Episode 596 Scott Adams: VP Pence Visits Border, Kanye Building Homes, Audience Questions

Bada bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. Hey, everybody, get in here. You know what time it is, and so do I. It's time for coffee with Scott Adams. I'm Scott Adams. You already know what coffee is. And if you're smart and prepared and good looking, you probably have a cup of coffee already ready. Might be another beverage, could be tea, could be something else. But whatever it might be, grab your cup of glass, your mug could be a tankardicellis or stein. It might be a thermos or a flask. And for our men and women in uniform, grab your canteen and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit that gets the rest of your day just going great. I call it the simultaneous sip. Join me. Now. Stretch. Try this. You know, the key to stretching, if you didn't already know, is you have to make the noise too loud because. Go. That's what a good stretch looks like. All right, I think we're ready, are we not? Let's talk. I'm going to take some questions in a bit, so if you have some questions, go ahead and get those prepared because I want good questions. Keep your questions short and I will be happy to answer them. All right, let's talk about a few things. So Mike Pence went down to visit some border detention facilities, which I'm happy about. And Mike Pence, continually underrated. Mike Pence is continually underrated. That guy has got a lot of game now. He gets a lot of fire for his, let's say, say not current views on lgbtq. One hopes that he's upgrading those opinions as part of the Trump administration. So he's got some baggage, but he's got a lot of game. And the first thing I say, I say this about him all the time. He has never embarrassed the President. He's always been right on point. And it's hard to be a vice president, I would think, and to do it with class and dignity and all that. And he does it very well. And he did something so smart in his trip to the detention centers that I thought I wanted to call it out persuasion wise, maybe politically wise, and persuasion wise. And it is such a simple thing. Just listen to how simple this is. And Mike Pence got it right. And a lot of people haven't gotten this right. So Pence was asked, asked by CNN whether the conditions for the detained single adult immigrants were acceptable. All right, so Pence is representing the administration. There's Been this contest of, are the detention centers doing a good job, say the Democrats, or are they doing a bad job, say the Democrats, or are the detention centers doing a good job, says the administration. That's the way it used. That's the way it has been up till now, which was the wrong framing from the administration's perspective. Here's Mike Pence getting it totally right. All right. So he's asked whether the conditions for the single adult immigrants were acceptable. Pence said, no, it's not. That's the right answer. That's the right answer followed by, that's the reason why we demanded that Congress give us 4.6 billion in additional support to Customs and Border Protection. Right, right. That's the right answer. You know, what's the wrong answer? Oh, I think you. You're exaggerating. The wrong answer is telling the Democrats that what they saw, they didn't see. Telling them that, oh, no, it's fine. We're doing a great job down there, even if you are. Even if we are doing a great job. We asked for $4.6 billion. Did we ask for $4.6 billion? Because everything was just the way we wanted it. No, no. If you can ever agree with the people who are criticizing you, do it, do it. It's always the best play. So Pence, so far the smartest person who's talked about this issue says, are things acceptable? No. That's why we're asking for money. Are things acceptable? No, no, it's bad. The conditions are not acceptable. You know, they are not acceptable. They're not acceptable to Democrats, they're not acceptable to Republicans. They're not acceptable to human beings. That's why they want the money to make it better. Every time that they disagree and say, well, you looked at the wrong facilities, you exaggerated or whatever, certainly you could disagree on maybe some details, but you should agree as hard as you can with the Democrats that things are unacceptable, and that's what you're trying to fix. So Mike Pence gets it right. Will he get credit for that? Who knows? But he got it right, so credit him. Here's what is not optimal so far. All of our. All the reports that we've seen about the various detention centers are all the same stupid thing. Here's what's stupid. You've got a bunch of different detention centers. One assumes some are doing great, some are not doing so great. So somebody will visit, some politician will visit one that's doing great and will say, hey, I visited. I went there myself. It looks pretty Good. Somebody else will visit the one that's not doing great, and they'll come back and say, hey, these detention centers are not working. It's all terrible conditions. And we, the public, who are the bosses, remember, you're in charge. The politicians aren't in charge. We elect them. You know, we can tell them what to do by our opinions. You know, as people get polled, the politicians aren't going to go against the polls forever. You know, temporarily they can, but in the long run, they don't. So you're the boss. You bosses, you citizens of the United States, what do you know about the detention centers in general? Nothing. Not a damn thing. You're the boss. You're in charge of this. You the. You the public, and you don't have any information that's reliable. I wouldn't believe anybody who said that things are going great. I wouldn't believe anybody who said they're not, because in all likelihood, it's going great in some and not great in others, because it's like everything else in the world. So I'd suggested the other day that the only solution for that is some kind of independent third party who visits all of them unpredictably, meaning somebody who can visit any of these facilities at the drop of a hat, whose job it is to do that, who is independent, who is independent and can just report to the country. The bosses. Right? You're the boss, I'm the boss. We run this country, we're the voters, and we'd like to get some actual useful, good information about what's going there. Now, it wouldn't probably change my opinion too much because I agree with the Democrats and I agree with Mike Pence. Is it acceptable? No, it's not acceptable. It's not acceptable. Whatever's happening down there, it's completely unacceptable. And any other answer is ridiculous. If you're asking for billions of dollars to fix something, you don't say it's fine the way it is. All right, I guess I made that point way too many times. But the good news is, apparently there's going to be some kind of. Some kind of independent pediatrician who is going to be tasked with visiting the facilities. It's pediatrician. So obviously the focus will be on the kids. And it seems to me that the independent physician pediatrician is probably going to get us closer to something like a good result. But the very first thing the Trump administration needs to do is to. Is to focus on what's wrong instead of focusing on doing a good job. I mean, it's great. I do like that, you know, the border patrol people get credit for the things