Episode 513 Scott Adams - Barr, Biden, Bullsh*t, Nuclear Power, Jobs
Challenging true believers in the “fine people” HOAX Read the transcript of President’s words out loud Triggers cognitive dissonance, they won’t be able to read it Summaries are NEVER as detailed as the underlying data Summaries NEVER capture the nuances of the details Can the President be indicted for doing his job? Physicist Murray Gell-Mann’s observation On topics where he’s an expert… …he noticed the media doesn’t understand the topic Monroe Doctrine and Venezuela Tucker Carlson poses a fascinating question Has intervention by the US ever worked out well? “Government in a Box” concept Target country must request the setup Country creation teams set up a functioning government Safe exit strategy for country leaders for sake of progress Joe Biden asked if he has a campaign slogan Nope, he says he doesn’t have one On the fly he said…”Make America Moral Again” …the acronym is MAMA, nice one Joe! “Sleepy Joe” label controls Biden’s actions To counter, he’s forced to present himself as high energy Mis-speaking is a natural consequence of that forcing The “HOAX Funnel” process Muslim Brotherhood being considered for terrorist designation Pushback is that they aren’t ALL terrorists or sympathizers Shouldn’t those that aren’t…condemn those that are? Press has been telling TWO LIES persistently “Fine People” HOAX “Russian Collusion” HOAX The most dangerous political lies in our countries history? What’s the intent of President Trump’s supposed “lying”? What OUTCOME is President Trump attempting to achieve? “Salesperson Lies” for a clear and positive purpose for U.S. Economy lies…literally make the economy better ISIS lies…hyperbole about how defeated they are? ISIS can’t recruit if people believe it wouldn’t end well Older nuclear technology dangers US has mostly Gen 1, France has mostly Gen 3 designs Gen 3 now has long history and no issues with it to date Does the potential of Gen 4 exceed Gen 3? What ARE the upper limits of wind and solar’s potential? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Please donate to support my YouTube channel: https://interface.my/ScottAdamsSays I also fund my Periscopes and podcasts via audience micro-donations on Patreon. I prefer this method over accepting advertisements or working for a "boss" somewhere because it keeps my voice independent. No one owns me, and that is rare. I'm trying in my own way to make the world a better place, and your contributions help me stay inspired to do that. See all of my Periscope videos here… https://www.pscp.tv/ScottAdamsSays/1nAKERDOwylGL Find my WhenHub Interface app here… https://interface.whenhub.com
Bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. Let's add in some new instruments so that my theme song has a little more character. Drums. Hey everybody, come on in. Tyler and now Fonz. Oh, and Baby, and Null Hypothesis. That's a funny name for your parents to give you. No Hypothesis. Well, I'm glad you're all…
View segment →taneous sip. All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, some kind of tankard or stein or chalice, perhaps a thermos. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure tha
View segment →t I call the simultaneous sip. Mmm. All right. I have a question which has been bugging me all night, and I can't wait to ask you, so I'll be looking at the comments for your answers. So on Twitter I presented a challenge. It's a psychological challenge and something you can do at home, and I'm won…
View segment →watch their brain reboot. So what you should see, I'll do an impression. All right, so this would be somebody who is not experiencing cognitive dissonance. They still disagree with you but they don't have any cognitive dissonance. It's like, all right, I'll humor you. I'll read it. Blah blah blah b…
View segment →ry time. So Mueller has made a case that on the details, if you were just to ignore everything you felt about what's right, if you were to ignore everything you felt about what's just, if you were to ignore everything about what's good for the country, if you could ignore all of those things, on so…
View segment →our war or something. So I would say Grenada has to be treated as a special case because they did not have any military resistance. So I don't think you can compare a country with no military to Venezuela. So is there a country that had a military? Some people are saying Kosovo and I'm seeing other…
View segment →figured it out. Now there was also this viral video that went around that put together all the little bits of his speech in which he seemed to be slurring or searching for a word. If you see them all together it looks like he has a mental problem or he's just very old or it really does sell a pictu…
View segment →re they only gonna have two opinions? Just two opinions? Pro-statue anti-statue? Now if you've been alive in this world for more than 10 freaking minutes and you've interacted with humans you know that the number of opinions at Charlottesville was probably closer to a thousand. Right I'm exaggerati…
View segment →ignorant in the sense that we're all ignorant about something. You know that everybody has something they don't know. I mean that's just normal texture in the world. So I'm not calling Chris Cuomo dumb. I'm saying that his question is a legitimate question meaning he doesn't know. So the fact that h…
View segment →t they say is not true. Now on the other side there are two giant lies that the press has been telling. One is the fine people lie that they continue to tell and one is the Russia collusion lie which they continue to sell indirectly as they are today. If you do a search on fine people you get a mil…
View segment →tion so you can say to yourself okay we really don't know what it looks like in 40 years. There's just no way to predict that. So I say go hard on everything and I'm gonna go watch Bill Barr and I will talk to you later. Bye.
View segment →Bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. Let's add in some new instruments so that my theme song has a little more character. Drums. Hey everybody, come on in. Tyler and now Fonz. Oh, and Baby, and Null Hypothesis. That's a funny name for your parents to give you. No Hypothesis. Well, I'm glad you're all here because you know what time it is. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, and it's time for the simultaneous sip.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, some kind of tankard or stein or chalice, perhaps a thermos. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure that I call the simultaneous sip. Mmm.
All right. I have a question which has been bugging me all night, and I can't wait to ask you, so I'll be looking at the comments for your answers. So on Twitter I presented a challenge. It's a psychological challenge and something you can do at home, and I'm wondering if any of you have done it yet.
The challenge is to find somebody who believes the Charlottesville fine people hoax, someone who believes that the president actually called the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville fine people. Find somebody who believes that's absolutely true, and then show them the transcript. But here's the key part: ask them to read the transcript, the specific sentence in which Trump said, "I condemn totally the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists."
And my hypothesis is that if you ask somebody to actually read it aloud to you, that they won't be able to do it. And when I say they won't be able to do it, I don't mean that they'll be weasels and they'll change the topic or they'll simply claim it's not true. Those would be sort of normal things. My hypothesis is that they actually physically can't do it. Let me say that again. The hypothesis is that somebody who is very invested in that being true will not be physically able to read it out loud, and that there will be a cognitive phenomenon which, as a hypnotist, I've seen many times, but most of you have either never seen it or never noticed it when you saw it.
So as a hypnotist this is a very predictable thing which, you know, in a lot of different contexts I can manufacture this effect, but most of you have never seen it and you'll never see a situation probably this perfect, as this clean and simple, in which you can just say, all right, I'm gonna induce intense cognitive dissonance. I'm gonna make your worldview that you think is solid and definite, I'm gonna make it dissolve right in front of you, and then I'm going to watch your reaction. You'll never get that opportunity in the normal world, but you have one.
So if you saw my Twitter feed, you saw the transcript is there. You can just print it out or show it on your phone and say to somebody, I want you to just see if you could read this out loud. I believe that they will look at it and they will immediately find an excuse. That they're busy. They will tell you that I'm not going to play your little game. They will say, what kind of trick are you up to? They will say, well this doesn't really matter because it's about something else. But the hypothesis is that they would be unable to actually voice the words on the page.
Now that doesn't mean it will work every time, but I would guess something like 80 to 90 percent of the time. Somebody said, I tried it. It's true. It will freak you out. It will freak you out to see the person read the sentence and then watch their eyes, watch their brain reboot.
So what you should see, I'll do an impression. All right, so this would be somebody who is not experiencing cognitive dissonance. They still disagree with you but they don't have any cognitive dissonance. It's like, all right, I'll humor you. I'll read it. Blah blah blah blah blah. And they read it and then they would tell you why it's wrong or why they don't believe it or whatever. That would not be cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance would look like this. That's what it would look like. You would see somebody in a state of sort of mental confusion and panic where it would make them temporarily unable to speak. So look for temporarily unable to speak. That's your tell-tale sign of cognitive dissonance. Once you see that in this controlled exercise, you're gonna get closer to seeing the world the way I see it as a trained hypnotist.
Once you're a trained hypnotist you can see people's brains rebooting where before you didn't notice it. You just thought they were pausing to think or something. But once you can recognize it, it changes everything about the way you see the world because you'll see people getting triggered into it, dealing with it, and then coming out of it. And it will be a completely different filter on the world.
All right. We want to talk about, I know you want to talk about, the Barr situation now. So the story is the fake news of the day is that Mueller allegedly wrote a letter to Bob Barr saying that Mueller disagrees with how Barr summarized the report. Now of course the news is all fake because apparently there is no letter in which Mueller said that he disagrees with what Barr said. In other words, there's no suggestion that what Barr said was inaccurate.
The real story, which they don't quite say, at least not in these words, is that the real issue is that the way Bob Barr summarized it left out some texture so that it would be misleading to the public. It wasn't inaccurate, but the public, and the way the press is handling it, mostly the press, the press is handling it in a way that didn't seem true to the underlying stuff. To which I say, what did you expect from a summary?
Now I'm a writer, so maybe this is just glaringly obvious to me because I quite often create summaries of larger bodies of my own work. Now if you create a summary of your own work, which I do on a routine basis as a writer, does the summary capture all the goodness that you would very, very much like everybody to see? Well no. How could a summary be as accurate as the underlying body of information? That's what a summary is. There's no such thing as a summary that has all the details of the original. The original thing. I mean you can imagine some special case where that might be true, but with all of the complexity of the underlying stuff, was there any chance that a summary could capture it as well as the author of all the underlying stuff believes should have been captured? That wasn't a thing.
So if somebody says to you Mueller wrote a letter and he's complaining that there's oxygen in the world, would that be headline news? Because you'd look at yourself and say, well there's always sort of oxygen. I think oxygen is the basic quality of the world. I don't know that that's news, right? It wouldn't be news because it's what everybody knows is the obvious reality you live in. So if somebody says I don't believe that the summary captured all the nuance of the original work, have they said anything? Is that anything? Because we've already seen the underlying work. We don't have to wonder.
So I turned on, you know, I caught this story at the end of yesterday and really paid attention this morning. I woke up and I said, oh I'm gonna dig into this a little bit before my Periscope, and we're gonna find out what's the issue. So I go to CNN and I start clicking on some links to find out what is the problem. What specifically did Mueller say is getting wrong? Not in terms of what Barr said wrong but in terms of how the way Barr said it has allowed the media to misrepresent it, I guess. So I guess the question is what exactly is Mueller complaining about?
So I thought, well that will be obviously in the article, right? If I read an article about this story it's going to tell me what specifically Mueller had a problem with that Barr said wrong or where the media is getting it wrong. I couldn't find it. Did anybody find it? Now it might be there but it seems so hidden in the way that they're covering the story. They're covering it like it's gossip. They're covering it like the details of what it is that they're differing on, if anything, don't really matter. They're covering it like it's a personality against a personality. They're covering it like it's a team sport. They're covering it like it's a he-said-she-said situation. I couldn't even tell what the problem was, and they seem to be deeply trying to manufacture something out of nothing.
Now of course on the other side, you know, so I flip over to Fox News just to see what the other world looks like, and in the other world they're saying there's nothing here, there's nothing here.
Now as far as I can tell, the closest I can get to what the issue is is about the legal technicalities of whether there was something that would qualify as obstruction of justice. There didn't seem to be any disagreement on the fact that Trump was not involved in any Russia collusion. That part seems to be both sides agree. But Mueller is still saying that it sounds like there may be, the way the press is saying that the president, at least the press on the right, they're saying that the president is essentially cleared of obstruction of justice. And Mueller, I think this is as close as I can get to what's really happening, this might be wrong so fact-check on this, but I think Mueller was indicating that you could maybe make a case of obstruction but that in this special case because it's a sitting president that Mueller wasn't sure if there were, you know, that the rules against indictment, etc., whether that made enough of a difference. And then on top of that, although they're not supposed to take into account that the underlying charge, the collusion, wasn't true, because keep in mind you can be found guilty of obstructing justice even in the situation where there was no justice to obstruct, meaning that there was no crime. So there was still a justice system that you could obstruct but there was no justice being lost because there was no crime that anybody was trying to get away with.
So I think the questions are something about whether you can indict a sitting president and then the second one is whether the president just doing his normal job under the Constitution could ever be interpreted, this is the Alan Dershowitz twist, couldn't, not twist but his explanation, that could a president ever be charged with a crime for doing the ordinary things that you do in your job, which is hiring and firing, directing people to do things or directing them not to do things.
So those are the things that were, that Mueller apparently, and I might be getting ahead of myself here so please bring me back if I've gone too far, but it looks like Mueller said yeah there are little factual things which if he were not the president, that's the key, if he were not the president doing the job of a president under the Constitution and if there had been a crime which there wasn't, which isn't the important part, and if you could indict a president under those conditions you might think that this could have gone forward as a case. But given that he was the president and we don't indict presidents and he was just doing the normal things under a president's job, it's a little too complicated for me, Mueller, to make the call on this. So I'm just going to lay out the information for the public and for the Attorney General, mostly for the Attorney General, and then the Attorney General decides what the public sees and then the Attorney General will handle it from there.
Now did what I just described say that the president was cleared of obstruction? No. No. Yeah I can't go so far into blind punditry that I'm gonna say that that equals cleared of obstruction. But he did say there's no Russia collusion. And so I'm not a lawyer. Well I guess I'm not a judge. I'm not a lawyer. If you tell me, citizen of the United States, what we want is justice. That's the main thing. We're not a country who needs to obsess over dotting the i's and the details of stuff if it conflicts with justice. If you had a choice of following the law or achieving justice and those are your only two choices, if you follow the law you don't get justice but if you ignore the law you get justice, which is a far higher standard, which would you do? You're an American and you're talking about another American citizen, one of your teammates, somebody on your team, somebody you are tasked to protect. And the law says something bad is going to happen that isn't fair. But if you do something that's fair it might not be exactly technically compatible with law. Which one? Which way do you go? If you're an American, justice every time.
So Mueller has made a case that on the details, if you were just to ignore everything you felt about what's right, if you were to ignore everything you felt about what's just, if you were to ignore everything about what's good for the country, if you could ignore all of those things, on some technical level there might be enough stuff that you could indict. Could you ever get a conviction? Probably no, I would think so. Can you imagine finding 12 jurors who would convict the president for doing his job and allegedly obstructing the investigation into the biggest witch hunt in history about a crime that the president alone knew he did not commit? I mean he's the only one who knew for sure that there was no crime. So there's no way this ever in any real world could have turned into a court case with a conviction. You could not find in any circumstance 12 jurors who would agree, oh yeah let's convict the president who has the best economy in the world and is keeping us out of wars. Let's convict him for a technical violation when he was trying to avoid a witch hunt into something that wasn't a crime. No way. No frickin' way.
But having said that, was it enough with what Mueller found to get an indictment? And if you don't know, the old saying is you could indict a ham sandwich. So it's really easy to get an indictment. You just have to have a pretty strong suggestion that there's something worthy of talking about. That's my legal explanation.
So when if Mueller is complaining that the public and the politicians are over-interpreting his finding, that's probably true. I think that's true. Because if you're just talking about could he get indicted if you were not a president just doing his normal job, I'd say probably yes, don't you think? If he were not the president, if he were guilty which he wasn't, you know that matters in terms of how people feel about it, not so much the law. And if he could be indicted and all those things that were true, probably Mueller has a case. So on a very technical Boy Scout according to the law, I don't want my work to be misinterpreted, I can say Mueller would have a point. It's a trivial point. It's an unimportant point. It's completely irrelevant to anything that will ever be the ultimate outcome of all this stuff. But it's a point.
Now let me give you another Gell-Mann look on this. So Gell-Mann was a physicist who famously noticed that when there was a story about physics, my topic that he understood better than most people in the world, he could tell that the story was usually wrong. But if he looked at a story on some other topic in which he was not an expert, Gell-Mann, that's his last name, two words I think, he couldn't tell but he believed the other stories even though a hundred percent of the stories that he understood their topic better than the news understood it, he knew that they were wrong. So he was saying, okay what are the chances that these other stories are all right when the only thing I understand is always wrong? So that observation should tell you what to believe.
All right. So in this case if somebody writes a summary about something this is very similar to when there are news stories about me. So I have read maybe, if I had to put an estimate, I would say I've read maybe a thousand news stories about myself over 30 years of being a cartoonist. Of those thousand-ish stories I've read about myself they're all summaries because you can't write an article about a person that captures all of the complexity of their life. That's not a thing. It's always a summary. How often are the summaries wrong? Pretty much all the time. Pretty much all the time. Now they're not wrong like necessarily a lie. They're not always wrong because a fact got wrong although that's very common. It's very common to have basic facts wrong maybe two-thirds of the time. But the fact is that when I see summaries of me I know they're all inaccurate in the way that I would want that story to be told.
So of course Mueller thinks that a summary doesn't capture everything and of course he thinks the public and the press are taking it too far or taking it out of context. There was no other option. It was a summary. There is no other option. Of course it doesn't capture the flavor of the original.
All right, enough about that. And as always I always caution you to wait for Alan Dershowitz's opinion on this whole thing. If Alan Dershowitz says that everything I just told you is a bunch of BS you should immediately change your opinion to whatever Alan Dershowitz says. So wait for him to weigh in and that'll tell us if this is something or nothing. But it feels like desperation. We've got to find something. We've been so embarrassed. We've gotta find some claim.
