accounting system, Right? You just say, well, you just need an accounting system. That's not a strategy. That's sort of just basic stuff you need to be in business. Likewise, when I talk about strategies for people, when I say stuff like, you know, build a talent stack, these things should be as basic as having an accounting system. In other words, calling these things life strategies, probably too much of a word. They're not really strategies. They're kind of like having an accounting system if you're a business. Basic stuff everybody should do. Now, if it's something that everybody should do, I'm not sure it's a strategy. Right. So strategy might be a misleading word. Is there anybody who should not try to have multiple skills that work well together? No, no, there's nobody who should not have that strategy. Therefore, I'm not sure it's a strategy. It's more of just a baseline good thing to do. All right. NBCUniversal has announced that its new goal is to have 50% women in the news organization. They don't say what the ratio is now, but they're trying to get to 50% women and also 50% people of color overall in the organization. Now, there's no way around that. That is public racial discrimination. Right. Because they are saying fairly clearly that they're going to discriminate against white people because they need to get to 50% people of color overall. And if it were going to happen on its own, if you didn't need to do anything actively to let it happen, it would have already happened. So they are saying we have to do something active to fix this ratio as they see it. What could you do that would be active? Well, you could try to, you know, you could recruit harder and you could make sure that you've really, you know, done the best putting the net out there. So there's some basic things you can do that are sort of generic. But ultimately you just have to tell the white people that they can't have the job. In the end, that's the only way you can get there. And so I asked this question, which again would have probably gotten me canceled a month ago. I retweeted that tweet and I said, challenge. Find a Fortune 500 company that isn't actively discriminating by race and gender. In a similar fashion to the way NBC is announcing it plans to discriminate. They actually announced it. Imagine announcing your plan to discriminate based on race and feeling. No, they have no embarrassment, there's no penalty. In fact, they will be rewarded for it for announcing in public that they plan to discriminate based on race and gender. That's our world anyway. So I put that out there and said, find a Fortune 500 company that isn't doing the same thing. How many do you think I got? Well, I got one suggestion of a company that's actually owned by, I guess, Chinese entities. So, you know, it was a special case. But basically nobody had a suggestion of any company in the Fortune 500 that is not publicly and obviously discriminating by race and gender. Now, if you were a 14 year old black kid and I were to poll you, and I say, hey, hey, you know, 14 year old black kid from the city, come here, come here, I gotta talk to you. Instead of randomly going through life, let's have a strategy. But your strategy might not be exactly like other people's. So this would be a case where people would have specific strategies, except for the general notion of you should go where you know, you should go where you have the best opportunity, which is generic. And I would say to this 14 year old black kid in the inner city. Has anybody told you that if you go for a job at a Fortune 500 company, which by the way, are really good jobs, Fortune 500 is the good jobs. If you went for one. Has anybody told you that if it's you and a bunch of white people applying for the same job, you're pretty much going to get that job every time? Has anybody told you that? What would the 14 year old black kid say? Would he say, oh, yeah, we all know that. Yeah, yeah, all we have to do is stay in school, get a B plus. Pretty much you get a job at every Fortune 500 company within your field. How many would know that? Maybe none. Maybe none, right? I mean, I don't know. I haven't asked the question, so I shouldn't assume, but I'm thinking it's none. So how much of an impact could you have is simply going to a young person say, you know, the only thing you need to succeed is just make sure your grades are good, you know, stay out of jail, don't do drugs, but basically just focus on your grades. Your life's going to be pretty darn good. Way better than other people, way better than other black people, way better than most white people. You'll be way above average for all people with this simple strategy. How many people are Talking to the 14 year old black youth in the inner city and saying, just do these things. Works every time or pretty close to every time? Nobody. So if you're telling me that I need to worry about your police brutality, I say I'm open to the whole conversation, but you have to measure it correctly, which is not being done and therefore you have not presented anything I could confirm is an actual problem in the real world. Certainly the worrying about it is a problem, but the actual problem is not demonstrated by the data, which doesn't mean it's not there. Right. All we know is that the data hasn't demonstrated it's there. All right. Kanye continues to be interesting. I got a comment from somebody who said, stop talking about Kanye so much. You will be