that are going right. So we should, you know, maybe highlight the ones that are doing a great job to give some balance. But we're trying to fix a problem. You don't fix a problem by focusing on what's going right. Let's, let's, let's look at the ugly. Show me the ugly. If you show me the ugly, I'll help you fix it. All right, so we got that going on. There's a story in sort of in Breitbart, and I think it's in some other places. Apparently Kanye west is moving forward with trying to design and build some homes for the poor. Now, you have to assume that anything you hear in the world these days may not be exactly accurate. So I'm not saying. The part we know is that it looks like Kanye is very, very interested and very involved in designing homes. What we don't know is exactly what he has in mind and who they're for and where they'll be and that sort of stuff. But the reporting said that it would be maybe based on some kind of a Star wars design. You know, the little igloo huts from Star Wars. I don't know if that's true. It could be that maybe that's a starting point. But I would like to caution Kanye, given that there's a non zero chance that he'll hear this. I don't know what the odds are, but I know he's seen some of my periscopes because he retweeted them a few years ago. But let me tell you what I think might be a problem with what he's doing. The problem with all housing, at least in the United States, is probably the same everywhere else. They all suffer from what I'd call the same problem, and I don't see anybody fixing it. And based on what I know, I don't know that Kanye's fixing it, but he could. He's the kind of person that could fix the thing that's never been fixed before. And it's this. Here's the worst way to design a house. Get a really good designer, really good architects, really good engineers, and then you design a house. Maybe you work with who is going to live there to get their requirements, etc. Then you design a house that's the way all homes are built. You get the people who know how to do it together. Somebody gives them money, and then they design a house. As far as I can tell, Kanye's effort. Until we find out differently, I'm going to assume that anything that Kanye does is going to be a little different than the way anybody else does it. That's what he does. So I'm not going to assume he's going to do it this way. But if he did the same thing, that would also be a mistake, and I'll tell you why in a moment. But it would be a mistake to simply get smarter people and say, hey, these homes have not been designed well in the past. All the smarter people, and we'll do it right. Still the wrong system. Here's the right system. We don't know how to build better homes. Let's try one. You build it, you put some people in it and you say, in 30 days, tell us what works and what doesn't. Thirty days later, the people, the family that moved in says, you know, we love this place, but there's no closet for our brooms. I have to walk, you know, to the garage to get a broom to sweep the floor. So the next version, you take all those little fixes and you build it into it and then you move family in for 30 days and you say, how about this one? And they say, you know, it's a little loud in this room because it's a little too close to this room. And we find that the kids like to play in this room and then we can't sleep. So then you say, fine, let's build another one right next to it. You build another one, put in a little insulation, put in a little dog door because they forgot something from the dog, put in a little different kind of table because the table and the other one got scratched or fell apart. So the point is, if you're starting with a goal in mind, and goal thinking versus systems thinking is being highlighted here. If your goal is to design a better home and the only way you do it is get some experts together and design a home, you did it wrong. You did it wrong. Because all you're going to get is a home that's maybe a little bit better than other homes because it's the same people who built all the bad ones are probably going to be the same people who build the new one. It might be a little better, but that's it. So the, the way to build a great home is to build 25 bad homes. Let me say that again. The way to build a great home, let's say you're building it for low income people. The way to build a great one is to build 25. That aren't so great. Each one of them iterating toward the better one. Or you could have several projects, each of them iterating in different ways. One of them for small families, one with kids, one without kids, that sort of thing. So I'm very much in favor of all the people who are trying different things, and big fan of Kanye, especially taking on a big, big challenge like that. But I hope he's looking to iterate, and I hope he's got that built into the system, because without that, it's just another person building a house. And even as innovative as Kanye is likely to be, you can't really guess what's going to work for people. You can't get there just by being smart. Being smart won't get you there. All right, so kudos to Kanye for even taking that on. That's why we love him. All right, There's a report out of China that they're working hard on fusion. Apparently they have some kind of breakthrough for fusion energy. Now, the breakthrough is giant magnets that can keep the reaction from touching the edges of the container. So I don't know anything about this stuff, so just assume that I'm giving you the moron description of nuclear fusion, because I am. But the idea is that whatever's happening, the plasma, the reaction, whatever it is, they have to keep it from touching the walls of anything. And the only way to do that is with super powerful magnets that will keep it from floating instead of touching walls. They have not. Science has not been able to achieve that until recently. So it looks like. It looks like a American Chinese group working on this collectively. It looks like they have some big breakthrough. But even with the big breakthrough, China is looking at building their first full fusion plant 2050. So they're still looking at 30 years to get a plant built, but that would still be pretty good. Now, we have lots of other nuclear options between now and the time we get our first fusion plant, you know, generation three, potentially generation four. But nuclear power is the way to go. And I saw that Rick Perry just appointed somebody in the Energy Department. I don't know, I forget the details, but they brought in somebody who is an expert at government and private industry, nuclear collaboration. So the government is doing the right stuff. They're bringing in the right people, and they're building a system, which means they're doing it right. Instead of trying to build a specific plant, the government, Rick Perry's group, is saying, let's create a system where the government can be very helpful to spur this Industry, so. And to make nuclear better. Better, faster, cheaper, safer. Sorry. So they're doing the right stuff. That's all good. I'm going to take some calls. So anybody has some questions, this would be the time to do it. Let's see who's on here. Jacob, I'm going to bring you on. Jacob, are you there? Jacob, Technology, please work. Okay. Jacob is processing. Jacob, are you there? Good morning. Do you have a question for me.