Now let's talk about some other things. Let's talk about Venezuela. You know it seems to me that the Monroe Doctrine is going to rule the day in that you know we can watch Venezuela as long as we need to until we don't need to. But I'm pretty sure that the Monroe Doctrine, meaning that the United States is going to take care of business in its own hemisphere, you know whatever it takes we're gonna take care of business. I think the Russians know that. I think the Cubans know that. I think Venezuela knows that. But we're not going to do it prematurely. We probably won't do it just for humanitarian reasons because there's already a humanitarian crisis obviously. And as Tucker Carlson pointed out on his show I think it was last time, when has the United States ever militarily intervened in another country to fix things and it all worked out well? And I'm not a historian and I thought to myself it's a really no example of that. Now I'm willing to believe that's true because I can't think of an example. Can any of you think of an example?
And it could be you know some South American country we messed with in the fifties. Somebody's saying South Korea. No. Well you know you can't count conquered countries. Germany and Japan. Kosovo. Grenada. Special cases. Panama. Panama is probably, I don't know what's the situation in Panama right now? What's the situation in Grenada right now? Yeah so I wouldn't include Japan and Germany because we went to war with them because it was a war. So I would not include countries where we went to war for war reasons and then we figured out what to do after the war was over. That's a different situation. But Grenada we actually invaded. That was like what an eight hour war or something. So I would say Grenada has to be treated as a special case because they did not have any military resistance. So I don't think you can compare a country with no military to Venezuela.
So is there a country that had a military? Some people are saying Kosovo and I'm seeing other people saying that's not a good example. Somebody saying Liberia. South Korea. Some are saying all right Panama. Some people are saying Guam. Somebody's asking I don't know about that. Nicaragua in the early 1900s. I don't know about that. I'm not debunking these by the way. Somebody said Israel. Israel is an interesting example. Chile. All right. Argentina versus the Brits. I don't know if that's appropriate. Kuwait. Oh yeah Kuwait was really not, Kuwait was not a situation of, yeah maybe that's a good example although you could argue that that led to the Iraq war eventually you know indirectly. All right so that's an open question. I'm not a historian enough to know if we've ever intervened and gotten a good result.
But then I heard, so this is funny, this is what I heard. We don't want to intervene. We don't want to intervene because if there's any intervening it should be the countries bordering Venezuela. So it's going to be far better for the United States if the United States doesn't intervene but those bordering countries, maybe they get a little more involved because it's literally more their backyard than it is ours or literally right there. To which I say where do you think they're getting their military advice and their military weapons and their aid? Are we just gonna give that stuff to the neighboring countries to employ in Venezuela? Yeah it's, yeah. And then somebody else says our special forces are there. Is there any chance that we're not already there with military? Don't you think that there's a hundred percent chance that some form of our military, probably special ops, is already there? I'm pretty sure we're already there. Do you think that our special forces are not already preparing a kill shot for Maduro? Do you think we're not on the ground figuring out where he is at all times? Do you think we're not tracking their digital communications so that we know who's doing what everywhere? Do you think that our special forces can't shine a laser on Maduro's office and have a missile go through his window anytime we want? I'm pretty sure we're kind of ready but not with uniformed forces on the ground I'm sure.
Let's drink to that. And so this brings me back to my idea that I often bring up. It seems to me that one of the things the world needs is a government in a box. And by government in a box I mean a country that has an organization within the country, and I'll just use an example. Let's say it's Switzerland. Let's say Switzerland decides to form a unit that might even be a commercial unit, doesn't even have to work for the government, that will go into a country as advisors and they will become the temporary government for let's say three years or one year or whatever it is. And all they do is they go in and they set up a new form of government and they're not even part of the country. They're literally advisers brought in to form a government and they are actually the president. So the president of the country would be just some Swiss guy that you know comes with this organization. They would set up a government and get it working and then they would transform that government back into a local government. So they would set up elections. They would make sure the elections are fair. You know they'd work with the government but basically it would just be government in a box and it would come in.
Now you would not do this unless invited. So in other words it could be the way to settle a dispute where there are two sides and they can just never agree. So you bring in the government in a box and the first thing that the government in a box does is they set up a safe passage for the dictator. There's always a dictator, right? You know all these problems end up with there's a strong person, strong man, strong woman in charge. And that person if they lose control of their country is probably going to be dead or in jail. So you can never get a dictator to leave if the alternative is they and their family are all killed. So you don't have a way to solve the problem because there's no exit strategy for the dictator.
So the government in a box would come and say look we've already secured an island estate for you in another place or we'll set up a situation where you can have your own little area in the country and we'll just you know make sure that nobody gets out and away gets in but we'll somehow create a safe path for the dictator to get to a better end state than dead. And just let them live out their life even with money. You know they could live a good life just in isolation. They don't have to be isolated. They could have visitors and stuff but they just can't have political influence anymore.
Somebody says use Bitcoin. Yes I think there's some kind of cryptocurrency layer to this where if the economy is broken, if you know if they just need some way to have some real money that they can buy and sell things, there might be a crypto element to that. I don't know enough to know that that makes sense yet anyway. So we need a government in a box. It probably needs to be something like in Switzerland because nobody would expect a Swiss team to come in and for any kind of long period of time be the ruling party of another country. Nobody would put up with that. So you probably at the minimum you probably have to have the military in favor of it because the military could get rid of the government in a box at the same time that they would have to be the ones that had invited them in. So it probably has to be supported by the military at a minimum. Anyway that's one idea.
Let's talk about some other things. Let's talk about Joe Biden. Okay the funniest thing about Joe Biden, and there are a lot of funny things about Joe Biden, I don't know where to start. So he was asked, the human gaffe machine I call him, he was asked by Robin Roberts if he had a slogan for his campaign. And here's the funny part. He didn't have a slogan. I guess he hadn't thought of it. He hadn't thought of a slogan. Come on that's sort of running for president 101. You gotta have a slogan.
And so he tries to come up with a slogan on the fly and he goes, make America moral again. And when Joe Biden is trying to act extra sincere his eyes get really close and he leans in. Yeah I'm so sincere. Making America moral again. See the sincerity? Look at these eyes. Elizabeth there's very sincere. Close these here. I'm more sincere than you could ever imagine. Look at my sincerity. And then of course he didn't realize that his, yeah that the acronym for make America moral again is MAMA. Perfect. Milk America. I get that's funny anyway.
So that's the first funny thing. Second funny thing, did you see the clip of him awkwardly hugging Hillary Clinton? It looks like there are four other, I can show but all right let me see if I can show it to you here. Can you see it? So he's hugging her and watch her give, she's giving him the tap on the shoulder. Tap tap. Okay let me go. Tap tap tap. Let me go. And then she just puts her hands down and just hangs there like the ultimate sign that let me go. And then she goes back to tap tap tap and let me go let me go. You can let me go now. Hey look at it I'm just hanging here. Let me go let me go let me go. Now that clip was actually looping so it looked more exaggerated. It wasn't real life but this was just an introduction to my actual funniest point.
The funny point is have you seen the latest video of him campaigning and he's going up on stage and everybody, when you go up on stage that's usually when there's some handshakes and some kisses and some hugs, and he doesn't know how to handle himself because he knows that everybody is watching how he touches people. So watch it. It's frickin' hilarious. Yeah if you're looking for it it's funny. If you're not looking for it you might not notice. But he doesn't know how to interact with people because he had 76 years of interacting a certain very physical way and now that he knows he can't do that he's, you could tell that he's completely out of his element because he's trying to navigate a MeToo world where you can't touch anybody. And so he looks awkward to me because he hasn't figured it out.
Now there was also this viral video that went around that put together all the little bits of his speech in which he seemed to be slurring or searching for a word. If you see them all together it looks like he has a mental problem or he's just very old or it really does sell a picture of him having some problems. I would say that's misleading because you could probably do that same clip with all of my Periscopes. If you took any of my Periscopes and took all the little times I'm searching for a word or I slur a word or I say a word wrong it would look just like that. Maybe it's because I'm old anyway. I wouldn't make too much of it because I think you could do that with anybody.
But here's the other funny part and this is the best part of all. So when we heard that Trump was calling him Sleepy Joe, Sleepy Joe Biden, yeah there was some disagreement about whether that was a good or bad nickname because people said well creepy would be better but I think the president wisely stayed away from creepy. And I think it was wise because the president has his own you know grab him by the whatever stuff going on and so if he used the creepy label it would probably be thrown back at him. So I think it was good that he avoided that. Sleepy is one that the president can win every time.
Because let me just give you this scenario and if this doesn't make you laugh you're dead inside. All right so now Sleepy Joe has to deal with the fact that he has to deal with this label. So he has to act as whatever is the opposite of sleepy when he was onstage. Do you think he was thinking that he had to look like he was presenting a lot of energy? Oh yeah he was thinking it. He was thinking it hard. Because if he had done anything that looked low energy it would have been all the news. That would have been the news. It wouldn't have mattered what he said that night. If his energy was low in any way that you could even interpret it as low even if it had not been that would have been the only story.
So Trump by now is absolutely in his head. He's so far into Biden's head because now everything that Sleepy Joe does has to counter the idea that he has low energy. What does that make you do to overcompensate? Well the first thing he does to make him overcompensate is he probably has to ramp up his energy a little higher than normal for these events and it almost certainly would make him miss peak. Because if you're adding a little bit too much energy compared to the energy that you normally add, and he I think he actually has good energy but it's a great political argument against him it seems to me, then maybe that could have been a little bit of what made him miss peak. Then maybe he was trying a little too hard.
Or how about this? Do you think that Biden got a good night's sleep the night before he gave his speech? When he was going to sleep the night before and you know Joe lays down and he's like ah tomorrow I'm gonna announce for president. I've got to save the world. He's calling me Sleepy Joe. Can't sleep. Can't sleep. Don't sleep. I'm not gonna get eight hours tonight. I'm gonna get five hours tonight because I'm not Sleepy Joe. I'm not Sleepy Joe. He's not gonna make me Sleepy Joe. I'm gonna get five hours a night. That's all I need. And I'm not gonna let anybody see me take a nap ever. I'm never gonna go home early. I'm not gonna cancel an event because I'm tired. I'm not Sleepy Joe.
So I think that President Trump has used what I would call a sports trash-talk model that is very active, meaning that it's gonna make his opponent respond to it. It's an active insult. I think imagine if you will President Trump has a long day and he wants to take a nap. How does he do it? He probably says something like this. Can you clear my schedule after eight o'clock tonight? I want to spend some alone time or some family time. And the president goes off to his private quarters and goes to sleep early. I don't know yet if he ever goes to sleep early. I suspect he doesn't but he could and nobody would have any question about it because his brand is high energy. So if the president goes and privately goes into his private quarters you just think well it might be a sleep. It might be having some family time. You wouldn't think anything of it. So the president could sleep as much as he wants because his brand allows it.
Now imagine that you're Sleepy Joe and you've got all these advisers and people. You don't know them all. You don't necessarily quite trust and yet you don't know who's leaking to the media. You don't know if you have a mole. You don't know what stories are gonna get out. And you're tired. You can't say you're tired. You can't tell your closest adviser you're tired because that's gonna come out someday. You can't say cancel my events this afternoon. I just need to catch up. Can't say that. You can't not take on an event even though it would exhaust you because you don't want to look like you couldn't take on an event because it would exhaust you. If you can't even go to sleep early. Suppose it's 11 o'clock at night and the advisers are still talking with Biden and what he wants to say is I need some sleep. I don't know if he can. I don't know if he can say that. I think he stays up to midnight so that they leave on their own so that he doesn't have to tell people he's tired.
So I think the president is so deeply in Sleepy Joe's head that I'm gonna make a prediction. Are you ready for this? If this is as actively powerful framing as I think it is he could exhaust Biden before Election Day if Biden makes it that far. I don't know. I'm thinking he probably won't but if he does make it that far in two years he will have run himself ragged at age 78 or 76 or whatever the hell he is. And the odds of him not stumbling or getting sick or showing some effect of all that work, it's pretty low. So it's possible that Trump has presented a ticking time bomb of a kill shot. And I don't know if we've seen this one before. This is one that has a timer on it because on day one when you heard Sleepy Joe didn't you have the same impression I did which is I don't know he doesn't look sleepy to me. My impression is sort of the opposite. He feels like he's a pretty high energy guy. And I said before I give him very high marks for fitness. Have you seen Joe Biden? Like he is really, at least in terms of his weight and his persona, and he's obviously had a lot of work done on his face and stuff like that but you know I don't like to criticize people for that. Those are personal choices. But I would say he's the opposite of sleepy-looking. But it's got a timer on it and the longer he tries to prove he's not sleepy the more he's gonna wear himself into the ground. The more he's gonna expose himself to mistakes that he might not have made. So I think it could be brilliant but we won't know. We're gonna have to wait and see if that little seed takes root.
All right. I should mention again so yesterday I wrote a blog post. I have not written a blog post in a long time because I've been doing the Periscopes and working on books and stuff. But I thought it was time to take everything about the fine people hoax and put it into a written form because written form just travels better. It can be more viral to more people because people will read things they won't watch on video. And I realized that there was such a consistency to how people responded when they're revealed to have been hoaxed and that they believe the president really said that there were, that the neo-Nazis were fine people. If they believed that and then he's shown the transcript and it's not true they almost always go down what I call the hoax funnel.
They start with this big claim. The president said neo-Nazis are fine people. They show him the transcript. They go okay it says exactly the opposite but he said, and they always revert to what were these other people these fine people? Why were they marching with Nazis? Huh. Can't be a fine person if you're marching with a Nazi. And so in my blog post I talked about how that's actually a hallucination. There is no claim and there's no reporting that all the people there were marching. In fact it was sort of a chaos. There were some marchers and then there were all kinds of other people doing all kinds of other things in street clothes. Who knows what those people were thinking or why they were there? Nobody did a survey. Nobody talked to them all. Nobody knows. So worst case scenario the president made an assumption but he also detailed this assumption. He said I believe there were people there about the statue. So he said that clearly in the same context as he was talking about the fine people on both sides. So it's obviously meant both sides of the statue controversy.
Anyway my observation is that people start with the big hoax and you can debunk each of the lesser hoaxes as they retreat down the funnel until you get to the end of the funnel and it usually turns into questions. If you can turn somebody from a statement of fact, the president said neo-Nazis are fine people, that's a statement it's not true, you debunk it they go down to another statement. Well those fine people were marching with Nazis. But that's not true. There's no evidence, no suggestion, no reporting and all the reporting says that people were not marching with Nazis. There were just lots of people there. So that's not true. Once you debunk that you end up all the time and you could do this at home. The person who's having their worldview annihilated will eventually end up with questions. Look the question form means they've already given up on the statement. So they've already accepted that the president did not say neo-Nazis are fine people. The transcript says that clearly he did not say that. And they end up with so why would these people who were fine people attend an event obviously organized by neo-Nazis and racists?
And as I write in my blog post in order to ask that question you would have to know nothing about reality or human beings. All right so the question is just freaking dumb. Because if you take a hundred human beings, 100 Americans I like to use as my example, you take any 100 Americans and even if they go to the same place for the same event are they going to have 100, are they going to have just two different opinions? If you take a hundred people and put them someplace that has two sides you know pro-statue anti-statue are they only gonna have two opinions? Just two opinions? Pro-statue anti-statue?
Now if you've been alive in this world for more than 10 freaking minutes and you've interacted with humans you know that the number of opinions at Charlottesville was probably closer to a thousand. Right I'm exaggerating but there were probably every flavor of opinion there. There were people who were complete racists but don't you know there were some people who were not racist who would never date somebody of a specific other ethnicity. Well sort of racist. But are those the same? Well you could argue that are the same or different but my point is there was probably every opinion that you could possibly imagine. If there are enough people you're gonna have every freaking opinion. And I would say that's one thing that you could bet on and win every time.
Now was this the one time the hundreds of people showed up in the same physical geography, is this the one time in the history of the world that they only brought two opinions with them? Pro-racism anti-racism? No not, there's no chance of that. So the idea that people came for the same reason or the same understanding or even that they looked at the same flyer and had the same interpretation of what was going on. Some people looked at it and said oh it's organized by racists. I guess I'm a racist so I'll go. I'm sure people said that. Don't you think that other people guaranteed because there were a lot of people who were talking about it and of all the hundreds of thousands of people who saw the flyer on social media don't you think there were any who said oh it's a thing about Unite the Right. It's about statues. It looks like some Nazis will be there but why do I care? There are gonna be a lot of people there. You know there are gonna be people on both sides. You know there's gonna be people with every opinion but this flyer is telling me that definitely some of them are Nazis. I don't think it's a Nazi event. I just like the racists are showing up because why wouldn't they? It's you know this is right in their sweet spot the statue controversy.
So could you show any flyer to a hundred people and have them all come down on the same opinion given that the flyer was not, it didn't say hey we're racists. It just listed speakers and had images and some statutes. Do you think you could get a hundred people to look at that flyer and have the same opinion? Now not in any world that you've ever lived in can you get a hundred people to have the same opinion about anything.