disappointed. So you should leave now. I'm going to be talking about Kanye today, and probably more because it fits perfectly with the whole persuasion theme that I like to talk about. Plus, he's interesting. So we know a little bit more about his planned run. Number one, he's given himself 30 days to really decide. So he has not decided to run, he's decided to decide to run. And he's given himself 30 days because after that the deadlines for getting into the race are passed in too many states. So he came up with a. So he's running as an independent. He said provocatively that if Trump were not in the race, he would run as a Republican. That's right. Kanye said he would run as a Republican if Trump were not the Republican candidate. Did you see that coming? I think you could sort of suspect it a little bit, because I think Kanye, one of his greatest contributions to the world, among quite a few, is his role modeling, weirdly enough, because I know immediately you're going to say, oh, there was those things he did which were not good role model for things. But there's one thing he does, several things he does that are just the best role model. I mean, just crazy good role model, which is first of all, how hard he works. Right. How much do you want a role model that works that hard? That's pretty good. Trump was a hard worker too. So we like that. How would you like to have somebody who has perceives no barriers to his own success? Well, Trump had that right. Trump never saw a barrier to his own success and indeed became president. Kanye likewise sees no barriers to music. He was not an inner city guy, but he still made it in a field where people thought you had to be. He succeeded in fashion, you know, gigantically. Nobody thought that would happen, or a lot of people didn't. And now he's running for president and he apparently doesn't think that there's anything that could stop him. So how good is that as a role model? It's great. It's great. You love to just see more people like that. So there's that, and then there's the talent stack thing. He has stacked talent after talent together to achieve what he's done. So these are all just tremendous role model qualities. And I know you'll find other things in his past. You'll say, well, what about that? What about that? And I get that. But I think that the big picture is the art, the creativity, the skills, the ambition, the mindset. That's the overwhelming feeling you get from him. I think we forgive any small imperfections, but. So he decided to name his party the Birthday Party. That's right. So Kanye's party is the birthday party, which is kind of genius. Here's why. Is there anybody who doesn't like a birthday party? I suppose there might be some introverts who don't, but first of all, when you hear the word Democrat, I don't know, does that have any uplifting feeling to it? Republican doesn't really feel uplifting. Doesn't make you happy. It's just a word, Right? But when you say the birthday party, don't you immediately kind of smile? Hey, what's the name of your party? We're the birthday party. And he explained it this way. He said, when he gets elected, it'll be everybody's birthday. How perfect is that? Yeah, when I get elected, it'll be everybody's birthday. Kind of really, really good. All right. Now, I don't know if he comes up with all of this himself or is he not conversation with other smart people, but if you look at just the first thing he did, name his party, kind of nailed it. How about the second thing he did, which is come up with a slogan? His slogan is one word, yes. And his name is Ye. So he's two thirds of yes. Just with his name. Yeah, and he. He clarified. It's not. Yup. It's not. Yup. It's not. Yeah, it's yes. How much do you love a slogan that is so ambiguous and yet so clear? Because yes is completely ambiguous. Well, yes to what? What am I agreeing to? On the other hand, it's perfect because you fill in the blanks, don't you? My cat is visiting, so if you see a tail go by, that would be my cat. Boo. So he got his slogan. One of the best I've ever seen. Yes is better than Make America Great Again. That's saying a lot, because I think Make America Great Again will go down in history as one of the great campaign slogans. But yes might be better. It might actually be better. So if you're trying to count him out because, oh, he's not serious or whatever, I would just point out that he's in the conversation for the presidency. I would point out that the first two things he did were kind of genius. Here are some other things that will give you pause. He's talking about a systems design approach to government. What does that sound like something I might like? Yeah, he's talking about government in terms of design. Oh, no. I've often said that if anybody ever talked about government with those with that frame as a design problem, that I would support that candidate because that mindset is exactly what we need, really. Now, when asked about specific details, he said, well, I haven't researched that yet. So he doesn't have an opinion on tax rates, for example. I think that's fair and I like the honesty of it. He'll say, I haven't looked into that. I don't know. Anything about that. I'll get good people and we'll figure it out. Kind of like everybody else. So is Kanye serious? I would say probably not in terms of 2020, but it would be very smart of him to have one, let's say partial run in 2020, because it makes him the automatic person you think of for 2024. So