As pertains to rural areas? But I find that a lot of people have homes, especially where I am in Atlantic Canada, but they don't have jobs or paths or careers. And everything they used to have was taking things from the earth. Fishing, logging and asbestos was actually huge here. All of which have been deemed unacceptable to extract now. Right. So I've been racking my brain because the. I mean, the majority of the country is these small areas, but they have to fly or leave their families for weeks or even months, like my father did, just to get by to work somewhere else. They kind of congregate in only one province of Canada, Alberta. Right, right. And I've been trying to think like, how can we give these tradespeople, because most of them are tradespeople, a path in the rural areas?

Well, that's a real good question. Obviously we're going to have to get away from taking stuff out of the ground as our primary way to get paid. So I don't know if anybody has any easy answer to that. I mean, some of it be the few people who can learn to do something with technology and do it at a distance, but that's not really a solution. I think a huge part of the solution is lowering cost. I think we don't focus enough. What would it take to lower the cost of a high quality life? Because if you lower the cost of living, then your opportunities for making money expand. Because maybe, for example, I'll just use a bad example, but let's say you had considered being a telemarketer, something that you could do from your home, wherever you are. But the most you could make was, I don't know, 30 or $40,000 a year. So you wouldn't do it because it just wouldn't be enough. And you'd be spending your whole day doing it. But what if it was enough? What if it were enough? What if 30 or $40,000 a year, let's say your spouse is also working. What if it's enough? So I think we probably have to solve getting expenses down. That's part of the answer. Part of the answer is things you can do at a distance. And a big part of the answer, I think, is going to be relocating. I'll tell you my almost guaranteed prediction. So I'm going to make a prediction that I think is just a certainty. I just don't know when. But it's the answer to what you're talking about. And that is, I think we're going to start to build entire super cities from areas where there's nothing. Because fixing a city that's already there is monstrously difficult. Could you imagine saying, hey, let's rebuild New York City to make it more livable? You almost couldn't do it for 100 different reasons. It would be so impractical. But now imagine saying, hey, there's a lot of room in this desert or plain or this state. There's just plenty of room. Let's designate this big area as our new city, start from scratch, and use design to do what money can't do. And what I mean by that is if you design the city right, it's going to be low cost, very good to live in, solve a lot of your problems, low maintenance, you know, good transportation and all the things that you need to live by design. So if you do design right, you don't need to spend as much. So my, my view of the future is at some point there will be a number of super cities, super towns, super cities being designed from scratch that will be so amazingly livable and will also have lots of access to employment because they'll, they'll design that, that consideration will be, be part of the design. Then people in the rural areas will be able to find these cities and apply to them and move. So I think probably in the long run, people in the rural areas that do not have access to employment and well designed homes will probably just move to where there are those things and their lives will be immeasurably better. But that might be a 2050 thing, you know, it might be a 2040 thing. So it's not a quick fix.

A lot of people in the comments were suggesting same thing, move where the jobs are going to have to relocate. Someone said not everywhere is meant to be inhabited, but it is hard to think. There's over half a million people in my province. I know that's not a lot, but there are only two cities out of the hundreds and hundreds of communities. So it's kind of hard for me to think that all these men and women just have to come to the two cities and try to, you know, make a living And a lot of them, they hate the cities. They feel that it robs their culture, their soul, you know. And again, weird excuse, but a lot of us do get identity from the small areas. Our songs are even our type of parties, you know, and they just, they want to avoid the cities, you know.

Well, everybody's got to make that choice. I'll tell you. I grew up in a very small town. My graduating class, there were only I think 40 people in my entire graduating class and maybe 2,000 people in the entire spread out town. You know, you could drive down the street for a long time without seeing another car. So when I graduated high school and I went to a nearby college that I could drive to, but when I got out of college, the first thing I did was I literally traded my car for a one way ticket to California with nothing on the other end. I didn't have anything waiting for me at the other end. Now my brother lived in California already, so I had a, literally, I had a couch to sleep on. So I sold my car for a one way ticket to California to go sleep on my brother's couch and borrow his car during the day and go look for jobs, which I did. Now eventually I got a job at a bank in San Francisco, long story. And that led to here. But the very first problem I solved was I said to myself, if I stay where I grew up, if I stay in this small local place and don't go to places that have cities and traffic and crime and all that, even if I prefer my small town lifestyle, there's no opportunity here. So the first problem I solved is location. And I recommend that to any, anybody who's, you know, graduating from school in any of those small rural areas. Get out. You should get out before you, before you have ties, you know, you always have your family tie.

I'm something of a success story. I did say I packed my car, moved in with nowhere to live, found an apartment that night. I'm a industrial mechanic and welder by trade, but I am literally learning to code right now. I'm in school.