So the president's assumption that could have been right or wrong and it doesn't matter because he stated his assumption. His assumption was that there were people there just about the statue. And then he talked about you know his belief based on the assumption. The worst case scenario is that the president assumed there were multiple opinions and it's the first time in human history that's ever not been true. That's the worst thing that you could say about this is that the president made the most common assumption you could make that there were a lot of different opinions there and it was the one time in human history it wasn't true. And there's no reporting on whether it was true. We can't know what everybody was thinking.
So anyway I put together these thoughts debunking every part of the hoax funnel so that you can use the same structure to drive people down the funnel. The fun is watching people go down the funnel so consistently because the direction they take always ends up with, and then I think Chris Cuomo will end up with the final weakest question which was oh why did the people who showed up not leave immediately if there were any fine people who showed up once they saw what was happening why didn't they leave immediately?
Now that's a question not a statement and it's a question based on ignorance and it's a question based on lack of imagination. The fact that Chris Cuomo doesn't know any possible reasons why that could be true doesn't tell you anything. It tells you that Chris Cuomo is ignorant. And I don't mean that as an insult. I mean ignorant in the sense that we're all ignorant about something. You know that everybody has something they don't know. I mean that's just normal texture in the world. So I'm not calling Chris Cuomo dumb. I'm saying that his question is a legitimate question meaning he doesn't know. So the fact that he doesn't know the answer to a question doesn't tell you anything about what happened. It just tells you Chris Cuomo didn't know the answer to the question.
Can we imagine any way to explain Chris Cuomo's question? Why would fine people show up and not immediately leave? How about this answer Chris Cuomo? How do you know they didn't immediately leave? How do you know they didn't show up see what was happening and turn and leave? That's not in evidence. We have no idea how long people stayed.
I've also suggested that if I were a fine person and I showed up there and once I was there I realized that there was going to be a fight between Antifa who I hate with a passion because they're literally masked armed people who would like to hurt me personally. If I saw that they were about to get in a fight with neo-Nazis who I hate with a passion as much as I hate Antifa, I'm making a moral equivalence yes I am. I'm making a moral equivalence. They're both completely bad. If you're saying if anybody's saying one of them is a little worse than the other well I don't think you should show your face in society if you're gonna make a fine differentiation between the masked and armed Antifa thugs who want to overthrow the government and beat me to death. If you say well they're not so bad. I mean that's not so bad. You know they're at least they're against racism. I mean they got that goal in mind so they're not completely bad. They want to beat you to death with clubs but you know they have these good parts too. If you're saying that don't talk in public. Seriously you you're just embarrassing yourself if you're defending one of those sides as being a little more moral than the other.
Anyway if I showed up there as a fine person and I saw that these two groups that I hate the most were gonna fight each other with sticks and beating each other you couldn't get me to leave. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? You think I would leave? No. If I ever felt physically in danger I would of course but apparently the police were protecting the people who were fighting and letting the people fight who wanted to fight and there weren't guns they were just beating each other. So you could kind of watch the show. Would I have left that? No frickin' way. I don't hate anybody more than I hate Antifa and neo-Nazis. To me they're tens and tens right? The most hated most worthy of you know kind of condemnation of any group. If you can show me a picture of them beating each other with clubs I'm all in on that. I want to see that.
All right so anyway if you read the blog post and if you would be nice enough to tweet that around it's pinned to the top of my Twitter feed so you can find it easily.
All right. Mike Sorensen had an interesting tweet in which he was talking about how the stress in the world is worse than ever at the same time that the world is better than ever. The stress that people are feeling about the world is the worst at the same time the world has never been better. I mean not even close. We are at levels humanity has never never seen. This is the best the world has ever been by a pretty good measure right? And he pointed out that he was nice enough to point out that I had predicted that we were entering now, I called it the golden age, when all of the real problems were solved or on the way to being solved. The real problems being you know poverty, war, crime, you know the real problems. And that they would be replaced by psychological problems. In other words the way we were thinking about our world was getting worse at the same time the world itself was getting way better. And so we're seeing that start to develop. So Mike was nice enough to call that out as a prediction that looks like it's heading toward fruition.
Now apparently Trump is considering designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group. And now the pushback to that is that the Muslim Brotherhood is not just one organization that's doing some bad stuff. There are people in the Muslim Brotherhood who were terrorists. That seems to be just a fact. Nobody's questioning except maybe the Muslim Brotherhood doesn't call themselves terrorists but as I understand it it's sort of an umbrella term and there are lots of people who say they are Muslim Brotherhood and especially in some countries where it just doesn't mean that. So there are people in other countries who are just innocent Muslim Brotherhood people who abhor violence. They're against violence. They're against terrorism but they still like being whatever you know that label. They like to be part of the Muslim Brotherhood for whatever the other benefits the organization presents.
And so the idea was that it would be bad to designate the organization as a terrorist group because it would have a bad effect on these people who really are on our side you know in the sense that they're peaceful and they don't want terrorism so they're marginally on our side. The same interests. To which I say that's our problem. If you can't tell me that if a nice person, I mean the Democrats have just finished telling us that if somebody who thinks they're a nice person marches with neo-Nazis well they're sort of neo-Nazis and I agree with that which is why that wasn't relevant in Charlottesville because nobody is making the case that they were actually marching with the neo-Nazis the people who were fine people.
But I think it must be said that if you identify yourself as a member of a group with known terrorists I don't think it matters that you personally are not in favor of terrorism does it? Because you can just change your membership. You can just say oh shoot now that you've designated them a terrorist group I denounce my membership. I'll join another group. I don't think we should see that as our problem. I think that we should very much encourage the good people who are nonviolent to maybe disavow the group. That's not asking a lot.
So without knowing the details of this it would be dangerous to have a strong opinion on this because I don't think any of us know all the nuance of the situation. But if the only problem is that there are a bunch of people that we really genuinely like and they're basically on our side but they call themselves Muslim Brotherhood for you know nonviolent reasons I think that's just something they need to work out. I don't think for a second that should influence what we do. Somebody else's decision to join a despicable group should not be determining our foreign national interests at all. Now I know I'm oversimplifying but just on that one point I have a pretty strong opinion but there may still be good reasons not to do it. I'm sure that'll get worked out in the conversations.
All right. Oh so I have a challenge question. I'm gonna ask this question as if I know the answer but I really don't because there might actually be an answer to this question that I can't imagine. So I'm going to open it up to the public and see if you can come up with an answer. President Trump has been blamed for or credited with racking up ten thousand lies. Ten thousand lies. Now I'm assuming that since he started office now I'm assuming that lie in this context is anything that doesn't pass the fact-checking and I'm assuming that ten thousand means repeating the same thing that they don't think is true more than once. So I think there would, it's not ten thousand individual lies I assume. I assume right? Check me on that. I think it's 10,000 things he said that they say aren't true but that would include a lot of repeats of the same thing that they say is not true.
Now on the other side there are two giant lies that the press has been telling. One is the fine people lie that they continue to tell and one is the Russia collusion lie which they continue to sell indirectly as they are today. If you do a search on fine people you get a million hits. Almost every one of those hits is a lie about the president because they would tell the story the wrong way almost all of them. And if you do a search on Russia collusion you get 1.4 million hits on Google. I'm guessing at least a million of them are blaming the president for being the Russian spy or a Russian puppet or something. So if you took those two lies, the fine people lie, and you added it together with the Russia collusion lie that's just two things. Imagine all the lies told about this president. That's just two of them and you have two million lies. Two million.
But here's what I'd like to suggest. I want you to see if I'm wrong on this. In fact check madness it seems to me that the ten thousand lies that the president has told are almost entirely what I would call sales lies. In other words they're there in the service of selling something and for the most part what he's selling is make America great again. So yes the thing he's lying about gets you to a better economy. Do you feel bad about that? If the thing he's lying about reduces ISIS recruiting is that bad?
So let me give you the specific examples. If the president says the economy is doing better or that his administration has done more things than he's really done or that the cutting of the regulations is more important to the economy than he says or that his contribution to the stock price going up is far more than actually the evidence suggests, what is the outcome of all of those lies about the economy? Well the outcome is that the economy improves. That is the point of those lies. The point of saying everything is great is to make people think our economy is great so I guess I should invest and when they invest it makes the economy great. When he says I mean we're hiring like crazy and employment's up and everything's good these are good lies. These are salesperson lies because the salesperson might lie to you but you still could end up buying the thing you wanted.
All right so there are lots of lies that are hyperbole. They're exaggeration or they're overstating but they're for a very clear positive purpose. Now of course it helps him get elected. It helps him be president etc. And I'm not minimizing the fact that there's self-interest involved but the lies are very very positive. They're so positive that you could argue that the president's lies about the economy are the best thing that have ever happened to the country. Think about that. The president's lies about how good the economy is are literally making the economy better. I mean that's not an exaggeration. That is a fact I would die on. You could put a bullet to my head and say Scott say with confidence that the president's lies about the economy are actually good for the economy and I would say I'll say it right now. Our president's lies are good for the economy. Okay I would put a bullet in my mouth and tell you that. There's no frickin' question that his lies helped the economy.
Let's take another topic. ISIS. So the president said you know ISIS is defeated blah blah blah. Was that an overclaim? Absolutely it was definitely more than what was true. It was hyperbole. It was maybe doesn't pass the fact-checking but if you're ISIS and you're watching the news or you're thinking of becoming ISIS do you want to join the group that is being decimated more than estimated? It's decimated technically means 10 percent worse so ISIS is more like 95 percent worse now and heading in the wrong direction. When the president lies about how well ISIS is doing that's bad for ISIS because they can't recruit if the news is saying ISIS is losing everywhere. It's a lie but it's the best freaking lie anybody ever told. I want more of those lies. Let's give us more of those. Those are good lies. All right those are smart lies. Those are leader lies.
Now compare those lies, and again I'm not saying those are the only things that there are lies about but compare them to just the two lies coming from the press. The fine people lie and the Russia collusion. What are those two things done to the moral fabric of this country? So speaking to Joe Biden's campaign theme about you know the moral center of the country what did the fine people lie do to the moral fabric of this country? It frickin' ripped its gizzards out. It's the worst political lie except for Russia collusion. Those two things are the worst political lies maybe of all time. And because if you look at the racial divide in this country so much of it springs from the fine people lie.
Now some of you are gonna say now you could throw that one away and the president has done so many other things that sound racist that that's just one of them. So Scott you're overstating the importance of that one. And I would state that that one lie is the one where they're sure that the president was a racist. All the other ones are ones that even the people who think he's a racist can sort of see that it might be something taken out of context. So that the country thinks even if you're sure the president's a racist for other reasons you hear that whole thing and I think even if you don't say it out loud you're thinking to yourself okay kind of was talking about the country. All right I started to get that it's not as good a spot a clean one but because the Charlottesville one I'm so sure is true and that one he really showed that he's in favor of neo-Nazis that makes me think that all these other things seem truer than the facts would make them seem.
So the point is that Charlottesville is the alpha lie for all of the other lies. And the reason I'm taking it out is because it's the third leg of the TDS stool. So the TDS stool, the thing that supports people's insanity about the president are three legs: Russia collusion, fine people hoax, and racism etc. And the thought these literally crazy he's got a mental problem. All right as time goes by and the results in this country continue to be stellar the he's crazy mentally incompetent one is starting to fade on its own. You know you have, you noticed you don't hear that as much? Have you noticed that the headlines are not full of the president is crazy and impulsive and all that? That just went away. That's one of the legs of the stool. Russia collusion went away. The fine people hoax is the last little brittle leg that is also going away because it's not true. And I think my blog post should kick that leg out because it will give you a link and by the way you should save it. You should save my blog post link and you should turn it into a bitly and you should put it on a note file so you always know where it is and then forever on social media when somebody brings up that lie send them a link to my blog post and it will take them all the way down the hoax funnel down to the question and get rid of that leg.
So I would say if you were going to compare the destructive power of lies the Russia collusion and the fine people lie were destructive lies and they got 2 million hits. That is the biggest lying I don't know if we've ever seen bigger lies maybe a world war two or something they were bigger lies but feels like the most powerful super lie situation we've ever seen. The president has told 10,000 salesperson lies and the result is a better economy less recruiting for ISIS. And what happened when they said is there a rise in white supremacy and the president downplayed it and they fact-checked him and said yeah but there are like two dozen people killed this way but there are two dozen plus three people killed this way in a context where more people die in swimming pools and on bicycles than are killed by white supremacists. I mean literally and it's not even close. There are far more people who drown in the backyard swimming pool than are ever killed by terrorists in this country. So the president downplayed it partly because he's the one being blamed for the rise in white supremacy. If somebody is blaming you for something are you gonna say there's a lot of it? If somebody said hey Scott you're to blame for pollution do you think there's a lot of pollution? I might be tempted to say there's not too much because I don't want to take the blame because I know I'm gonna get the blame. So of course I'm gonna minimize it anyway.
So the president's lies if you want to call them that are seemingly all toward a greater good. The lies against the president are not for a greater good. The fine people hoax had no good intentions. It was just to change who was in power. Same with the Russia collusion stuff.
All right did I cover all of my topics? Is there anything I didn't talk about yet? So I watched a clip of Don Lemon talking to I forget who but it was some Trump supporter who was just annihilating him until the point where Don Lemon had to just shout it over him and until the guy couldn't talk and that was funny.
Oh nuclear. Let's talk nuclear. So I hope you enjoyed my interview with Michael Shellenberger yesterday, a world expert advisor on the subject of nuclear energy. And you saw a little bit of a disagreement and that's your disagreement that might be too strong of a word but there was a different view let's say on older nuclear technology versus generation four. But I wanted to put that in context now. So there are two points of view roughly. So Shellenberger is saying that generation three nuclear which is the type France has and not the type of the United States has, I don't think we might have a few I think we have mostly generation one which were the relatively more dangerous designs. France has generation three and I'll be looking for some fact-checking on this because I'm out of my depth here, has generation three very successful and as far as I know zero nuclear accidents. Somebody or at least of any consequence. So fact-checking on that. I don't believe there's ever been a generation three nuclear accident. Can somebody fact check me on that? I forget what Fukushima was but certainly Chernobyl was a different thing. Three Mile Island none of those were generation three.
So Michael Shellenberger is saying quite reasonably why would you mess around with these new generation four stuff that would take a lot of work and testing and there's a lot of risk involved on the unknown versus generation three where we have such a long history and no problems and we've refined it to the point where we've taken out all of the opportunity for problems. Why wouldn't you go with that and you know worry less about generation four because we already have a solution? And my take on that was you know I certainly get that if you're gonna start today you have to start with generation three because generation four is not quite there. All right so that part we agree on.
But what I disagree on is that the potential for generation four isn't better than gen three. And the reason I say that is some of you saw I did with the person I call the smartest person in the world and Naval Ravikant. It was a founder of AngelList and generally considered one of the smartest people in the world and certainly specifically smart in the world of startups and entrepreneurial stuff. That's really his greatest area of at least what the public thinks of his expertise is. His brain's pretty big but we would recognize him as maybe one of the smartest people in the world on that topic.
Now when he talks about nuclear he says yeah talking about it as startups the way you would talk about it as startups is that nuclear you can't iterate designs because if something goes wrong and there's a long approval process and blah blah it's hard to quickly test things the way every other technology is developed. So other things can be tested quickly and then you can get to a better point because even if things go wrong you know it doesn't matter if your smartphone doesn't work it's not like a nuclear meltdown. I've got something in my eye now.
The government has funded and there's at least one test site in the world where they could rapidly test generation four designs and there are a dozen or so startups in the generation four world and Bill Gates is a major investor in one of those. So I say why don't you do both as hard as you can? You know why not build the generation three power plants so we know how to do right now and still keep iterating the heck out of generation four because someday someday they might be better. And it's hard for me to imagine that all of the geniuses, and they would have to be geniuses literally geniuses working on all these nuclear startups, it's hard for me to imagine that they don't know what Michael Shellenberger knows that generation three has been refined to the point where it's the safe smart way to go. How could all of those startups not know that?
Now I'm probably overstating it so I don't want to misrepresent Michael's point of view but I think his point of view has more to do with where you put your emphasis. I don't think he's saying that there's no way we would ever get to a better design through generation four. I think he just thinks that's the bad play statistically and timing-wise which I wouldn't disagree with because I don't have the expertise to disagree with that. But I want to make a case for doing both hard because we don't have a money problem. In other words there is funding for these startups. Bill Gates etc. So it wouldn't make sense not to push them as hard as we can within the safe zone at the same time we're doing generation three if we need to build stuff right away and we do.
And then Michael also had a little I say a more negative opinion about green technology's potential and made a pretty compelling case that the people who are claiming the economics are good are let's say they're leaving things out. Well let's say that their analyses, I'm being as kind as possible, that the people who say the all-green solution is ready now and we can just roll this stuff out and we're all good to go that those people are not quite considering all of the variables let's say. That's the kindest thing I can say and I think he's probably right on that.