putting his name in this year is brilliant, no matter what happens, because it's still a better setup for 2024. We saw with Reagan, with Nixon, with Trump. You could think of some more presidents who had an unsuccessful run, but then it's the first person you think of for the next election. So Trump has been getting a lot of fire for saying that the coronavirus fatalities are less than 1%. Actually, what he says is the other way. He says 99% of people will be fine, don't have to worry about it, but 1% will have problems. And of course, the news has said that's not true. You are putting fake data into the world. But is it not true? Again, we don't have a cabinet level position for data analysis. Someone who could tell you what I'm going to tell you now, which Andreas told me, so I'm getting it from somebody smarter. If you looked at the total of confirmed cases, it's higher than 1%. Depending on where you are, it's, you know, it could be 4%, but, you know, it's a lot more than 1% if you're looking at confirmed cases. But one thing we know with no doubt whatsoever, is that the number of total cases is far bigger than the number of confirmed cases. Nobody disagrees with that. And if you were to look at the number of likely cases, just sort of did the math and say, all right, if we found this many cases, we're pretty sure there are at least this many cases. So under those conditions, it turns out that the President is basically right. If you could find all of the infections, you would discover that fewer than 1% of them are going to die. So you've been watching the news tell you that the President's math is all wrong when the President's math is all right. Did you know that? You know, when I saw the President making that claim, I said to myself, oh, well, he's just exaggerating in his usual way to draw attention to the fact that the risk is low. Ish. So that's just his normal routine. But it turns out in this, in this case, he's actually just right. The entire news cycle has been hammering him on the left anyway. Hammering him for being bad at math. But he's just right and the public can't tell the difference. There's a new model coming out which should be no more reliable than all the other models for coronavirus deaths. The new model says that without masks you might have 200,000 deaths by November 1st. And keep in mind, November 1st is not the day that the virus goes away. November 1st might be the day that the virus starts getting much, much worse. So the model says 200,000 by November 1st. And then God knows what happens after November 1st because it's not going to get better unless the virus magically goes away or we magically have a vaccine, which I don't expect. So, and then if we do wear masks, this particular model, and it doesn't even matter where it came from, you don't even need to know the details. None of these models are terribly accurate. We assume that it would be only something 160 some thousand deaths if people wore masks. So if you do the math, there's something like a 45,000 death difference between masks and no masks. Why is this reported on cnn? Well, obviously they're trying to produce a number that they can pin on the President for being the number of people he killed by not wearing a mask in public. You know where this is heading, right? The whole setup is just to create an actual number from an expert that they can pin on the President as the number of people he killed. Of course, the Republicans play the same game with the, with let's say, Mayor, I'm sorry, Governor Cuomo, by saying, well, you know, he's responsible for X number of deaths in the senior senior care facilities. I'm not sure that putting a death count on all of our politicians is the best way to go, but it does help, I gotta admit. Now, wouldn't you like to see a data expert look at this new claim on this new model and tell you if you should care about it? Kind of like that maybe it can't be a cabinet position because then they wouldn't be independent. So maybe there needs to be some kind of independent data analysis entity that doesn't have a political affiliation that would be better. Alright, so if we get to 200,000 deaths, and I don't know if we will, but if we do, there were people. And I asked this question early on, I said to people, if you think this is just the flu, what number of deaths would change your mind? And one smart person, I asked that question of said 200,000. So we have this interesting situation where we still have the two worlds where one part of the population thinks the United States, anyway, still thinks this is just sort of a bad flu and we shouldn't take it so seriously because it's baseline danger for being a human being in the world. But at around 200,000 deaths, people start saying, okay, okay, you got me. This is not a normal flu. That's. That's a lot of deaths. I think we're going to get there, but we'll see. Still, the wild card is nobody knows why flus ever go away. Nobody knows why a virus ever goes away. The normal virus, this one, any. They don't know why they go away, but maybe that'll happen. And the funniest thing is that one of the things Trump got criticized the most for is saying that the virus might just go away, which turns out to be completely scientifically valid. Sometimes the virus just goes away and we don't know why. So is it impossible that this one would go away? Well, why is the death count dropping? Does anybody know the death count today? Somebody says, are deaths being