All right, so yeah, yeah, you can't, you can't. There's no amount of advice that creates you, right? There's no event, there's no amount of advice that would create me, you. And I, I mean, I can tell just from, you know, one minute of talking to you, I can tell that, you know, we, you, we could drop you from a plane, you know, with the parachute, onto any island, anywhere in the world and then come back in five years and you're doing okay because you figured it out, right? Because you, it's obvious that you're a guy who figures it out. I don't know what to do. I'll figure this out. Now go. I'll go do what I need to do. I'll do the hard stuff. I'll put it into work. I'll figure it out. So I'm the same guy. If you drop me on the island, I was. I always use this little story as a way to understand myself. I use the island of prisoners and I always say this. If you were to drop me on the island of prisoners where there's no law, it's just, you know, people committed terrible crimes, live there. They're put there because they can't escape. If you drop me on the island of prisoners, on day one, I would get, you know, beaten up and raped. On day two, I'd be beaten up and raped again. On day three, I'd be beaten up and raped again. But if he came back in five years, I would be running the island. Yeah, yeah. And the difference is being beaten up and raped every day for a year isn't going to stop me. It's not going to stop me because my mind is already on the other end of that. It's like, how long is this going to take? Do we have a month of this? Is this a two month situation? I don't care. I don't care if it's a month. A year. At the end of it, you're all going to be dead. That's my philosophy. It's probably a dangerous philosophy because I keep it with me when I'm in dangerous places too. Because you'll see situations where people and you'll say to yourself, okay, this person might want to hurt me or rob me or kill me. And I always have this little recording running in my head, which is, I feel sorry for this guy. Sure enough. Sure enough, this person could hurt me if they wanted to. They would just have to want to and they could hurt me. But if I didn't die, yeah, I'm the same. Sorry for that guy. Yeah, I really feel sorry for somebody who hurt me badly and didn't kill me because that's going to be. That's not going to work out well. All right. Well, I'm going to take another call. Thanks so much.

All right. God bless conversation.

All right. I love Canadians, don't you? Let's take T Bar. T Bar coming at you. T Bar. Can you hear me and do you have a question for me?

Well, I was enjoying Bill Pulte's Twitter philanthropy, and I thought, is there a way to allow people to donate their time and services to those who need it, such as elderly who need errands run or their yard cut, things like that?

Well, I don't know if there's an easy way to do it through Twitter philanthropy, because Twitter goes to the whole world. But you. You need to talk to people who are local. There's an app called Next Door, if. Have you ever heard of that app?

Yes, I am on that app.

Oh, okay. So that's the most local social media thing because it literally goes to your neighbors. So you could always put out the word and say, I've got some time. If there's somebody who needs something, you would almost certainly find somebody recommending a. A neighbor, an elderly person or something.

Right. And I also had a question about. You had the Gen4 development idea for North Korea. Do you think that idea would work as a negotiating tool in Iran?

Yeah, I think anytime you can throw in a variable, another variable, it gives you a little bit more opportunity to make a deal because. And especially, you know, a Gen 4 nuclear development site in North Korea would make perfect sense. The North Koreans would be able to use their nuclear expertise. They need cheap energy just like everybody else does, and it's good for the world. So, yeah, I think there could be something there if they wanted to. But in any event, it's smart to throw it in the mix. It's something that should at least be discussed.

It would be a good export for. Or they're diversifying their economy because so much of their economy is linked to oil energy. If they can diversify to gen 4, that would be.

Yeah, yeah, I would think North Korea would be all over that if they could. So, yes, I expect that will be part of the conversation. Thank you so much.

Excellent. Thank you.

Let's take another. Let's do. Nicholas? Nicholas? Nicholas. Nicholas, come at me. Are you there? Hey, I can hear you. What's your question, Nicholas?

I was wondering, like, with all the shadow banning and things, you know, the down voting and all that on YouTube, is there any possibility that it's just purely profit driven? Because, like, YouTube's never been profitable. And so maybe by, like limiting your views on the first day or something like that, they're just trying to make more money.

I never rule out the profit motive. And I make this following point. Often people don't do things for one reason. When we talk about why people do things, we'll often say they had that One reason. And maybe it means that's the one reason to put it over the top or the one. One reason you didn't expect or the one that you didn't know about. But people don't do things for one reason. So I would imagine that YouTube, being like any other company, has a profit motive that absolutely is influencing them. But they also have, you know, they might have some political bias in that mix as well. So my guess is that if the political, say, if the financial motive was overwhelming to let people stay on the platform, let's say, if, let's say all the conspiracy theorists happen to be the most profitable creators on YouTube, I think you'd find that they would. They would figure out some way to have more. More conspiracy theorists, not less. They would just label it better and, you know, call it entertainment instead of news or whatever they needed to do. But the fact that the people who are a problem for YouTube, if you added them all together, probably not more than 1% of their total revenue and viewership, most of YouTube is people looking at makeup tutorials and funny animal stories and all kinds of stuff like that. So the entirety of all the people who are the politically problematic ones, all of them together, are probably not much of YouTube's revenue. So I think that they have the ability to maintain their profitability and still operate in ways that might be philosophically compatible with them but not with you. Meaning that they might. They might put a little bit more bias against some groups than others because they. Because of where their own political bias starts from. So, yes, the money, I think, is always going to be the biggest variable after legality. So a big corporation is going to first ask, is it legal? They have to ask that, and then is it profitable next, and then if you've done both of those things right, or at least as much as you can do profitability wise, then you might look at the smaller problem, which is, hey, you know, maybe if we put our thumb on this a little bit, we'll get a political result. We want to, but. So, yes, thanks for the question.

Thank you.