But like generation four I will take the Naval point of view which is I don't think you can really know where a green technology mostly solar and wind I don't think you can know what their upper limit is. I think if it's like every other thing in the world people will discover new improvements and ways to optimize that we didn't know. Let's take just the simplest example. One of the things people say about solar is that it takes up too much physical space. Don't you think somebody's going to invent a way to make it more vertical and then physical space is not important? What happens when robots can build solar facilities and you just say okay robots go out there and we'll check back in a month and we want a whole new full solar facility built in the desert? Well what does that do to the cost structure when you can just point the robots in a direction and the next thing you know there's a solar facility and maybe it doesn't take much room. Maybe it's vertical.
I think I tweeted around an article in which there's one plan for turning air conditionings in skyscrapers. Yeah somebody's talking about this already the solar skyscraper. Somebody has a plan and I don't think it's quite as practical as they're thinking but they think maybe they can get there in which an office building would have lots of air-conditioning facilities and those air conditioners create heat. So if you're cooling something you're necessarily making something else hotter because you're just moving the heat. You're not taking heat away. You're just changing where it is. So something's getting hotter in order for an air conditioner to do what it does. And the idea is that heat could maybe be used as to create fuel out of the CO2 in the air. In other words you convert these air conditioners to do two things. One is to cool the building but the other is to use the heat that they generate in the process as part of the solution for dragging CO2 out of the air and converting it chemically into a fuel that could be used where you can't use green energy. So that's usually a ship or an aircraft. They don't run, it's not likely that they'll run on electric energy anytime soon. So you create fuel out of the CO2.
So then you put solar panels all over your building. So if you imagine a building it's got solar panels all the way up and the air conditioning for each building is optimized to create, to pull a little CO2 out of the air and to convert it to fuel that replaces the need for carbon in airplanes and boats. Now can they ever build that? If I said to you in 40 years will we be able to do what I just described? Build a skyscraper that is energy neutral and actually drag CO2 out of the air doesn't require any electricity beyond what it's generating on its own. And oh you're watching the Barr. Damn it I need to go watch that too.
Anyway so the point is nobody can really tell you where solar and green energy are going to be in 40 years. Anybody who says they can I don't trust them. Let me just toss this out right now. The biggest problem with solar is that you can't store it right? We can't figure out batteries. But imagine if you will that we solve instead the transmission problem. Suppose instead of making batteries we figure out how to send electricity over long distances without losing the energy. And right now I think you could do that with maybe superconductivity or something but a breakthrough in that would allow you to network together all of the skyscrapers with their solar all over the world. So even if the sun were not shining where you are you could be networked by super conductive cables to another part of the world where the sun is shining just great. So if you had the entire world networked with superconductivity do you need batteries? That's a question. Would you need batteries if it was dark where you are but you're networked to the other side of the world where there's plenty of sun and there's plenty of solar and it's just sending you the electricity from the other side of the world?
Now you would have to have superconductivity and underwater cables and all that and those are things we haven't solved but if you can tell me, and I'm not suggesting that that exact scenario will happen I'm just trying to stimulate your imagination so you can say to yourself okay we really don't know what it looks like in 40 years. There's just no way to predict that. So I say go hard on everything and I'm gonna go watch Bill Barr and I will talk to you later. Bye.
bump bump bump bump bump bump um cent add in some new instruments so that my theme song has a little more character drums hey everybody come on in Tyler and now Fonz oh and baby and null hypothesis that's a funny name for your parents to give you no hypothesis well I'm glad you're all here because you know what time it is it's time for coffee with Scott Adams and it's time for the simultaneous up and all you need is a cup or a mug or gloves some kind of tankard or Stein or chalice perhaps a thermos fill it with your favorite liquid I like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure that I call the simultaneous scent mmm oh all right I have a question which has been bugging me all night and I can't wait to ask you so I'll be looking at the comments for your your answers so on Twitter I presented a challenge it's a psychological challenge and something you can do at home and I'm wondering if it sorry I'm wondering if any of you have done it yet and the challenge is to find somebody who believes the charlottesville fine people hoax someone who believes the believes that the president actually called the neo-nazis in Charlottesville fine people find somebody who believes that's absolutely true and then show them the transcript but here's the key part ask them to read the transcript the specific sentence in which Trump said I condemn totally the neo-nazis and the whites nationals and my hypothesis is that if you ask somebody to actually read it aloud to you that they won't be able to do it and when I say they won't be able to do it I don't mean that they'll be weasels and they'll they'll change the topic or though or they'll simply claim it's not true those would be sort of normal normal s things you that my hypothesis is that they actually physically can't do it let me say that again the hypothesis is that somebody who is very invested in that being true will not be physically able to read it out loud and that there will be a cognitive phenomenon which as a hypnotist I've seen many times but most of you have either never seen it were never noticed it when you saw it so as a hypnotist this is a very predictable thing which like you know in a lot of different contexts I can manufacture this effect but most of you have never seen it and you'll never see a situation probably this is perfect as this so clean and simple in which you can just say all right I'm gonna I'm gonna induce intense cognitive distance I'm gonna make your world view that you think is solid and definite I'm gonna make it dissolve right in front of you and then I'm going to watch your reaction you'll never get that opportunity in the normal world but you have one so if you saw my Twitter feed you saw the transcript is there you can just print it out or show it on your phone and say to somebody I want to see just see if you could read it down loud I believe that they will look at it and they will immediately find an excuse that they're busy they will tell you that I'm not going to play your little game they will say what kind of trick you you up to they will say well this doesn't really matter because it's about something else but the hypothesis is that they would be unable to actually voice the words on the page now that doesn't mean it will work every time but I would guess something like 80 to 90 percent of the time somebody said I tried us all true all right so I'm looking in the comments for somebody who actually tried it and somebody said they tried it and it's true it will freak you out it will freak you out to see you actually read that see the person read the sentence and then watch their eyes watch their watch their brain reboot so what you should see I'll do I'll do an impression all right so this would be somebody the first would be somebody who is not experiencing cognitive distance they still disagree with you but they they don't have any cognitive distance it's like all right I'll humor you I'll read it bla bla ba ba ba ba ba and they read it and then they would tell you why it's wrong or why they don't believe it or whatever that would not be cognitive distance cognitive dissonance would look like this but that's what it would look like you would see somebody in in a state of sort of mental confusion and panic where it would make them temporarily unable to speak so look for temporarily unable to speak that's your telephone cognitive distance once you see that in this controlled exercise you're gonna get closer to seeing the world the way I see it as a trained hypnotist once you're a trained hypnotist you can see people's brains rebooting where before you didn't notice it you just thought they were pausing to think or something but once you could recognize it it changes everything about the way you see the world because you'll see people getting triggered into it dealing with it and then coming out of it and it will be a completely different filter on the world all right we want to talk about I know you want to talk about the bar the bar situation now so the story is the fake news of the day is that Muller allegedly wrote a letter to Bob are saying that that Muller disagrees with how Barr summarized the report now of course the news is all fake because apparently there is no letter in which Muller said that he disagrees with what Barr said in other words there's no suggestion that what Barr said was inaccurate the real story which they don't quite say onceá them at least not in these words is that the real issue is that the way Bob Barr summer that left out some texture so that it would be misleading to the public it wasn't inaccurate but the public and the way the press is handling it mostly the press the press is handling in a way that didn't seem true to the underlying stuff to which I say what did you expect from a summary now I'm a writer so maybe this is just glaringly obvious to me because I quite often create summaries of larger bodies of my own work now if you create a summary of your own work which I do on a routine basis as a writer does the summary capture all the goodness that you would very very much like everybody to say well no how could it how could a summary be as accurate as the underlying body of information that's what a summary is there's no such thing as a summary it has all the details of the original the original thing I mean you can imagine some special case where that might be true but with all of the complexity of the underlying stuff was there any chance that a summary could capture it as well as the author of all the underlying stuff believes should have been captured that wasn't a thing so if somebody says to you a mullah wrote a letter and he's complaining that there's oxygen in the world would that be a headline news because you'd look at yourself and say well there's always sort of oxygen I I think oxygen is the basic quality of the world I don't know that that's news right it wouldn't be news because it's what everybody knows is the obvious reality you live in so if somebody says I don't believe that the summary captured all the nuance of the original work have they said anything is that anything because we've already seen the underlying work we don't have to wonder will you see now and of course so I turned on you know I I caught this story at the end of yesterday and really pay attention this morning I woke up and I said oh I'm gonna dig into this a little bit before my periscope and we're gonna find out what's the issue so I go to CNN and I start clicking on some links to find out what is the problem what is specifically Muller say is getting wrong not in terms of what Barr said wrong but in terms of how the way Barr said it has allowed the media to misrepresent it I guess so I guess the question is what exactly is Muller complaining about so I thought well that will be obviously in the article right if I read an article about this story it's going to tell me what specifically Muller had a problem with that Barr said wrong where the media's is getting wrong I couldn't find it did anybody find it now it might be there but it seems so hidden in the way that they're covering the story they're covering it like it's gossip they're covering it like the details of you know what it is that they're differing on if anything don't really matter they're covering it like it's a personality against a personality they're covering it like it's a team sport they're covering it like it's a he-said she-said situation or or you know one against another I couldn't even tell what the problem was and they seem to have they're deeply trying to to manufacture something out of nothing now of course on the other side you know so I flip over to Fox News and just to see what the the other world looks like and then the other world they're saying there's nothing here there's nothing here now as far as I can tell the closest I can get to what the issue is is about the the legal technicalities of whether there was something that would qualify as obstruction of justice there didn't seem to be any disagreement on the fact that Trump was not involved in any Russia collusion that part seems to be both sides are great but Mahler is still saying that it sounds like there may be the the the way the press is saying that the president at least the press on the right they're saying that the president is essentially cleared of obstruction of justice and Muller I think this is as close as I can get to what's really happening this might be wrong so fact checking on this but I think Muller was indicating that you could maybe make a case of obstruction but that in this special case because it's a sitting president that Muller wasn't sure if there were you know that the rules against indictment etc whether that made enough of a difference and then on top of that although they're not supposed to take into account that the underlying charge the collusion wasn't true because keep in mind you can be found guilty of obstructing justice even in the situation where there was no justice to obstruct meaning that there was no crime so there was still a justice system that you could obstruct but there was no justice being lost because there was no crime that that anybody was trying to get away with so so I think the questions are something about whether you can indict a sitting president and then the second one is whether the president just doing his normal job under the Constitution could ever be interpreted this is the Alan Dershowitz twist couldn't not twist but his explanation that could a president ever be charged with a crime for doing the ordinary things that you do in your job which is hiring and firing directing people to do things or directly not to do things so so those are the things that were that Muller apparently and I might be getting ahead of myself here so please you know bring me back if I've gone too far but it looks like Muller said yeah there are little factual things which if he were not the president that's the key if he were not the president doing the job of a president under the Constitution and if there had been a crime which there wasn't which isn't the important part and if you could indict a president under those conditions you might think that this has could have gone forward as a case but given that that is he was the president and we don't indict presidents and he was just doing the normal things under a president's job it's a little too complicated for me Muller to make the call on this so I'm just going to lay out the information for the public and for the Attorney General mostly for the Attorney General and then the Attorney General decides what the public sees and then the Attorney General will handle it from there now did what I just described say that the president was cleared of obstruction no no yeah I I can't go so far into you know blind pundit Rhee that I'm gonna say that that equals cleared of obstruction but he did say there's no rush of collusion and so I'm not a lawyer I'm not well I guess I'm not a judge I'm not a lawyer if you tell me citizen of the United States what we want is justice that's the main thing what we're not you know we're not a country who needs to obsess over that you know the dot the eyes and the details of stuff if it conflicts with justice if you had a choice of following the law or achieving justice and those are your only two choices if you follow the law you don't get justice but if you ignore the law you get justice which is a far higher standard which would you do you're an American and you're talking about another American citizen one of your teammates somebody on your team somebody you are tasked to protect and the law says something bad is going to happen that isn't fair but if you do something that's fair it might not be exactly technically compatible with law which one which way do you go if you're an American justice every time so Mahler has made a case that on the details if you were just to ignore everything you felt about what's right if you were to ignore everything you felt about what's just if you were to ignore about everything about what's good for the good in the country if you could ignore all of those things on some technical level there might be enough stuff that you could indict could you ever could you ever get a conviction probably no I would think so can you imagine finding 12 jurors they would convict the president for doing his job and allegedly obstructing the investigation into the biggest witch hunt in history about a crime that the president alone knew he did not commit I mean he's the only one who knew for sure that there was no crime so there's no way this ever in any real world could have turned into like a court case with a conviction you could not find in any circumstance 12 jurors who would who would agree oh yeah let's convict the president who has the best economy in the world and is keeping us out of Wars let's convict him for a technical violation when he was trying to avoid a witch-hunt into something that wasn't a crime no way no frickin way but having said that was it enough with what Muller Muller found to get an invite in the indictment and if you don't know the old saying is you know you could get a hit you could get an indictment for a ham sandwich so it's really easy to get an indictment you just have to have a pretty strong suggestion that there's something worthy of talking about that's my legal explanation so when when if Muller is complaining that the public and the politicians are are over over-interpreting is finding that's probably true I think that's true because if you're just talking about could he get indicted if you were not a president just doing his normal job I'd say probably yes don't you think if he were not the president if he were guilty which he wasn't you know that matters in terms of how people feel about it now so much the law and if he could be indicted and all those things that were true you know probably Muller has a case so on a very technical Boy Scout according to the law I don't want my work to be misinterpreted I can say Butler would have a point it's a trivial point it's an unimportant point it's completely irrelevant to anything that will ever be the ultimate outcome of all this stuff but it's a point now if you've let me let me give you another gell-mann look on this so so gell-mann was a physicist who famously noticed that when there was a story about physics my topic that he understood better than most of people in the world he could tell that the story was usually wrong but if he looked at a story on some other topic in which he was not an expert gell-mann that's his last name two words I think he couldn't tell but he believed the other stories even though a hundred percent of the stories that he understood their topic better than the news understood it he knew that they were wrong so he was saying okay what are the chances that these other stories are all right when the only thing I understand is always wrong so that observation should tell you what to believe all right so in this case if somebody writes a summary about something this is very similar to when there are news stories about me so I have read maybe if I had to put an estimate I would say I've read maybe a thousand news stories about myself over 30 years of being a cartoonist of those thousand ish stories I've read about myself they're all summaries because you can't write an article about a person that you know years all of the complexity of their life that's not a thing it's always a summary how often are the summaries wrong pretty much all the time pretty much all the time now they're not wrong like necessarily a lie they're not always wrong because a fact got wrong although that's very common it's very common to have basic facts wrong maybe two-thirds of the time and but the fact is that when I see summaries of me I know they're all inaccurate in this in the way that I would want that story to be told so if coarse Muller thinks that a summary doesn't capture everything and of course he thinks the public and the press are taking it too far or taking you down in context there was no other option it was a summary there is no other option of course it doesn't capture the flavor of the original all right enough about that and as always I always caution you to wait for alan dershowitz opinion on this whole thing if alan dershowitz says that everything i just told you is a bunch of BS you should immediately change your opinion to whatever alan dershowitz says so wait for him to weigh in and that'll tell us if this is something or nothing but it feels like desperation I have we've got to find something we've been so embarrassed we've gotta find some claim now let's talk about some other things let's talk about Venezuela you know it seems to me that the Monroe Doctrine is going to rule the day in that you know we can watch Venezuela as long as we need to until we don't need to but I'm pretty sure that the Monroe Doctrine meaning that the United States is going to take care of business in its own hemisphere you know whatever it takes we're gonna take care of business I think the Russians know that I think the Cubans know that I think Venezuela knows that but we're not going to do it prematurely we probably won't do it just for humanitarian reasons because there's already a humanitarian crisis obviously and as as Tucker Carlson pointed out on his show I think it was last time when has the United States ever militarily intervened in another country to fix things and it all worked out well and I'm not a historian and I thought to myself it's a really no example of that now I'm willing to believe that's true because I can't think of an example can any of you think of an example and it could be you know some South American country we messed with in the fifties somebody's saying South Korea no well you know you can't count conquered countries Germany and Japan Kosovo Grenada special cases Panama Panama is probably I I don't know what's the situation in Panama right now what's the situation in Grenada right now yeah so I wouldn't I wouldn't include Japan and Germany because we went to war with them because it was a war so I would not include countries where we went to war for war reasons and then we figured out what to do after the war was over that's a different situation but Grenada we actually invaded that was like what a eight hour war or something so I would say Grenada has to be treated as a special case because they did not have any military resistance so I don't think you can compare a country with no military to Venezuela so is there a country that had a military