recorded accurately? Probably not, but they're probably being recorded consistently, meaning that if one hospital is doing it a certain way, they're probably going to continue. But in total, you should see the pattern is either going toward fewer or more. So the direction would be more important. And the direction seems down unambiguously. Yeah. Somebody said, where's the Spanish flu? Are you telling me that of all the people in the world, that literally all of them would somehow get rid of it or become immune to the Spanish flu, not a single person still has it to continue giving it to another person? Nobody. There's something wrong with how we understand viruses, and it makes it feel like we're in a simulation and the virus is just a software update. I mean, it feels like that because it just has a beginning and an end, and we don't know why it has either one. I guess beginning, we kind of know. All right, that is what I wanted to say for today. Note the degree to which I have extended my powers of freedom of speech. Take note of my technique in case you would have to like to have better freedom of speech yourself, number one. That always has to be number one if you want to maintain your maximum freedom of speech without getting cancelled. And yes, yes, I know freedom of speech is about the Constitution. It's about the government. It's not about the people. Fuck you, Fuck you, fuck everybody who tells me free speech is only about the government. Fuck all of you. That's. You're just Living in the past, in the present. Free speech, for a practical purposes, is about how other people treat you because of cancellation culture. So I don't want to hear anybody correcting me that free speech is about what only the government does, because you're just living in the past. I have no interest in living in the past with you. You're welcome to live in the past. Please go live in the past if you enjoy it, but don't bring me there. I don't want to live in the past. So, anyway, the most important thing you need to do to maximize your freedom of speech is to show that you have good intentions. If your intentions are good, people will give you a lot of latitude because they'll say, well, he means well. Maybe that's not the way I would have worded that, but as soon as they think you mean wrong, everything you say will just sound like it happens through that filter. So you see that with President Trump, everybody who thinks he means well hears him saying things that don't sound that bad. Everybody who thinks he's evil incarnate, they hear everything as the worst possible description. Oh, can somebody remind me? Speaking of that, dark and divisive was the term that the Democrats started trotting out again after Trump's speech at Mount Rushmore. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought I heard a clip in which Kayleigh McEnany used their own term against them and called the Democrats dark and divisive. Did I hear that? Because if I did, and I think I did, that was one of the most clever things ever. Not by itself, but imagine, if you will, that dark and divisive is powerful. That's why they use it, because they have advice from people who understand these things and they know it's a powerful phrase. If you were trying to take the power out of a powerful phrase that your opponents are using against you, how would you do it? Well, one way would be if it's mockable. If there was something about the words dark and divisive that just automatically becomes something you could joke about, or you could make somebody think about it as a joke, that would work. But I don't see that opportunity with dark and divisive. There's nothing really funny about that. So you can't go the mocking route. But what you can do is take the power out of it. As Jay Z famously says about the N word, the reason he would use it a lot in his songs is to take the power out of it. So if the Republicans started using dark and divisive as a go to description of Democrats because taking down statues is pretty dark and divisive, right? All right. I'm getting confirmation that she did exactly that. If she continues to do that, it completely takes dark and divisive off the table. Because if you start hearing it as a generic thing that any politician says about the other side, it's empty. She can actually open that thing up with, remove its guts and give it back to you as an. As an empty, empty vessel. And she did it once. And let me ask you this. From the moment that Kayleigh McEnany said dark and divisive as a description of anything the Democrats are doing after that, did you hear any Democrats using it? Because she might have killed it. She might have killed it with one sentence. Because I don't think I've seen it since then. Have you. Can anybody confirm that there's any national figure who has used the phrase dark and divisive about the Republicans after McEnany took the power out of it? Because, you know, if they keep doing it, she's going to keep doing it. So if you hear the Democrats revive that, that dark and divisive thing, I think the Republicans are just going to revive it at the same time and just neuter it, which I think is a brilliant play that I don't believe I've seen anybody else smart enough to do so again, it's obvious to me that McEnany is just operating at a different level than what we've seen before, maybe ever. Really. She's just operating at a different level. All right. That's all I have to do for now and I will talk to you tomorrow.