Let's take another caller here. And we're going to go to. I don't know why I even decide. I'm using no, no criteria whatsoever to decide who to invite here. Pretty random. Caller, can you hear me? What's your name?

My name is Matt.

Hey, Matt, do you have a question for me?

Yes. In regard to your position on women's sports and sports in general in terms of unfairness. So it's my take that women's sports were created with that exact intent, which is the great fairness, and that they're merely a subcategory of sports in general, not yours.

Your sound is fading out. I don't know if other people can hear you, but can you say that again a little bit louder?

Sure. It's my position that Europe, your take on women's sports in regards to fairness is incorrect. That women's sports are a subcategory of sports in general with the specific intent to institute a fair game. Does that change your mind at all in terms of the fairness aspect of your.

No. Because even if it's an objective to create a fair sport, it's not possible because all of the individual players have wildly different skill levels. Now, I heard somebody say, why don't we just do away with the male female difference? Just period. If there's a woman who could make a, you know, a top NBA team, it's just the top NBA team and it has a woman on it, and that's okay. So one of the one solution for the transgender thing is to just say all leagues are open, but the. But you'd have to go pretty far down the league levels before you get the first team that's mostly women. But that would be fine because if you wanted to watch a sport that was mostly women, you'd say, oh, I guess the A league or whatever is mostly men, but a woman could play there if the woman were qualified. Let's say it's football and maybe there's a punter or something who's a woman. But once you go down to, say, the B or the C league, and I don't know how far you'd have to go down before 15 year old boys are not the best players. But you get to a point where you'd have more women than men. Or maybe men didn't even want to play on those teams because they weren't good enough. And the only downside is that the locker room situation, you might need to need the men's and women's locker room, but you already have those. So I think that would be fine. My take on this is that sports do try to have a level game so that you don't always know who's going to win. And they could still do that, it has nothing to do with who's male and who's female. You could always say, well, this team's got some men, this one has some women, there's some transgender women on this team, and it just doesn't matter that all you're doing is Making sure that the two teams that are relatively the same get to play. Would that satisfy your fairness?

I think men's sports is kind of a misnomer. I think men's sports are sports in which anybody can compete, including women. I'm not sure that women are prevented from competing in the NFL or NBA to the extent that they're good enough to play in those leagues. I think women's sports and age bracketed sports were created with a specific intent of creating a fair game. And to interject somebody into those games that doesn't fit the specific intent, which is fairness in those leagues, to me, is wrong. It's a corruption of what the intent was to begin with. That's why the rules exist.

Would you be in favor of a really good female player on a team of all females?

Sure.

I wouldn't. No. You just. You just said you're not. You just said that if a transgender were on the team, it wouldn't be fair that transgender is, by the rules of society, a woman just happens to be really good. But suppose it was not a transgender. It was just a woman who was just amazingly good. Is it fair to have that woman on the team?

Scott, that's a very, very incredible point that you just made. I totally understand now what you're saying. It's. It's. It's my position that a woman that has experienced the hormonal profile of a man throughout the entirety of their life is not necessarily fair. But again, that's another arguable point.

And I.

And I kind of. I kind of see what you're saying now.

I appreciate. Yeah, so. So I think that. And I think actually, you people are really sick of this conversation, by the way. So you and I are enjoying this, but the audience is throwing up in their mouths and saying, move on, move on, move. But I think you hit on something that will make most of the audience happy on this, because people. Pretty much everybody in my audience hates me for this opinion. But let's put it this way, because I think you hit on the crux of it. The problem is not transgender people competing on the wrong teams or the right teams or whatever. The problem is that the rules have not. The rules probably needs to be revised so that you get a better result. So it's not a transgender problem. It's that the rules and the transgender and the history are a little out of whack, but could easily be fixed. So that's my take, is that as long as everybody's gaining a fair game and the audience doesn't know who's going to win. That's all you need? Absolutely. Okay. I think we're pretty close to this. Thanks for the call.

Andrew Yang for Trump vp. That's it.

Okay, thanks. All right, we won't talk about that one again. I know it triggers everybody here, so there's no point in that. Let's see what Drock has to say. Drock? Drock, can you hear me? I can. Do you have a question for me? Thanks for taking my call. Yeah, I have actually kind of a more, I guess, light hearted question. I see you have boo and a little dog. Are you a cat guy or a dog guy? Oh, that's a good question. I would say that I. I love them equally and I've had more cats than dogs, but they are really. They're really different animals. The. The big difference between a cat and a dog, and I've talked about this before, is that a cat, a dog actually tries to understand what its owner is thinking, what your intentions are. So your dog will try to sort of read your mind the same way people try to read people's mind in the sense that we only understand what they're doing because we take a good guess about what they're thinking when they're doing it. The cat doesn't care what your internal thoughts are. The cat is only looking at what your body's doing and the pattern of what your body has done before. So once you realize that the cat is a sociopath and the dog is an empath, they're completely different creatures, but I love them for their own qualities separately. But thanks for the call. Awesome. Thank you, Scott. All right, take care. Let's do. I'm looking for whoever might be the most dangerous person on here. I want somebody dangerous. All right, Jordy. I'm using totally unscientific methods to figure out who might be dangerous. Jordi, are you there? I'm hoping you have a dangerous question for me. Do you have a question?

A dangerous question doesn't have to be okay.

Go.

It doesn't have to be okay. This might be a sideways tangent here. How do you square the ideas of your user interface theories with your lack of free will theories?