some people are saying Kosovo and I'm seeing other people saying that's not a good example somebody saying Liberia South Korea some are saying alright Panama some people are saying Guam somebody's asking I don't know about that Nicaragua in the early 1900s I don't know about that I'm not I'm not debunking these by the way somebody said Israel Israel is an interesting example Chile alright Argentina versus the Brits I don't know if that's appropriate Kuwait oh yeah wait Kuwait was really not in Kuwait was not a situation of yeah maybe that's a good example although you could argue that that led to the Iraq war eventually you know indirectly all right so that's an open question I'm not a historian enough to know if we've ever intervened and gotten a good result but then I heard so this is funny this is what I heard we don't want to intervene we don't want to intervene because the if there's any intervening it should be the countries bordering Venezuela so it's going to be far better for the United States if the United States doesn't intervene but those bordering countries maybe they get a little more involved because it's literally it's more their backyard than it is ours or literally right there to which I say where do you think they're getting their military advice and their military weapons and and their aid are we just gonna give that stuff to the neighboring countries to employ in Venezuela yeah it's yeah and then somebody else says our special forces are there is there any chance that we're not already there with military don't you don't you think that there's a hundred percent chance that are some form of our military probably special ops is already there I'm pretty sure we're already there do you think that our special forces are not already preparing a kill shot for Medora do you think we're not on the ground figuring out where he is at all times do you think we're not tracking they're on digital communications so that we know who's doing what everywhere do you think that there are special forces can't shine a laser on medoras office and have a missile go through his window anytime we want I'm pretty sure we're kind of ready but not with not with uniformed forces on the ground I'm sure let's drink to that and so this brings me back to my idea that I I often bring up it seems to me that one of the things the world needs is a government in the box and by government in a box I mean a a country that has an organization within the country and I'll just use an example let's say it's Switzerland let's say Switzerland decides to form a you know a unit that might even be a commercial unit doesn't even have to work for the government that will go into a country as advisors and they will become the temporary government for let's say three years or one year or whatever it is and all they do is they go in and they set up a new form of government and they don't they're not even part of the country they're literally advisers brought in to form a government and they are actually the president so the president of the country would be just some Swiss guy that you know comes with this organization they would set up a government and get it working and then they would transform that government back into a local government so they would set up elections they would make sure the elections are fair you know they'd work with the government but basically it would just be government in a box and and it would come in now you would not do this unless invited so in other words it could be the way to settle a dispute where there are two sides and they can just never agree so you bring in the government in the box and the first thing that the government of the box does is they set up a a safe passage for the dictator there's always a dictator right you know all these problems end up with there's a strong person strong man strong woman in charge and that person if they lose control of their country probably going to be dead or in jail so you can never get a dictator to leave if the if the alternative is they and their family are all killed so you don't have a way to solve problem because there's no exit strategy for the dictator so the government in a box would come and say look we've already secured an island state for you in another place or we'll set up a situation where you can have your own little area in the country and we'll just you know make sure that nobody gets out and away gets in but we'll somehow create a safe path for the dictator to get to a better end state than dead and just let them live out their life even with money you know they could live a good life just in isolation they don't have to be isolated they could have visitors and stuff but they just can't have a can't have a political influence anymore somebody says use Bitcoin yes I think there's some kind of cryptocurrency layer to this where if the if the economy is broken if you know if they just need some way to have some real some money that they can buy and sell things there might be a crypto element to that I don't know enough to know that that's that that makes sense yet anyway so we need a government in a box it probably needs to be something like in Switzerland because nobody would expect a a Swiss team to come in and for any kind of long period of time be the ruling party of another country nobody would put up with that so you probably at the minimum you probably have to have the military in favor of it because the military could get rid of the the government in a box at the same time that they would have to be the ones that had invited them in so it probably has to be supported by the military at a minimum anyway that's one idea let's talk about some other things let's talk about Joe Biden ok the funniest thing about Joe Biden and there are a lot of funny things about Joe Biden I don't know where to start so he was asked the human gaff machine I call him he was asked by I was a Robin Roberts asked him if he had a slogan for his campaign and here's the funny part he didn't have a slogan I guess he hadn't thought of it he hadn't thought of a slogan come on that's sort of running for president 101 you gotta have a slogan and so he he tries to come up with a slogan on the fly and he goes make America moral again and when Joe Biden is trying to act extra sincere his eyes get really close he and he leans in yeah I'm so since a year making America moral again see the sincerity Lou these eyes Elizabeth there's very sincere closes here I'm more sincere than you could ever imagine look at my sincerity and then of course he didn't realize that his yeah that the acronym for make America moral again is mama perfect milk America I get that's funny anyway so that's the first funny thing second funny thing did you see the you see the clip of him awkwardly hugging Hillary Clinton it looks like there are four other Dove I can show but all right let me see if I can show to you here can you see it so he's hugging her and watch her give she's giving him the tap on the shoulder tap tap okay let me go tap tap tap let me go and then she just puts her hands down and just hangs there like the ultimate sign that let me go and then she goes back to tap tap tap and let me go let me go you can let me go now hey look at it I'm just hanging here let me go let me go let me go now that clip was actually looping so look it looked more exaggerated it wasn't real life but this was just an introduction to my actual funniest point the funny point is have you seen the latest video of him campaigning and he's going up on stage and everybody when you go up on stage that's usually when there's some handshakes and some kisses and some hugs and he doesn't know how to handle himself because he knows that everybody is watching how he touches people so watch it is frickin hilarious yeah if you're looking for it it's funny if you're not looking for it you might not notice but he doesn't know how to interact with people because he had 76 years of interacting a certain very physical way and now that he knows he can't do that he's he you could tell that he's completely out of his element because he's trying to navigate a me-too world where you can't touch anybody and so he looks he looks awkward to me because he hasn't figured it out now there was also this viral video that went around that put together all the the little bits of his speech in which he seemed to be slurring or searching for a word if you see them all together it looks like he has a mental problem or he's just very old or it it really does sell a picture of him having some problems I would say that's misleading because you could probably do that same clip with all of my periscopes if you if you took any of my periscopes and took all the little times I'm searching for a word or I slur a word or I say a word wrong it would look just like that maybe it's because I'm old anyway I wouldn't make too much of it because I think you could do that with anybody but here's the other funny part and this is the best part of all so when we heard that Trump was calling him sleepy Joe sleepy Joe Biden yeah there was some disagreement about whether that was a good or bad nickname because people said well creepy would be better but I think the president wisely stayed away from creepy and I think it was wise because the president has his own you know grab him by the whatever stuff going on and so if he used the creepy creepy label it would probably be thrown back at him so I think it was good that he avoided that sleepy is one that the president can win every time because let me let me just give you this scenario and if this doesn't make you laugh you're dead inside all right so now sleepy Joe has to deal with the fact that he has to deal with this label so he has to act as whatever is the opposite of sleepy when he was onstage do you think he was thinking that that he had to look like he was presenting a lot of energy oh yeah he was thinking it he was thinking it hard because if he had done anything that looked Low Energy it would have been all the news that would have been the news it wouldn't have matter what he said that night if his energy was low in any way that you could even interpret it as low even if it had not been that would have been the only story so trumpet by now is absolutely in his head he's so far into Biden's head because now everything that sleepy Joe does has to counter the idea that he has low energy what does that make you do to overcompensate well the first thing he does to make him overcompensate is he probably has to ramp up his energy a little higher than normal for these events and it almost certainly would make him miss peak because if you're if you're adding a little bit too much energy compared to the energy that you normally add and he I think he actually has good energy but it's a great political argument against them it seems to me then maybe that could have been a little bit of what made him miss peak then maybe he was trying a little too hard or how about this do you think that Biden got a good night's sleep the night before he gave his speech when he was when he was going to sleep the night before and you know Joe lays down and he's like ah tomorrow I'm gonna announced for president I've got to save the world he's calling me sleepy Joe can't sleep can't sleep don't sleep I'm not gonna get eight hours tonight I'm gonna get five hours night because I'm not sleepy Joe I'm not sleepy Joe he's not gonna make me sleepy Joe I'm gonna five hours a night that's all I need and I'm not gonna let anybody see me take a nap ever I'm never gonna go home early I'm not gonna cancel an event because I'm tired I'm not sleepy Joe so I think that I think President Trump has used what I would call a sports trash-talk model that is very active meaning that it's gonna make his opponent respond to it it's an active insult I think imagine if you will President Trump has a long day and he wants to take a nap how does he do it he probably says something like this can you clear my schedule after 8 o'clock tonight I want to spend some alone time or some family time and the president goes off to his private quarters and goes to sleep early I don't know yet if he ever goes to sleep early I suspect he doesn't but he could and nobody would have any question about it because his brand is high energy so if the president goes and privately goes into his private quarters you just think well it might be a sleep you might be having some family time you wouldn't think anything of it so the president could sleep as much as he wants because his brand allows it now imagine that you're you're sleepy Joe and you've got all these advisers and people you don't know them all you don't necessarily quite trust and yet you don't know who's leaking to the media you don't know if you have a mole you don't know what stories are gonna get out and you're tired you can't say you're tired you can't tell you can't tell your closest advisor you're tired because that's gonna come out someday you can't say cancel my events this afternoon I just need to catch up can't say that you can't not take on an event even though it would exhaust you because you don't want to look like you couldn't take on an event because it would exhaust you if you can't even go to sleep early suppose suppose it's 11 o'clock at night and the advisors are still walking with Biden and what he wants to say is I need some sleep I don't know if he can I don't know if he can't say that I think he stays up to midnight so that they leave on their own so that he doesn't have to tell people he's tired so I think the president is so deeply in sleepy Joe's head that I'm gonna make a prediction are you ready for this if this is as actively powerful framing as I think it is he could exhaust Biden before Election Day if Biden makes it that far I don't know I'm thinking he probably won't but if he does make it that far in two years he will have run himself ragged at age 78 or six or whatever the hell he is and the odds of him not stumbling or getting sick or showing some affect of all that work it's pretty low so it's possible that the Trump that Trump has presented a ticking time bomb of a kill shot and I don't know if we've seen this one before this is one that has a timer on it because on day one when you heard sleepy Joe didn't you have the same impression I did which is I don't know he doesn't know like feel less sleepy to me I my impression is sort of the opposite he feels like he's a pretty high energy guy and I said before I give him very high marks for fitness have you seen Joe Biden like he is really at least in terms of his weight and his you know just his persona and he's obviously had a lot of work done and his face and stuff like that but you know I I don't I don't like to criticize people for that those are personal choices but I would say he's the opposite of sleepy-looking but it's got a timer on it and the longer he tries to prove he's not sleepy the more he's gonna wear himself into the ground the more he's gonna expose himself to mistakes that he might not have made so I think it could be brilliant but we won't know we're gonna have to wait and see if it see if that little thing that little seed takes root alright I said around an article since all of you know oh I should mention again so yesterday I wrote a blog post I have not written a blog post in a long time because I've been doing the periscopes and working on books and stuff but I thought it was time to take everything about the fine people hoax and put it into a written form because written form just travels better it can be more viral to more people because people will read things they won't watch on video and and I realized that there was such a consistency to how people responded when when they're revealed to have been hoaxed and that they believe the president really said that there were that the neo-nazis were fine people if they believed that and then he's shown the transcripts and it's not true they almost always go down what I call the hoax funnel they start with this big claim the president said neo-nazis are fine people they show him the transcript they go okay it says exactly the opposite but he said and they always revert to what were these other people these fine people why were they marching with Nazis huh-huh can't be a fighting person if you're marching with the Nazi and so in my blog post I talked about how that's actually a hallucination there is no claim and there's no reporting that all the people there were marching in fact it was sort of a chaos there were some marchers and then there were all kinds of other people doing all kinds of other things in in in spree clothes who knows what those people were thinking or why they were there nobody did a survey nobody talked to the ball nobody knows so worst case scenario the president made an assumption but he also detailed this assumption he said I believe there were people there about the statue so he said that clearly in the same context as he was talking about the fine people on both sides so it's obviously meant both sides of the statue controversy anyway um the my observation is that people start with the big hoax and you you can debunk each of the lesser hoaxes as they retreat to down the funnel until you get to the end of the funnel and Philip and it usually turns into questions if you can turn somebody from a statement of fact the president said neo-nazis are firing people that's a statement it's not true you debunk it they go down to another statement well those fighting people were marching with Nazis but that's not true there's no evidence no suggestion no reporting and all the reporting says that people were not marching marching with Nazis there were just lots of people there so that's not true once you have to bunk that you end up all everytime and you could you could do this at home the person who's being having their their worldview annihilated will eventually end up with questions look the question forum means they've already given up on the statement so they've already accepted that the President did not say neo-nazis are fine people the transcript says that clearly he did not say that and they end up with so why would these people who were foreign people attend an event obviously organized by neo-nazis and races and as I write in my blog post in order to ask that question you would have to know nothing about reality or human beings all right so the question is just freaking dumb because if you take a hundred human beings 100 Americans I like to use as my example you take any 100 Americans and even if they go to the same place for the same event are they going to have 100 are they going to have just two different opinions if you take a hundred people and put them someplace that has two sides you know Pro Statue anti statue are they only gonna have two opinions just two opinions Pro statue anti statue now if you've been alive in this world for more than 10 freaking minutes and you've interacted with you you know that the number of opinions at Charlotte's Ville was probably closer to a thousand right I'm exaggerating but there were probably every flavor of opinion there there were people who were a complete racist but don't you know there were some people who were not racist who would never date somebody of a specific other ethnicity well sorta racist but are those the same well you could argue that are the same or different but my point is there's per there was probably every opinion that you could possibly imagine if there are enough people you're gonna have every freaking opinion and I would say that's one thing that you could bet on and win every time now was this the one time the hundreds of people showed up in the same physical geography is this the one time in the history of with the world that they only brought two opinions with them Pro racism anti racism no not there's no chance of that so the idea that people came for the same reason or the same understanding or even that they looked at the same flyer and had the same interpretation of what was going on some people looked at and said oh it's organized by racists III guess I'm a racist so I'll go I'm sure people said that don't you think that other people guaranteed because there a lot of people were talking about and of all the hundreds of thousands of people who saw the flyer on social media don't you think there were any who said oh it's a thing about unites the right it's about statues it looks like some Nazis will be there but why do I care there gonna be a lot of people there you know they're gonna be people on both sides you know there's gonna be people with every opinion but this flyer is telling me that definitely some of them are Nazis I don't think it's a nasty event I just like the the racists are showing up because why wouldn't they it's you know this is right in there right in there their sweet spot the statue controversy so could you show any flyer to a hundred people and have them all come down on the same opinion given that the flyer was not it didn't say hey we're racists it just listed speakers and had images and some statutes do you think you could get a hundred people to look at that flyer and have the same opinion now not in any world that you've ever lived in can you get a hundred people they have the same opinion about anything so the president's assumption that could have been right or wrong and it doesn't matter because he stated his assumption his assumption was that there were people there just about the statue and then he talked about you know his belief based on the assumption the worst-case scenario is that the president assumed there were multiple opinions and it's the first time in human history that's ever not been true that's the worst thing that you could say about this is that the president made the most common assumption you could make that there were a lot of different opinions there and it was the one time in human history it wasn't true and there's no reporting or whether it was true we can't know what everybody was thinking so anyway I put together these thoughts debunking every part of the hoax final so that you can use the same structure to drive people down the funnel the fun is watching people go down the funnel so consistently because the direction they take always ends up with and then I think Chris Cuomo will end up with the the final weakest question which was oh why did the people who showed up not leave immediately if there were any fine people who showed up once they saw what was happening why didn't they leave immediately now that's a question not a statement and it's a question based on ignorance and it's a question based on lack of imagination the fact that Chris Cuomo doesn't know any possible reasons why that could be true doesn't tell you anything it tells you that Chris Cuomo is ignorant and I don't mean that as an insult I mean ignorant in the sense that we're all ignorant about something you know that everybody has something they don't know I mean that's just normal texture in the world so I'm not calling Chris Cuomo dumb I'm saying that his question is a legitimate question meaning he doesn't know the so the fact that he doesn't know the answer to a question doesn't tell you anything about what happened it just tells you Chris Cuomo didn't know the answer to the question can we imagine any way to explain Chris cromoz question why would find people show up and not immediately leave how about this answer Chris Cuomo how do you know they didn't immediately leave how do you know they didn't show up see what was happening and turn and leave that's not in evidence we have no idea how long people stayed I've also suggested that if I were to find people and I showed up there and once I was there I realized that there was going to be a fight between an Tifa who I hate with a passion because there were the yeah there they're literally masked armed people who would like to hurt me personally if I saw that they were about to get in a fight with neo-nazis who I hate with a passion as much as I hate Anti Fog I'm making a moral equivalence yes I am I'm making a moral equivalence there's they're both completely bad if you're saying if anybody's saying one of them is a little worse than the other well I don't think you're you know you should not show your face in society if you're gonna if you're gonna find if you're gonna make like a fine differentiation between the masked and armed anti five thugs who want to overthrow the government and beat me to death if you say well they're not so bad I mean that's not so bad you know they're at least they're against racism I mean they got that goal informed so they're not completely bad they want to beat you to death with clubs but you know they have these good parts - if you're saying that don't talk in public seriously you you're just embarrassing yourself if you're defending one of those sides as being a little more moral than the other anyway if I showed up there as a fine person and I saw that these two groups that I hate the most we're gonna fight each other with sticks and beating each other you couldn't get me to leave are you kidding me are you kidding me you think I would leave show now if I ever fell physically in danger I would of course but apparently the police were protecting that the people were fighting and letting the people fight who wanted to fight and there weren't guns they were just beating each other mistake so you could kind of watch the show would I have left that no frickin way I don't hate anybody more than I hate anti-shah and neo-nazis to me they're tens and tens right the the most hated most worthy of you know kind of condemnation of any group if you can show me a picture of them beating each other with clubs I'm all in on that I want to see that all right so anyway if you read the blog post and if you would be nice enough to tweet that around its pinned to the top of my Twitter feed so you can find it easily all right yeah Mike sorry fetch had an interesting tweet in which he was he was talking about how the stress in the world is worse than ever at the same time that the world is better than ever the stress the people are feeling about the world is the worst at the same time the world has never been better I mean not even close we are at levels humanity has never never seen this is the best the world has ever been by a pretty good measure right and he pointed out that he was nice enough to point out that I had predicted that we were entering now I called it the Golden Age when all of the real problems were solved or on the way to being solved the real problems being you know poverty war a crime you know the real problems and that they would be replaced by psychological problems in other words the the way we were thinking about our world was getting worse at the same time the world itself was getting way better and so we're seeing that start to develop so Mike was nice enough to call that out as a prediction that looks like it's heading toward fruition now apparently Trump is considering designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group and now the pushback to that is that the Muslim Brotherhood is not just one one organization that's doing some bad stuff there are people in the Muslim Brotherhood who were terrorists that seems to be just a fact nobody nobody's questioning except maybe the Muslim Brotherhood doesn't call themselves terrorists but as I understand it it's sort of an umbrella term and there are lots of people who say they are mother Muslim Brotherhood and especially in some countries where it just doesn't mean that so there are people in other countries were just innocent Muslim Brotherhood people who abhorred violence they're against violence against they're against terrorism but they still like being whatever you know that label they like to be part of the Muslim Brotherhood for whatever the other benefits the organization presents and so the idea was that it would be bad to designate the organization as a terrorist group because it would have a bad effect on these people who really are on our side you know in the sense that they're peaceful and they don't want terrorism so they're marginally on our side the same interests to which I say that's our problem if you can't tell me that if a if a nice person I mean the the Democrats have just finished telling us that if somebody who thinks they're a nice person marches with neo-nazis well they're sort of neo-nazis and I agree with that which is why that wasn't relevant in Chavez Ville because nobody nobody is making the case that they were actually marching with the neo-nazis the people who were fighting people but I think it must be said that if you identify yourself as a member of a group with known terrorists I don't think it matters that you personally are not in favor of terrorism does it because you can just change change your membership you can just say oh shoot now that you've designated them a terrorist group I denounce my membership I'll join another group I don't think we should see that as our problem I think that we should very much encourage the good people who are nonviolent - maybe disavow the group that is that's not asking a lot so without knowing the details of this it would be dangerous to have a strong opinion on this because I don't think any of us know all that the nuance of the situation but if the only problem is that there are a bunch of people that we really genuinely like and they're basically on our side but they call themselves Muslim Brotherhood for you know nonviolent reasons I think that's just something they need to work out I don't think for a second that should influence what we do somebody else's decision to join a despicable group should not be determining our foreign national interests at all now I know I'm oversimplifying but just just on that one point I have a pretty strong opinion but there may still be good reasons not to do it I'm sure that'll get worked out in the conversations all right oh so I have a challenge questions in I'm gonna ask this question as if I know the answer but I really don't because there might actually be an answer to this question that I can't imagine so I'm going to open it up to the public and see if you can come up with an answer president Trump has been blamed for or credited with defending out you once a with ten thousand lies ten thousand lies now I'm assuming that since he started office now I'm assuming that lie in this context is anything that doesn't pass the fact-checking and I'm assuming that ten thousand means repeating the same thing though that they don't think is true more than once so I think there would it's not ten thousand individual lies I assume I assume right check me on that I think it's 10,000 things he said that they say aren't true but that would include a lot of repeats of the same thing that they say is not true now on the other side there are two giant lives that the press has been telling one is the fine people lie that they continue to tell and one is the rush of collusion lie which they continue to sell indirectly as they are today if you do a search on fine people you get a million hits almost every one of those hits is a lie about the president because they would tell the story the wrong way almost all of them and if you do a search on rush inclusion you get 1.4 million hits on Google I'm guessing at least a million in them are blaming the president for being the Russian spy so or a Russian puppet or something so if you took those two lies to find people lie and you add it together with the rush of collusion line that's just two things imagine all the lies told about this president that's just two of them and you have two million lies two million but here's here's what I'd like to suggest I want you to see if I'm wrong on this in fact check madness it seems to me that the ten thousand lies that the president has told are almost entirely what I would call sales lies in other words they're there in the service of selling something and for the most part what he's selling is make America great again so yes the thing is lying about gets you to a better economy do you feel bad about that if the thing is lying about reduces Isis recruiting is that bad so let me give you the specific examples if the president says the economy is doing better were they his administration has done more things than he's really done or that the cutting of the regulation is more important to the economy than he says or that his contribution to the stock price going up is far more than actually the evidence suggests what is the outcome of all of those lies about the economy well the outcome is that the economy improves that is the point of those lies the point of saying everything is great is to make people think our economy is great so I guess I should invest and when they invest it makes the economy great when he says I mean we're hiring like crazy and employments up and everything's good these are good lies these are salesperson lies because the salesperson might lie to you but you still could end up buying the thing you wanted all right so there are lots of lies that are hyperbole they're exaggeration or they're overstating but they're for a very clear positive purpose now of course it helps them get elected it helps them be president etc and I'm not minimizing the fact that their self-interest involved but the lies are very very positive they're so positive that you could argue that the president's lies about the economy are the best thing that have ever happened to the country think about that the president's lies about how good the economy is are literally making the economy better I mean that's not an exaggeration that is a fact I would die on I would you could put a bullet to my head and say Scott say with confidence that the president's lies about the economy are actually good for the economy and I would say I'll say it right now our president's lies are good for the economy okay I would put a bullet in my mouth and tell you that there's no fricking question that his lies helped the economy let's take another topic Isis so the president said you know Isis is defeated blah blah was that and over a claim absolutely it was definitely more than what was true it was hyperbole it was maybe doesn't pass the fact-checking but if you're isis and you're watching the news or you're thinking of becoming Isis do you want to join the group that is being decimated more than estimated it's decimated technically means 10 percent worse so Isis is more like 95 percent worse now and heading in the wrong direction when the president lies about how well Isis is doing that's bad for Isis because they can't recruit if the news is saying Isis is losing everywhere it's a lie but it's the best freaking lie anybody ever told I want more of those lies let's give us more of those those are good lies all right those are smart lies those are leader lies now compare those lies and again I'm not saying those are the only things that that there lies about but compare them to just the two lies coming from the press the fine person lie and and the rush of collusion what are those two things done to the to the moral fabric of this country so speaking to Joe Biden's campaign theme about you know the moral center of the country what did the fine person lie do to the moral fabric of this country if Rickon ripped its gizzards out it's the worst political lie except for Russia collusion those two things are the worst political lies maybe of all time and because if you look at the racial divide in this country so much of it Springs from the fine people lie now some of you are gonna say now you you could you could throw that one away and the president has done so many other things that sound racist that that's just one of them so Scott you're overstating the importance of that one and I would state that that one line is the one where they're sure that the president was a racist all the other ones are ones that even the people who think he's a racist can sort of see that it might be something taken Anna context so that the the countries think even if you're sure the presidents are racist for other reasons you hear that whole thing and I think even if you don't say it out loud you're thinking to yourself okay kind of was talking about the country's alright I I started to get that it's not a good spot a clean one but because the Charlottesville one I'm so sure is true and that one he really showed that he's in favor of neo-nazis that makes me think that common is true take another one the Mexicans are animals fake news well of course the president was actually talking about ms-13 if you're someone who thinks the president is racist and you hear that story you say okay call them animals but it's pretty clear he was talking about ms-13 alright that's a gray area it feels racist to me though not because of the situation because that's that's obviously he was talking about him as 13 but because of Charlottesville since I know Charlottesville really happened all these other things seem truer than the facts would make them seem so the point is that Charlottesville is the Alpha lie for all of the other lies and the reason I'm I'm taking it out is because it's the is the third leg of the TDS stool so the TDS stool the thing that supports people's insanity about the president are three legs Russia collusion find people hoax and racism etc and the thought these literally crazy he's got a mental problem all right as time goes by and the results in this country continue to be stellar the he's crazy mentally incompetent one is starting to fade on its own you know you have you noticed you don't hear that as much have you noticed that the headlines are not full of the president is crazy and impulsive and all that that just went away that's one of the legs of the stool Russia collusion went away the fine people hoax is the list last little brittle leg that is also going away because it's not true and I think my blog post should kick that leg out because it will give you a link and by the way you should save it you should save my blog post link and you should turn it into a bitly and you should put it on a nope like a no file so you always know where it is and then forever on social media when somebody brings up that lie send them a link to my blog post and it will take them all the way down the hoax funnel down to the question and get rid of that leg so I would say if you were going to compare the the destructive power of lies the Russia collusion and the fine people lie were destructive lies and they got 2 million hits that is the biggest lying I don't know if we've ever seen bigger lies maybe a world war 2 or something they were bigger lies but feels like the most powerful super lie situation we've ever seen the president has told 10,000 salesperson lies and the result is a better economy less recruiting for Isis and what happened when they said is there a rise in white supremacy and the president downplayed it and they they fact checked him and said yeah but they're like two dozen people killed this way but there are two dozen plus three people killed this way in a context where more more people die in swimming pools and on bicycles that are killed by white supremacists I mean literally and it's not even close there are far more people who drown in the backyard swimming pool that are ever killed by killed by terrorists in this country so the president downplayed it partly because he's the one being blamed for the rise and white supremacy if somebody is blaming you for something are you gonna say there's a lot of it if somebody said hey Scott you're you're to blame for a pollution do you think there's a lot of pollution I might be tempted to say there's not too much me because I don't want to take the blame because I know I'm gonna get the blame so of course I'm gonna minimize it anyway so the president's lies if you want to call them that are seemingly all toward a greater good the lies against the president are not for a greater good the fine person hoax had no good intentions it was just to change who was in power same with the Russia collusion stuff all right did I cover all of my topics is there anything I didn't talk about yet so I watched a clip of Don Lemon talking to I forget who but it was some Trump supporter who was just who was just annihilating him until the point where Don Lemon had to just shout it over him and and until the guy couldn't talk and that was funny Oh nuclear let's talk nuclear so I hope you enjoyed my interview with Michael Shellenberger yesterday a world expert advisor on the subject of nuclear energy and you saw a little bit of a disagreement and that's your disagreement that might be too strong of a word but there was a different view let's say on older nuclear technology versus generation four but I wanted to put that in context now so there are two points of view roughly so Shellenberger is saying that that generation three nuclear which is the type France s and not the type of the United States has I don't think we might have a few I think we have mostly generation one which were they relatively more dangerous designs France has generation three and I'll be looking for some fact-checking on this because I'm out of my depth here has generation three very successful and as far as I know zero nuclear accidents somebody or at least of any of any consequence so fact-checking on that I don't believe there's ever been a generation 3 nuclear accident can somebody fact check me on that I forget what Fukushima was but certainly Chernobyl was a different thing Three Mile Island with none of those were generation 3 so Michael Sheldon Berger is saying quite reasonably why would you mess around with these new generation for stuff that would take a lot of work and testing and there's a lot of risk involved on the unknown versus generation 3 where we have such a long history and no problems and we've refined it to the point where we've taken out all of the opportunity for problems why wouldn't you go with that and you know worry less about generation 3 because we already have a solution and my take on that was you know I certainly get that if you're gonna start today you have to start with generation 3 because generation 4 is not quite there all right so that part we agree on but what I disagree on is that the potential for generation 4 isn't better than gen gen 3 and the reason I say that is some of you saw I did if you are I did with the person I call the smartest person in the world and of all raava comp it was a founder of Angel.
List and generally considered one of those smartest people in the world and certainly specifically smart in the world of startups and entrepreneurial stuff that's that's really his greatest area of at least what the public thinks of his expertise is is his brains pretty big but the we would recognize him as maybe one of the smartest people in the world on that topic now when he talks about nuclear he says yeah talking about it as startups the way you would talk about is startups is that nuclear you can't iterate designs because if something goes wrong and there's a long approval process and blah blah it's her to quickly test things the way every other technology is developed so other things can be tested quickly and then you can get to a better point because they even if things go wrong you know it doesn't matter if your smartphone doesn't work it's not like a nuclear meltdown I've got something in my eye now the government has funded and there there's at least one test site in the world where there could rapidly test generation for designs and there are a dozen or so startups in the generation four world and Bill Gates is a major investor in one of those so I say why don't you do both as hard as you can you know why not build the generation 3 power plant so we know how to do right now and still keep iterating the hack in a generation 4 because someday someday they might be better and it's hard for me to imagine that all of the geniuses and they would have to be geniuses literally geniuses working on all these nuclear startups it's hard for me to imagine that they don't know what Michael Shellenberger knows that generation 3 is it has been refined to the point where it's the safe smart way to go how could all of those startups not know that now I'm probably overstating it so I don't want to misrepresent Michael's point of view but I think his point of view has more to do with where you put your your emphasis I don't think he's saying that there's no way we would ever get to a better design through generation four I think he just thinks that's the bad play statistically and timing-wise which I wouldn't I wouldn't disagree with because I don't have the expertise to disagree with that but I want to make a case for doing both hard because we don't we don't have a money problem in other words there is funding for these startups Bill Gates etc so it wouldn't make sense not to push them as hard as we can within a safe the safe zone at the same time we're doing generation 3 if we need to build stuff right away and we do and that and then Michael also had a little I say a more negative opinion about green technologies potential and made a beta compelling case that the people who are claiming the economics are good are let's say they're leaving things out well let's say let's say that their analyses I'm being as kind as possible that the people who say the all green solution is ready now and we can just roll this stuff out and we're all good to go that those people are not quite considering all of the all of the variables let's say that's the kindest thing I can say and I think he's probably right on that but like generation four I will take the than of all point of view which is I don't think you can really know where a green technology mostly solar and wind I don't think you can know what their upper limit is I think if it's like every other thing in the world people will discover new improvements and ways to optimize that we didn't know let's take just the simplest example one of the things people say about solar is that it takes up too much physical space don't you think somebody's going to invent a way to make it more vertical and then physical space is not important what happens when robots can build solar facilities and you just say okay robots go out there and we'll check back in a month and we want a whole new full solar facility built in the desert well what does that do to the cost structure when you can just point the robots in a direction and the next thing you know there's a solar facility and maybe it doesn't take much room maybe it's vertical I think I tweeted around an article in which there's one plan for turning air conditionings and in skyscrapers yeah somebody's talking about this already the solar skyscraper somebody has a plan and I don't think is quite as practical as they're thinking but they think maybe they can get there in which an office building would have lots of air-conditioning facilities and those air conditioners create a heat so if you're cooling something you're necessarily making something else hotter because you're just moving the heat you're not you're not taking heat away you're you're just changing where it is so something's getting hotter in order for an air conditioning to do what it does and the idea is that heat could maybe be used as to create fuel and of the co2 in the air in other words you convert these air conditioners to do two things one is to cool the building but the other is to use the heat that they generate in the process as part of the solution for dragging co2 out of the air and converting it chemically into a fuel that could be used where you can't use green energy so that's usually a ship or an aircraft they they don't run it's not likely that they'll run on electric energy of any time soon so you create fuel end of the co2 so then you put solar panels all over your building so if you imagine a building it's got solar panels all the way up and the air-conditioning for each building is optimized to create to pull a little co2 end of the air and to convert it to fuel that replaces the need for carbon in airplanes and boats now can they ever build that if I said to you in 40 years will we be able to do what I just described build a skyscraper that is energy neutral and actually drag co2 end of the air doesn't require any electricity beyond what is generating on its own and oh you're watching the bar damn it I need to go watch that too anyway so the point is nobody can really tell you where solar and green energy are going to be in 40 years anybody who says they can I don't trust them let me let me just toss this out right now the biggest problem with solar is that you can't store it right we can't figure out have batteries but imagine if you will that we solve instead the transmission problem suppose instead of making batteries we figure out how to send electricity over long distances without losing losing the energy and right now I think you could do that with maybe super conductivity or something but a breakthrough and that would allow you to network together all of the skyscrapers with their solar all over the world so even if the Sun were not shining where you are you could be networked by super conductive cables to another part of the world where the sun is shining just great so if you had the entire world networked with super conductivity do you need batteries that's a question would you need batteries if it was dark where you are but you're networked to the other side of the world where there's plenty of Sun and there's plenty of solar and it's just sending you the electricity from the other side of the world now you would have to have super conductivity and underwater cables and all that and those are things we haven't solved but if you can tell me and I'm not suggesting that that exact scenario will happen I'm just trying to I'm trying to stimulate your imagination so you can say to yourself okay we really don't know what it looks like in 40 years there's just no way to predict that so I say go hard and everything and I'm gonna go watch Bill Barr and I will talk to you later bye