They're completely compatible. So one is the idea that you can manage your reality if you know where the user interface is, and the other is that you have something called free will, but they're not really incompatible because what. Whatever our world is, if you don't have free will, you're going to do what you're going to do and what you're going to do might be pushing the human interface buttons or not. So I think they're completely compatible. Why would you think they're incompatible?

It sounds like the user interface implies a degree of control over your reality or at least the feeling of it. Maybe that's the difference.

Well, let's say that you were a robot driving a car and the robot was just programmed. It had no free will, but it could still operate the user interface of the car. So free will is unnecessary for the robot in the car. And in theory for the same reason if you. It would be unnecessary. If we have no free will, we're still going to be pushing those buttons or not pushing those buttons just like a robot in a car. Does that make sense?

Makes sense. It sounds like that the robot would have a predetermined path when it's pushing the buttons to drive the car. Although the user interface makes it feel like that we can determine our own goals. But maybe that's not true.

Yeah, yeah. Free will is a perception. All right, thanks for the question.

Thanks, Scott.

Let's see, let's bring on. I think Andy looks dangerous. Bringing on Andy. Andy, can you hear me? Andy, are you there? Andy? I'm good. How are you?

Hanging in there. So this is actually more of a cat dog type question too in terms of. It's more light hearted. Ever been to and by the way, I'm the, I'm the comic book artist that's talked to you a few times or emailed.

Oh, Andy, yes. Yeah, I've seen your work. Your, your work is amazing. What? Give us your, your URL.

Oh, it's andysmithart.com Andy Smith, art at what? No, it's just andysmith art.com.

Yeah. And you do, you do primarily comic book art, right?

Yeah, yeah, I've been drawing comic books since 1991.

Yeah, I saw you, I saw your webpage. It's phenomenal. You're very talented. So if anybody's looking for that sort of thing, go to his website. All right, what's your, what's your question, Andy?

Have you ever gone to Comic Con?

I did. I think I did once. Yeah, I did once and I did it as a. Wait, wait, was it Comic Con? Yeah, I did a book signing at one. It was, it was quite a zoo and it was scary and I think pretty much nobody showed up for my book signing.

Do you remember how long ago that was?

Five years ago, 10 years ago, something like that.

The only reason I asked that is because it was, I was trying to, trying to gauge on popularity of Dilbert at the time. Like, if it was in the beginning when, like a first book came out, it might be like, oh, who's this guy? But, you know, five years ago or.

So, I think I. I believe. I believe I did. I did it twice. Once was when I was at the height of the. The comic book fame and there were lines as long as you could see. And then once, maybe five plus years ago, whatever it was, and I literally had zero people. Like, I. I was just book signing, standing by myself and. And nobody came. Which, by the way, is not that unusual. I've had lots of book signings where I have lines around the block, but other ones where literally nobody came. And sometimes there's no real explaining it. But. Yes. Probably won't be going to another one.

I go every year for the past 20, so.

Well, you can represent me. I'll do that. All right. Thanks, Andy. Take care. Bye. Let's see. We're gonna take Heather. Heather, coming at you. If our technology works, but it looks like it's Heather. Hi. Do you have a question for me?

Stolen. And the kids were in the car and the dad chased him down and caught him in traffic and beat him up so bad that he died in the hospital later.

Yeah, I understand some other people joined in the beating, so. Yeah.

I just feel sorry for that guy, you know, Imagine how scared he was and the rage. He probably couldn't control himself.

Yeah, yeah. Imagine how you'd feel if you saw somebody drive off with. With your little kids in the car and you don't know if you'll ever see those kids again. And then you run after him, and he literally ran after the car, but the car stopped in traffic and he dragged him out. And by the time he was done, other people had joined in and they literally beat the guy to death. And my understanding is no charges are filed.

Not yet. I haven't heard of any yet.

And even if, you know, could you imagine yourself being on that jury? And let's say the prosecutors decided to get tough and they said, you know, you. You didn't really need to finish him off because once you got him out of the car, you were sort of done. But killing him was going too far. So we're gonna have to charge you with murder. Put me on that trial. Put me in that jury. You're not gonna get a conviction.

Right, right. And any, any psychologist. Right. Is gonna. Or psychiatrist is gonna say, the rage blinds you.

Right.

The fear.

Yeah. You know, and. And I'd be sitting on the jury. And I'd just be saying, blah, blah, blah. I don't care about the rage. I don't care that you could have stopped. I don't care that, you know, maybe somebody else should have stopped you. I don't. I don't care. I literally don't care that he killed that guy. And there's not. There's nothing that you could say or do that would make me convict that guy. If I were on the jury, it just wouldn't happen. If somebody steals a car for all your kids and the father finds you and kills you, that's the end of the story. There's nothing else to that story except, good job, dad. That's it. Right.

Exactly. Hooray. The kids were unharmed.

Yeah. All right, thanks.

Have a good weekend.