bump bump bump bump bump bump um cent
add in some new instruments so that my
theme song has a little more character
drums hey everybody come on in Tyler and
now Fonz oh and baby and null hypothesis
that's a funny name for your parents to
give you no hypothesis well I'm glad
you're all here because you know what
time it is it's time for coffee with
Scott Adams and it's time for the
simultaneous up and all you need is a
cup or a mug or gloves some kind of
tankard or Stein or chalice
perhaps a thermos fill it with your
favorite liquid I like coffee
and join me now for the unparalleled
pleasure that I call the simultaneous
scent mmm oh all right I have a question
which has been bugging me all night and
I can't wait to ask you so I'll be
looking at the comments for your your
answers so on Twitter I presented a
challenge it's a psychological challenge
and something you can do at home and I'm
wondering if it sorry I'm wondering if
any of you have done it yet and the
challenge is to find somebody who
believes the charlottesville fine people
hoax someone who believes the believes
that the president actually called the
neo-nazis in Charlottesville fine people
find somebody who believes that's
absolutely true and then show them the
transcript but here's the key part ask
them to read the transcript the specific
sentence in which Trump said I condemn
totally the neo-nazis and the whites
nationals and my hypothesis is that if
you ask somebody to actually read it
aloud to you that they won't be able to
do it
and when I say they won't be able to do
it I don't mean that they'll be weasels
and they'll they'll change the topic or
though or they'll simply claim it's not
true those would be sort of normal
normal s things you
that my hypothesis is that they actually
physically can't do it let me say that
again the hypothesis is that somebody
who is very invested in that being true
will not be physically able to read it
out loud and that there will be a
cognitive phenomenon which as a
hypnotist I've seen many times but most
of you have either never seen it were
never noticed it when you saw it
so as a hypnotist this is a very
predictable thing which like you know in
a lot of different contexts I can
manufacture this effect but most of you
have never seen it and you'll never see
a situation probably this is perfect as
this so clean and simple in which you
can just say all right I'm gonna I'm
gonna induce intense cognitive distance
I'm gonna make your world view that you
think is solid and definite I'm gonna
make it dissolve right in front of you
and then I'm going to watch your
reaction you'll never get that
opportunity in the normal world but you
have one so if you saw my Twitter feed
you saw the transcript is there you can
just print it out or show it on your
phone and say to somebody I want to see
just see if you could read it down loud
I believe that they will look at it and
they will immediately find an excuse
that they're busy they will tell you
that I'm not going to play your little
game they will say what kind of trick
you you up to they will say well this
doesn't really matter because it's about
something else but the hypothesis is
that they would be unable to actually
voice the words on the page now that
doesn't mean it will work every time but
I would guess something like 80 to 90
percent of the time somebody said I
tried us all true all right so I'm
looking in the comments for somebody who
actually tried it and somebody said they
tried it and it's true it will freak you
out it will freak you out to see you
actually read that see the person read
the sentence and then watch their eyes
watch their watch their brain reboot so
what you should see I'll do
I'll do an impression all right so this
would be somebody the first would be
somebody who is not experiencing
cognitive distance they still disagree
with you but they they don't have any
cognitive distance it's like all right
I'll humor you I'll read it
bla bla ba ba ba ba ba and they read it
and then they would tell you why it's
wrong or why they don't believe it or
whatever that would not be cognitive
distance cognitive dissonance would look
like this but that's what it would look
like you would see somebody in in a
state of sort of mental confusion and
panic where it would make them
temporarily unable to speak so look for
temporarily unable to speak that's your
telephone cognitive distance once you
see that in this controlled exercise
you're gonna get closer to seeing the
world the way I see it as a trained
hypnotist once you're a trained
hypnotist you can see people's brains
rebooting where before you didn't notice
it you just thought they were pausing to
think or something but once you could
recognize it it changes everything about
the way you see the world because you'll
see people getting triggered into it
dealing with it and then coming out of
it and it will be a completely different
filter on the world all right
we want to talk about I know you want to
talk about the bar the bar situation now
so the story is the fake news of the day
is that Muller allegedly wrote a letter
to Bob are saying that that Muller
disagrees with how Barr summarized the
report now of course the news is all
fake because apparently there is no
letter in which Muller said that he
disagrees with what Barr said in other
words there's no suggestion that what
Barr said was inaccurate
the real story which they don't quite
say onceá them at least not in these
words is that the real issue is that the
way Bob Barr summer
that left out some texture so that it
would be misleading to the public
it wasn't inaccurate but the public and
the way the press is handling it mostly
the press the press is handling in a way
that didn't seem true to the underlying
stuff to which I say what did you expect
from a summary now I'm a writer so maybe
this is just glaringly obvious to me
because I quite often create summaries
of larger bodies of my own work now if
you create a summary of your own work
which I do on a routine basis as a
writer does the summary capture all the
goodness that you would very very much
like everybody to say well no how could
it how could a summary be as accurate as
the underlying body of information
that's what a summary is there's no such
thing as a summary it has all the
details of the original the original
thing I mean you can imagine some
special case where that might be true
but with all of the complexity of the
underlying stuff was there any chance
that a summary could capture it as well
as the author of all the underlying
stuff believes should have been captured
that wasn't a thing so if somebody says
to you a mullah wrote a letter and he's
complaining that there's oxygen in the
world would that be a headline news
because you'd look at yourself and say
well there's always sort of oxygen I I
think oxygen is the basic quality of the
world I don't know that that's news
right it wouldn't be news because it's
what everybody knows is the obvious
reality you live in so if somebody says
I don't believe that the summary
captured all the nuance of the original
work have they said anything
is that anything because we've already
seen the underlying work we don't have
to wonder will you see
now and of course so I turned on you
know I I caught this story at the end of
yesterday and really pay attention this
morning I woke up and I said oh I'm
gonna dig into this a little bit before
my periscope and we're gonna find out
what's the issue so I go to CNN and I
start clicking on some links to find out
what is the problem what is specifically
Muller say is getting wrong not in terms
of what Barr said wrong but in terms of
how the way Barr said it has allowed the
media to misrepresent it I guess so I
guess the question is what exactly is
Muller complaining about so I thought
well that will be obviously in the
article right if I read an article about
this story it's going to tell me what
specifically Muller had a problem with
that Barr said wrong where the media's
is getting wrong I couldn't find it did
anybody find it now it might be there
but it seems so hidden in the way that
they're covering the story they're
covering it like it's gossip they're
covering it like the details of you know
what it is that they're differing on if
anything don't really matter they're
covering it like it's a personality
against a personality they're covering
it like it's a team sport they're
covering it like it's a he-said she-said
situation or or you know one
against another I couldn't even
tell what the problem was and they seem
to have they're deeply trying to to
manufacture something out of nothing now
of course on the other side you know so
I flip over to Fox News and just to see
what the the other world looks like and
then the other world they're saying
there's nothing here there's nothing
here
now as far as I can tell the closest I
can get to what the issue is is about
the the legal technicalities of whether
there was something that would qualify
as obstruction of justice there didn't
seem to be any disagreement on the fact
that Trump was
not involved in any Russia collusion
that part seems to be both sides are
great but Mahler is still saying that it
sounds like there may be the the the way
the press is saying that the president
at least the press on the right they're
saying that the president is essentially
cleared of obstruction of justice and
Muller I think this is as close as I can
get to what's really happening this
might be wrong so fact checking on this
but I think Muller was indicating that
you could maybe make a case of
obstruction but that in this special
case because it's a sitting president
that Muller wasn't sure if there were
you know that the rules against
indictment etc whether that made enough
of a difference and then on top of that
although they're not supposed to take
into account that the underlying charge
the collusion wasn't true because keep
in mind you can be found guilty of
obstructing justice even in the
situation where there was no justice to
obstruct meaning that there was no crime
so there was still a justice system that
you could obstruct but there was no
justice being lost because there was no
crime that that anybody was trying to
get away with so so I think the
questions are something about whether
you can indict a sitting president and
then the second one is whether the
president just doing his normal job
under the Constitution could ever be
interpreted this is the Alan Dershowitz
twist couldn't not twist but his
explanation that could a president ever
be charged with a crime for doing the
ordinary things that you do in your job
which is hiring and firing directing
people to do things or directly not to
do things so so those are the things
that were that Muller apparently and I
might be getting ahead of myself here so
please you know bring me back if I've
gone too far but it looks like Muller
said yeah there are little factual
things which if he were not the
president that's the key if he were not
the president doing the job of a
president under the Constitution
and if there had been a crime which
there wasn't which isn't the important
part and if you could indict a president
under those conditions you might think
that this has could have gone forward as
a case but given that that is he was the
president and we don't indict presidents
and he was just doing the normal things
under a president's job it's a little
too complicated for me Muller to make
the call on this so I'm just going to
lay out the information for the public
and for the Attorney General
mostly for the Attorney General and then
the Attorney General decides what the
public sees and then the Attorney
General will handle it from there
now did what I just described say that
the president was cleared of obstruction
no no yeah I I can't go so far into you
know blind pundit Rhee that I'm gonna
say that that equals cleared of
obstruction but he did say there's no
rush of collusion and so I'm not a
lawyer I'm not well I guess I'm not a
judge I'm not a lawyer if you tell me
citizen of the United States what we
want is justice that's the main thing
what we're not you know we're not a
country who needs to obsess over that
you know the dot the eyes and the
details of stuff if it conflicts with
justice if you had a choice of following
the law or achieving justice and those
are your only two choices if you follow
the law you don't get justice but if you
ignore the law you get justice which is
a far higher standard which would you do
you're an American and you're talking
about another American citizen one of
your teammates somebody on your team
somebody you are tasked to protect and
the law says something bad is going to
happen that isn't fair but if you do
something that's fair it might not be
exactly technically compatible with law
which one which way do you go
if you're an American justice every time
so Mahler has made a case that on the
details if you were just to ignore
everything you felt about what's right
if you were to ignore everything you
felt about what's just if you were to
ignore about everything about what's
good for the good in the country if you
could ignore all of those things on some
technical level there might be enough
stuff that you could indict could you
ever could you ever get a conviction
probably no I would think so
can you imagine finding 12 jurors they
would convict the president for doing
his job and allegedly obstructing the
investigation into the biggest witch
hunt in history about a crime that the
president alone knew he did not commit I
mean he's the only one who knew for sure
that there was no crime so there's no
way this ever in any real world could
have turned into like a court case with
a conviction you could not find in any
circumstance 12 jurors who would who
would agree oh yeah let's convict the
president who has the best economy in
the world and is keeping us out of Wars
let's convict him for a technical
violation when he was trying to avoid a
witch-hunt into something that wasn't a
crime
no way no frickin way but having said
that was it enough with what Muller
Muller found to get an invite in the
indictment and if you don't know the old
saying is you know you could get a hit
you could get an indictment for a ham
sandwich so it's really easy to get an
indictment you just have to have a
pretty strong suggestion that there's
something worthy of talking about that's
my legal explanation so when when if
Muller is complaining that the public
and the politicians are are over
over-interpreting is finding that's
probably true I think that's true
because if you're just talking about
could he get indicted if you were not a
president just doing his normal job
I'd say probably yes don't you think if
he were not the president if he were
guilty which he wasn't you know that
matters in terms of how people feel
about it now so much the law and if he
could be indicted and all those things
that were true you know probably Muller
has a case so on a very technical Boy
Scout according to the law I don't want
my work to be misinterpreted I can say
Butler would have a point it's a trivial
point it's an unimportant point it's
completely irrelevant to anything that
will ever be the ultimate outcome of all
this stuff but it's a point
now if you've let me let me give you
another gell-mann look on this so so
gell-mann was a physicist who famously
noticed that when there was a story
about physics my topic that he
understood better than most of people in
the world he could tell that the story
was usually wrong but if he looked at a
story on some other topic in which he
was not an expert gell-mann that's his
last name
two words I think he couldn't tell but
he believed the other stories even
though a hundred percent of the stories
that he understood their topic better
than the news understood it he knew that
they were wrong so he was saying okay
what are the chances that these other
stories are all right when the only
thing I understand is always wrong so
that observation should tell you what to
believe all right so in this case if
somebody writes a summary about
something this is very similar to when
there are news stories about me so I
have read maybe if I had to put an
estimate I would say I've read maybe a
thousand news stories about myself over
30 years of being a cartoonist of those
thousand ish stories I've read about
myself they're all summaries because you
can't write an article about a person
that you know
years all of the complexity of their
life that's not a thing it's always a
summary how often are the summaries
wrong pretty much all the time pretty
much all the time now they're not wrong
like necessarily a lie they're not
always wrong because a fact got wrong
although that's very common it's very
common to have basic facts wrong maybe
two-thirds of the time and but the fact
is that when I see summaries of me I
know they're all inaccurate in this in
the way that I would want that story to
be told
so if coarse Muller thinks that a
summary doesn't capture everything and
of course he thinks the public and the
press are taking it too far or taking
you down in context there was no other
option it was a summary there is no
other option of course it doesn't
capture the flavor of the original all
right enough about that and as always I
always caution you to wait for alan
dershowitz opinion on this whole thing
if alan dershowitz says that everything
i just told you is a bunch of BS you
should immediately change your opinion
to whatever
alan dershowitz says so wait for him to
weigh in and that'll tell us if this is
something or nothing but it feels like
desperation I have we've got to find
something we've been so embarrassed
we've gotta find some claim now let's
talk about some other things let's talk
about Venezuela you know it seems to me
that the Monroe Doctrine is going to
rule the day in that you know we can
watch Venezuela as long as we need to
until we don't need to but I'm pretty
sure that the Monroe Doctrine meaning
that the United States is going to take
care of business in its own hemisphere
you know whatever it takes we're gonna
take care of business I think the
Russians know that I think the Cubans
know that I think Venezuela knows that
but we're not going to
do it prematurely we probably won't do
it just for humanitarian reasons because
there's already a humanitarian crisis
obviously and as as Tucker Carlson
pointed out on his show I think it was
last time when has the United States
ever militarily intervened in another
country to fix things and it all worked
out well and I'm not a historian and I
thought to myself it's a really no
example of that now I'm willing to
believe that's true because I can't
think of an example can any of you think
of an example and it could be you know
some South American country we messed
with in the fifties somebody's saying
South Korea no well you know you can't
count conquered countries Germany and
Japan Kosovo Grenada special cases
Panama Panama is probably I I don't know
what's the situation in Panama right now
what's the situation in Grenada right
now yeah so I wouldn't I wouldn't
include
Japan and Germany because we went to war
with them because it was a war so I
would not include countries where we
went to war for war reasons and then we
figured out what to do after the war was
over that's a different situation but
Grenada we actually invaded that was
like what a eight hour war or something
so I would say Grenada has to be treated
as a special case because they did not
have any military resistance so I don't
think you can compare a country with no
military to Venezuela so is there a
country that had a military some people
are saying Kosovo and I'm seeing other
people saying that's not a good example
somebody saying Liberia South Korea some
are saying alright
Panama some people are saying Guam
somebody's asking I don't know about
that Nicaragua in the early 1900s I
don't know about that
I'm not I'm not debunking these by the
way somebody said Israel Israel is an
interesting example Chile alright
Argentina versus the Brits I don't know
if that's appropriate
Kuwait oh yeah wait Kuwait was really
not in Kuwait was not a situation of
yeah maybe that's a good example
although you could argue that that led
to the Iraq war eventually you know
indirectly all right so that's an open
question I'm not a historian enough to
know if we've ever intervened and gotten
a good result
but then I heard so this is funny this
is what I heard we don't want to
intervene we don't want to intervene
because the if there's any intervening
it should be the countries bordering
Venezuela so it's going to be far better
for the United States if the United
States doesn't intervene but those
bordering countries maybe they get a
little more involved because it's
literally it's more their backyard than
it is ours or literally right there to
which I say where do you think they're
getting their military advice and their
military weapons and and their aid are
we just gonna give that stuff to the
neighboring countries to employ in
Venezuela yeah it's yeah and then
somebody else says our special forces
are there is there any chance that we're
not already there with military don't
you don't you think that there's a
hundred percent chance that are some
form of our military probably special
ops is already there I'm pretty sure
we're already there do you think that
our special forces are not already
preparing a kill shot for Medora do you
think we're not on the ground figuring
out where he is at all times do you
think we're not tracking they're on
digital communications so that we know
who's doing what everywhere do you think
that there are special forces can't
shine a laser on medoras office
and have a missile go through his window
anytime we want I'm pretty sure we're
kind of ready but not with not with
uniformed forces on the ground I'm sure
let's drink to that
and so this brings me back to my idea
that I I often bring up it seems to me
that one of the things the world needs