You, too. All right. I see a lot of stars coming in because people just love the violence. All right, let's go to Tom. Tom, you are going to be coming at me in a second here. Tom, can you hear me? Tom? Tom? Tom? Tom, you there? Hello? Are you there? Tom? Good. Do you have a question for me? Oh, I love that question. That's a diabolical question. What do I like the most? What do I like the most about being me? Now, are you saying in terms of my, I don't know, personality or character or just about my life? Yeah, I think it's more your life, the way you have to prayer your time. And what do you look forward to? All right, I like that question. Maybe the rest of the audience will care less about hearing about my personal stuff, but I like talking about me. So thanks. Thanks for asking. At the moment, you're catching me at probably just this wonderful golden age in my life, meaning that a lot of things are going my way. I've already made my money. I'm having tremendous fun doing this periscope stuff, talking about Persuasion. I've got a new book coming out in November. If you've. If you've ever seen pictures of Christina, my girlfriend, you know that. That part of my life is going sensationally. And we're, you know, we get along great. Life is good, and I get to. I'll give you an example. I woke up this morning without my alarm, which is the way I wake up almost every day. I wake up. Whenever I wake up, I get my cup of coffee and I feel great. I mean, I wake up feeling great. I have to have my first sip of coffee to feel really great. And then I think to myself, I think, I'll look at the news, and then I Look at the news and there are all these amusing stories that I want to talk about. But of course, it's, you know, it's 7:00am by the time I start these periscopes in my time zone. And I haven't really talked to any human beings who are awake because I'm just in my own home in my office here. And I so look forward to hitting the start button for a periscope so that I could connect with all of you people. I absolutely love it, and I wouldn't do any of this except for how much I enjoy it. You know, that that's the overarching thing. So my morning is terrific. And when I'm doing work work, I'm doing something like writing comics that I'm good at, so it doesn't hurt. I'm drawing, which I like. It's, you know, I can watch TV while I'm doing it. And I have to tell you that this. This specific phase of my life is so rewarding, it's almost indescribable because at this point, I have a few books out that people have found are changing their lives. So in a typical day, several people will contact me, social media or other ways to tell me that usually it's usually my book, how to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. And they'll say that the book changed their life. They lost. They lost, you know, 40, 80 pounds, they got a new job. They, you know, everything's working out, they're healthier. And you have no idea how good that feels because I put a lot of work and sweat into that book. And now, exactly as I planned, it's starting to pay off in terms of the results that people are reporting. So it's just amazing the way it feels just to be helpful and, you know, win bigly. I get the same kind of comments, etc. And when I'm doing these periscopes, I'm trying to be useful. That's sort of the one word that guides what I do. Just try to be useful. You know, I've taken care of my own. My own needs. I don't. I just don't have a lot that I need. Personally, I've got that pretty much dialed in at this point. So anytime I can make somebody else's life a little bit better, whether I'm, you know, helping Bill Pulte on the Blight Authority or on his Twitter philanthropy giveaway, or if I'm giving somebody some life advice or if I'm helping clarify something in politics, it just Feels tremendously good. But I also think that I have some. You know, there's a Spider man saying about. With. With great response. No, with great power comes great responsibility. And I actually live that philosophy because I'm in a position where a lot of people will watch my periscopes and pay attention and my cat's playing with my microphone here. Sorry. And Nobu, stop it. Go away. And because I have a unique voice in terms of my window on persuasion and I can predict things and frame them in productive ways, I find that I'm a productive part of the conversation on a national level in that I can see my influence working its way through the system. By the way, here's a question for those of you still here. How many of you have seen my influence express itself in the larger world? I'd be interested in your comments if you have any examples. I'd like to see them. Are there things that you've seen me influence in the larger world that you can identify pretty accurately? I'm seeing a lot of yeses go by in the comments. Good. Because that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to add something positive. And I think, I hope you. I hope you'd agree that I try to add some positivity, try to give you some optimism, give you some techniques, teach you about systems, not goals, put things in frames that are useful and make you understand the world. So when I'm doing that stuff, it's just amazingly rewarding. So to answer your question, I would say the best thing about being me is that I have the sensation of successful life arc. And the way I explain that is that when you're born, you're born perfectly selfish, and you should be because you're a baby, you know, somebody else needs to give you milk, etc. But as you get older, you can start taking on some jobs. Maybe you're a teenager, you can help mow the lawn, but you still got to take care of yourself, go to school, learn how to be a good adult. Someday maybe you have some kids and you're giving more to the kids than you are to yourself. And then I'm at that part of my life arc where I've taken care of myself and those closest to me. And now I'm trying to. Trying to expand that helpfulness, the usefulness to the larger system. And as you saw in the comments, apparently I'm having some success because those of you in the audience can actually see the impact on the larger world in real time. You can actually See things I suggest become part of the real world in 24 hours. And you've probably seen it a number of times. So I almost can't even express how gratifying that is. And somebody in the comments just said, you literally make my life better. And when I hear. And thank you, Erica. And when I hear stuff like that, that's my fuel. It makes me feel like I'm exactly where I should be in terms of my biological nature, my social purpose, the meaning of life. All of those things are coming together really well. And a lot of it is more rewarding because all of you who are watching this are part of the process. In other words, the only reason that anything I do can have an impact on the larger world is because of how many of you are watching this periscope right now. Without that, you know, if three people watched the periscope, I wouldn't do it, but because anywhere from. I would say between YouTube and the podcasts and stuff, let's say, sorry, my cat's getting in the action here. Anywhere from 50 to 100,000 people will probably watch a typical periscope. And that means that it's enough people with enough clout that if I come up with any idea that's worthy of looking into, I can be sure that there will be somebody on that periscope who took it seriously and said, huh, I think I will think about that a little differently, and I'll weigh that option. So thank you for the question. That was my long answer, but it was an excellent question. I appreciated that. All right, thank you. Let's take one more. I'm going to take. Oh, let's see who we've got here. Let's go for Paramvir. If I'm pronouncing your name correctly, Paramvir. Can you hear me? I can. Did I pronounce your name anywhere close to accurate?

That is very good. Actually, you can also call me Param. I've been a fan for about 20 years, and there's literally one thing I've ever disagreed with you on. So let's see if I can change your mind or you can change mine.

Okay.

Unfortunately, it's on the transgender and women's sports question. The thing I disagree with you on is when you started talking about the topic, you spent some time on it. Pushing back on Twitter, I think you spent about two, three days. And then there was a periscope where you said, hey, I pushed back enough. Now people who are disagreeing with me are just, you know, biased or racist against transgender People. So that specific thing is what I disagree with you on. I think you called that a little bit early. I think people just oppose you because they want sports to be fun, and if you put a transgender woman on a female team, it stops being fun for them. Right. And so I thought you called that one a little bit early.

Well, there are no two situations or two people alike, so it could be true that there are people who are operating from their bias, and then they're rationalizing. You know, they're starting with a bias that they just don't feel right about it. And then they're saying, well, there must be a reason. I guess the reason is fairness. And my point is that because the fairness is a real issue, but so solvable that it's not a real issue. In other words, it's a fake, because. Meaning that when people say they want sports to be fair and that adding a transgender athlete would, in their opinion, make something unfair, that part is true, but so solvable and so trivial that it makes me think that the real reason is something. Something deeper. Now, keep in mind that my view of the world is that all of our reasons are rationalizations. You know, sometimes if we have no. If we have no emotional connection to the topic, well, then we can be rational. So if you're balancing your checkbook, you're just doing math, there's no opinion, no feeling about it. You can be rational about that. But when you're deciding who to marry, where to work, what you think about politics, what you think about the transgender athletes, any of those topics go right to your biological emotional self. And the normal way that a person would react is to react emotionally first, form an opinion, and then after the opinion is formed, make up some total BS explanation. Now, in this case, the total BS explanation is 100% logical. What you're saying that adding somebody who's especially good transgender athlete to a woman's team, that. That would create a sense of unfairness? True. It would cause you as the. The audience to perhaps like it less. True. It would cause somebody on the team who otherwise would have been having a better, you know, spot on the team might cause them to lose their spot. True. All of those things are true. And they can still not be the reason. So my view of the world is that all of those things can be technically accurate, but if you were add. If you were to add them all up, they add up to a peanut. They add up to a grain of salt. They're true. They're completely trivial. But in our minds, we've Blown them up to something bigger than they are. And one of the best evidences of that is I hear people say, hey, I think that if you allow transgender athletes to compete, there will be a whole bunch of men who are not even really transgender who are pretending to be transgender because they'll get an advantage in sports. To which I say, okay, there's your tell. That's the tell for this not being an actual rational response, because I don't think we're going to have a national problem with men pretending to be women to win as sports. I just don't think that's anything to worry about. Sure, there might be one, and it will be a fun story, and some people will be annoyed, and that's what makes it fun. But it's never going to be a big problem. And as other callers said, if there is some momentary imperfection in the. You know, how equal the teams are, it can all be easily fixed because you could. You could re. You could reconfigure the rules so that everybody can play on every team. You could make new levels so that everybody's got a level they can play on and a level that's inappropriate. It's normal business for sports to try to make adjustments as things get unequal. So the most normal thing in sports is that when it starts getting less fun, they'll change something, say, oh, this didn't work out. Let's add a new rule. Let's fix this. So we can never decide, you and I, whether your decisions, whether the way you're thinking about it is the rational reason and the rational reasons are all that matter to you, or if you were triggered by an irrational sort of reaction to it and then you rationalized it with things that are true, those things are true. There would be some problems. There would be some inequality. There would be some people who would be worse off. But because they're true, it doesn't make them important. That's the difference. Now, let me just put a cap on this. I had a little journey myself with this topic because my first reaction was, same as yours, which is, ha, ha, ha. This isn't any fair. You can't put them on this team. This will be inequality, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there was a point where I realized that my reasons weren't real reasons, that I was just reacting out of these. These. The transgender athletes are not what I'm used to. It's not. It's not what I'm adapted to thinking about. It's just out of my comfort zone. And that I was making up reasons to justify why something was making me uncomfortable. But the moment that I realized that the problem was me, that my discomfort is not the way you should organize sports, then I was free to say, okay, if you added all these good reasons together, and I'm going to say that all of your reasons are good, every one of them is solid. If you say adding the transgender athlete will cause some inequality. True. True. Will somebody try to cheat in the whole world over time? True. Somebody's going to try it. All of it together isn't very important because you could have made the same argument about integrating the. You know, remember, there was the same conversation with black athletes not too many decades ago. We were having the same conversation. Well, you can't. Can't add black athletes to professional sports. Look. Look at all the problems that's going to cause. You know, that there were racists saying that not too many decades ago in my lifetime. And so what I. The realization I had was that my feeling about transgender athletes probably was very much like some bigot from decades ago who started with the this is a bad idea, and then rationalized why it must be true. And we've seen, of course, that black athletes dominate most of professional sports. So everything that everybody is thought about that was just completely wrong. All right, we're losing all our audience. I'm going to thank you for the call, and I'm going to sign off now and thanks, everybody for joining me, and we'll talk less about transgender issues in the future because I know it triggers everybody. Bye for now.