is a government in the box and by
government in a box I mean a a country
that has an organization within the
country and I'll just use an example
let's say it's Switzerland let's say
Switzerland decides to form a you know a
unit that might even be a commercial
unit doesn't even have to work for the
government that will go into a country
as advisors and they will become the
temporary government for let's say three
years or one year or whatever it is and
all they do is they go in and they set
up a new form of government and they
don't they're not even part of the
country they're literally advisers
brought in to form a government and they
are actually the president so the
president of the country would be just
some Swiss guy that you know comes with
this organization they would set up a
government and get it working and then
they would transform that government
back into a local government so they
would set up elections they would make
sure the elections are fair you know
they'd work with the government but
basically it would just be government in
a box and and it would come in now you
would not do this unless invited so in
other words it could be the way to
settle a dispute where there are two
sides and they can just never agree so
you bring in the government in the box
and the first thing that the government
of the box does is they set up a a safe
passage for the dictator there's always
a dictator right you know all these
problems end up with there's a strong
person strong man strong woman in charge
and that person if they lose control of
their country probably going to be dead
or in jail so you can never get a
dictator to leave if the if the
alternative is they and their family are
all killed so you don't have a way to
solve
problem because there's no exit strategy
for the dictator so the government in a
box would come and say look we've
already secured an island state for you
in another place or we'll set up a
situation where you can have your own
little area in the country and we'll
just you know make sure that nobody gets
out and away gets in but we'll somehow
create a safe path for the dictator to
get to a better end state than dead and
just let them live out their life even
with money you know they could live a
good life just in isolation they don't
have to be isolated they could have
visitors and stuff but they just can't
have a can't have a political influence
anymore
somebody says use Bitcoin yes I think
there's some kind of cryptocurrency
layer to this where if the if the
economy is broken if you know if they
just need some way to have some real
some money that they can buy and sell
things there might be a crypto element
to that I don't know enough to know that
that's that that makes sense yet anyway
so we need a government in a box it
probably needs to be something like in
Switzerland because nobody would expect
a a Swiss team to come in and for any
kind of long period of time be the
ruling party of another country nobody
would put up with that so you probably
at the minimum you probably have to have
the military in favor of it because the
military could get rid of the the
government in a box at the same time
that they would have to be the ones that
had invited them in so it probably has
to be supported by the military at a
minimum anyway that's one idea let's
talk about some other things let's talk
about Joe Biden ok the funniest thing
about Joe Biden and there are a lot of
funny things about Joe Biden I don't
know where to start
so he was asked the human gaff machine I
call him he was asked by I was a Robin
Roberts asked him if he had a slogan for
his campaign and here's the funny part
he didn't have a slogan
I guess he hadn't thought of it he
hadn't thought of a slogan come on
that's sort of running for president 101
you gotta have a slogan and so he he
tries to come up with a slogan on the
fly and he goes make America moral again
and when Joe Biden is trying to act
extra sincere his eyes get really close
he and he leans in yeah I'm so since a
year making America moral again see the
sincerity Lou these eyes Elizabeth
there's very sincere closes here I'm
more sincere than you could ever imagine
look at my sincerity and then of course
he didn't realize that his yeah that the
acronym for make America moral again is
mama
perfect milk America I get that's funny
anyway so that's the first funny thing
second funny thing
did you see the you see the clip of him
awkwardly hugging Hillary Clinton it
looks like there are four other Dove I
can show but all right let me see if I
can show to you here can you see it so
he's hugging her and watch her give
she's giving him the tap on the shoulder
tap tap okay let me go tap tap tap let
me go
and then she just puts her hands down
and just hangs there like the ultimate
sign that let me go and then she goes
back to tap tap tap and let me go let me
go you can let me go now hey look at it
I'm just hanging here let me go let me
go let me go now that clip was actually
looping so look it looked more
exaggerated it wasn't real life but this
was just an introduction to my actual
funniest point the funny point is have
you seen the latest video of him
campaigning and he's going up on stage
and everybody when you go up on stage
that's usually when there's some
handshakes and some kisses and some hugs
and he doesn't know how to handle
himself because he knows that everybody
is watching how he touches people so
watch it is frickin hilarious yeah if
you're looking for it it's funny if
you're not looking for it you might not
notice but he doesn't know how to
interact with people because he had 76
years of interacting a certain very
physical way and now that he knows he
can't do that he's he you could tell
that he's completely out of his element
because he's trying to navigate a me-too
world where you can't touch anybody and
so he looks he looks awkward to me
because he hasn't figured it out now
there was also this viral video that
went around that put together all the
the little bits of his speech in which
he seemed to be slurring or searching
for a word if you see them all together
it looks like he has a mental problem or
he's just very old or it it really does
sell a picture of him having some
problems I would say that's misleading
because you could probably do that same
clip with all of my periscopes if you if
you took any of my periscopes and took
all the little times I'm searching for a
word or I slur a word or I say a word
wrong it would look just like that maybe
it's because I'm old anyway I wouldn't
make too much of it because I think you
could do that with anybody but here's
the other funny part and this is the
best part of all so when we heard that
Trump was calling him sleepy Joe sleepy
Joe Biden yeah there was some
disagreement about whether that was a
good or bad nickname because people said
well creepy would be better but I think
the president wisely stayed away from
creepy and I think it was wise because
the president has his own you know grab
him by the whatever stuff going on and
so if he used the creepy creepy label it
would probably be thrown back at him so
I think it was good that he avoided that
sleepy is one that the president can win
every time because let me let me just
give you this scenario and if this
doesn't make you laugh you're dead
inside all right so now sleepy Joe has
to deal with the fact that he has to
deal with this label so he has to act as
whatever is the opposite of sleepy when
he was onstage
do you think he was thinking that that
he had to look like he was presenting a
lot of energy oh yeah he was thinking it
he was thinking it hard because if he
had done anything that looked Low Energy
it would have been all the news that
would have been the news it wouldn't
have matter what he said that night if
his energy was low in any way that you
could even interpret it as low even if
it had not been that would have been the
only story so trumpet by now is
absolutely in his head he's so far into
Biden's head because now everything that
sleepy Joe does has to counter the idea
that he has low energy what does that
make you do to overcompensate well the
first thing he does to make him
overcompensate is he probably has to
ramp up his energy a little higher than
normal for these events and it almost
certainly would make him miss peak
because if you're if you're adding a
little bit too much energy compared to
the energy that you normally add and he
I think he actually has good energy but
it's a great political argument against
them it seems to me then maybe that
could have been a little bit of what
made him miss peak then maybe he was
trying a little too hard or how about
this do you think that Biden got a good
night's sleep the night before he gave
his speech when he was when he was going
to sleep the night before and you know
Joe lays down and he's like ah tomorrow
I'm gonna announced for president I've
got to save the world he's calling me
sleepy Joe can't sleep can't sleep don't
sleep I'm not gonna get eight hours
tonight I'm gonna get five hours
night because I'm not sleepy Joe I'm not
sleepy Joe he's not gonna make me sleepy
Joe I'm gonna five hours a night that's
all I need and I'm not gonna let anybody
see me take a nap ever I'm never gonna
go home early I'm not gonna cancel an
event because I'm tired I'm not sleepy
Joe so I think that I think President
Trump has used what I would call a
sports trash-talk model that is very
active meaning that it's gonna make his
opponent respond to it it's an active
insult
I think imagine if you will President
Trump has a long day and he wants to
take a nap how does he do it he probably
says something like this
can you clear my schedule after 8
o'clock tonight I want to spend some
alone time or some family time and the
president goes off to his private
quarters and goes to sleep early I don't
know yet if he ever goes to sleep early
I suspect he doesn't but he could and
nobody would have any question about it
because his brand is high energy so if
the president goes and privately goes
into his private quarters you just think
well it might be a sleep you might be
having some family time
you wouldn't think anything of it so the
president could sleep as much as he
wants because his brand allows it now
imagine that you're you're sleepy Joe
and you've got all these advisers and
people you don't know them all you don't
necessarily quite trust and yet you
don't know who's leaking to the media
you don't know if you have a mole you
don't know what stories are gonna get
out and you're tired you can't say
you're tired you can't tell you can't
tell your closest advisor you're tired
because that's gonna come out someday
you can't say cancel my events this
afternoon I just need to catch up can't
say that you can't not take on an event
even though it would exhaust you because
you don't want to look like you couldn't
take on an event because it would
exhaust you if you can't even go to
sleep early suppose suppose it's 11
o'clock at night and the advisors are
still
walking with Biden and what he wants to
say is I need some sleep
I don't know if he can I don't know if
he can't say that I think he stays up to
midnight so that they leave on their own
so that he doesn't have to tell people
he's tired so I think the president is
so deeply in sleepy Joe's head that I'm
gonna make a prediction are you ready
for this if this is as actively powerful
framing as I think it is he could
exhaust Biden before Election Day if
Biden makes it that far I don't know I'm
thinking he probably won't but if he
does make it that far
in two years he will have run himself
ragged at age 78 or six or whatever the
hell he is and the odds of him not
stumbling or getting sick or showing
some affect of all that work it's pretty
low so it's possible that the Trump that
Trump has presented a ticking time bomb
of a kill shot and I don't know if we've
seen this one before
this is one that has a timer on it
because on day one when you heard sleepy
Joe didn't you have the same impression
I did which is I don't know
he doesn't know like feel less sleepy to
me I my impression is sort of the
opposite he feels like he's a pretty
high energy guy and I said before I give
him very high marks for fitness have you
seen Joe Biden like he is really at
least in terms of his weight and his you
know just his persona and he's obviously
had a lot of work done and his face and
stuff like that but you know I I don't I
don't like to criticize people for that
those are personal choices but I would
say he's the opposite of sleepy-looking
but it's got a timer on it and the
longer he tries to prove he's not sleepy
the more he's gonna wear himself into
the ground the more he's gonna expose
himself to mistakes that he might not
have made so I think it could be
brilliant but we won't know we're gonna
have to wait and see if it
see if that little thing that little
seed takes root alright I said around an
article since all of you know oh I
should mention again so yesterday I
wrote a blog post I have not written a
blog post in a long time because I've
been doing the periscopes and working on
books and stuff but I thought it was
time to take everything about the fine
people hoax and put it into a written
form because written form just travels
better it can be more viral to more
people because people will read things
they won't watch on video and and I
realized that there was such a
consistency to how people responded when
when they're revealed to have been
hoaxed and that they believe the
president really said that there were
that the neo-nazis were fine people if
they believed that and then he's shown
the transcripts and it's not true they
almost always go down what I call the
hoax funnel they start with this big
claim the president said neo-nazis are
fine people they show him the transcript
they go okay it says exactly the
opposite but he said and they always
revert to what were these other people
these fine people
why were they marching with Nazis
huh-huh can't be a fighting person if
you're marching with the Nazi and so in
my blog post I talked about how that's
actually a hallucination there is no
claim and there's no reporting that all
the people there were marching in fact
it was sort of a chaos there were some
marchers and then there were all kinds
of other people doing all kinds of other
things in in in spree clothes who knows
what those people were thinking or why
they were there nobody did a survey
nobody talked to the ball nobody knows
so worst case scenario the president
made an assumption but he also detailed
this assumption he said I believe there
were people there about the statue so he
said that clearly in the same context as
he was talking about the fine people on
both sides so it's obviously meant both
sides of the statue controversy anyway
um the my observation is that people
start with the big hoax and you
you can debunk each of the lesser hoaxes
as they retreat to down the funnel until
you get to the end of the funnel and
Philip and it usually turns into
questions if you can turn somebody from
a statement of fact
the president said neo-nazis are firing
people that's a statement it's not true
you debunk it they go down to another
statement
well those fighting people were marching
with Nazis but that's not true there's
no evidence no suggestion no reporting
and all the reporting says that people
were not marching marching with Nazis
there were just lots of people there so
that's not true once you have to bunk
that you end up all everytime and you
could you could do this at home the
person who's being having their their
worldview annihilated will eventually
end up with questions look the question
forum means they've already given up on
the statement so they've already
accepted that the President did not say
neo-nazis are fine people the transcript
says that clearly he did not say that
and they end up with so why would these
people who were foreign people attend an
event obviously organized by neo-nazis
and races and as I write in my blog post
in order to ask that question you would
have to know nothing about reality or
human beings all right so the question
is just freaking dumb because if you
take a hundred human beings 100
Americans I like to use as my example
you take any 100 Americans and even if
they go to the same place for the same
event are they going to have 100 are
they going to have just two different
opinions if you take a hundred people
and put them someplace that has two
sides
you know Pro Statue anti statue are they
only gonna have two opinions just two
opinions Pro statue anti statue now if
you've been alive in this world for more
than 10 freaking minutes and you've
interacted with you
you know that the number of opinions at
Charlotte's Ville was probably closer to
a thousand right I'm exaggerating but
there were probably every flavor of
opinion there there were people who were
a complete racist but don't you know
there were some people who were not
racist who would never date somebody of
a specific other ethnicity
well sorta racist but are those the same
well you could argue that are the same
or different but my point is there's per
there was probably every opinion that
you could possibly imagine if there are
enough people you're gonna have every
freaking opinion and I would say that's
one thing that you could bet on and win
every time now was this the one time the
hundreds of people showed up in the same
physical geography is this the one time
in the history of with the world that
they only brought two opinions with them
Pro racism anti racism no not there's no
chance of that so the idea that people
came for the same reason or the same
understanding or even that they looked
at the same flyer and had the same
interpretation of what was going on some
people looked at and said oh it's
organized by racists III guess I'm a
racist so I'll go I'm sure people said
that don't you think that other people
guaranteed because there a lot of people
were talking about and of all the
hundreds of thousands of people who saw
the flyer on social media don't you
think there were any who said oh it's a
thing about unites the right
it's about statues it looks like some
Nazis will be there but why do I care
there gonna be a lot of people there you
know they're gonna be people on both
sides you know there's gonna be people
with every opinion but this flyer is
telling me that definitely some of them
are Nazis I don't think it's a nasty
event I just like the the racists are
showing up because why wouldn't they
it's you know this is right in there
right in there their sweet spot the
statue controversy so could you show any
flyer to a hundred people and have them
all come down on the same opinion given
that the flyer was not it didn't say hey
we're racists
it just listed speakers and had images
and some statutes do you think you could
get a hundred people to look at that
flyer and have the same opinion now not
in any world that you've ever lived in
can you get a hundred people they have
the same opinion about anything so the
president's assumption that could have
been right or wrong and it doesn't
matter because he stated his assumption
his assumption was that there were
people there just about the statue and
then he talked about you know his belief
based on the assumption the worst-case
scenario is that the president assumed
there were multiple opinions and it's
the first time in human history that's
ever not been true that's the worst
thing that you could say about this is
that the president made the most common
assumption you could make that there
were a lot of different opinions there
and it was the one time in human history
it wasn't true and there's no reporting
or whether it was true we can't know
what everybody was thinking so anyway I
put together these thoughts debunking
every part of the hoax final so that you
can use the same structure to drive
people down the funnel the fun is
watching people go down the funnel so
consistently because the direction they
take always ends up with and then I
think Chris Cuomo will end up with the
the final weakest question which was oh
why did the people who showed up not
leave immediately
if there were any fine people who showed
up once they saw what was happening why
didn't they leave immediately now that's
a question not a statement and it's a
question based on ignorance and it's a
question based on lack of imagination
the fact that Chris Cuomo doesn't know
any possible reasons why that could be
true doesn't tell you anything it tells
you that Chris Cuomo is ignorant and I
don't mean that as an insult
I mean ignorant in the sense that we're
all ignorant about something you know
that everybody has something they don't
know I mean that's just normal texture
in the world so I'm not calling Chris
Cuomo
dumb I'm saying that his question is a
legitimate question meaning he doesn't
know the
so the fact that he doesn't know the
answer to a question doesn't tell you
anything about what happened it just
tells you Chris Cuomo didn't know the
answer to the question can we imagine
any way to explain Chris cromoz question
why would find people show up and not
immediately leave how about this answer
Chris Cuomo how do you know they didn't
immediately leave how do you know they
didn't show up see what was happening
and turn and leave that's not in
evidence
we have no idea how long people stayed
I've also suggested that if I were to
find people and I showed up there and
once I was there I realized that there
was going to be a fight between an Tifa
who I hate with a passion because there
were the yeah there they're literally
masked armed people who would like to
hurt me personally if I saw that they
were about to get in a fight with
neo-nazis who I hate with a passion as
much as I hate Anti Fog I'm making a
moral equivalence yes I am I'm making a
moral equivalence there's they're both
completely bad if you're saying if
anybody's saying one of them is a little
worse than the other well I don't think
you're you know you should not show your
face in society if you're gonna if
you're gonna find if you're gonna make
like a fine differentiation between the
masked and armed anti five thugs who
want to overthrow the government and
beat me to death if you say well they're
not so bad I mean that's not so bad you
know they're at least they're against
racism I mean they got that goal
informed so they're not completely bad
they want to beat you to death with
clubs but you know they have these good
parts - if you're saying that don't talk
in public seriously you you're just
embarrassing yourself if you're
defending one of those sides as being a
little more moral than the other anyway
if I showed up there as a fine person
and I saw that these two groups that I
hate the most
we're gonna fight each other with sticks
and beating each other you couldn't get
me to leave are you kidding me are you
kidding me
you think I would leave
show now if I ever fell physically in
danger I would of course but apparently
the police were protecting that the
people were fighting and letting the
people fight who wanted to fight and
there weren't guns they were just
beating each other mistake so you could
kind of watch the show would I have left
that no frickin way I don't hate anybody
more than I hate anti-shah and neo-nazis
to me they're tens and tens right the
the most hated most worthy of you know
kind of condemnation of any group if you
can show me a picture of them beating
each other with clubs I'm all in on that
I want to see that all right so anyway
if you read the blog post and if you
would be nice enough to tweet that
around its pinned to the top of my
Twitter feed so you can find it easily
all right yeah Mike sorry fetch had an
interesting tweet in which he was he was
talking about how the stress in the
world is worse than ever at the same
time that the world is better than ever
the stress the people are feeling about
the world is the worst at the same time
the world has never been better I mean
not even close we are at levels humanity
has never never seen this is the best
the world has ever been by a pretty good
measure right and he pointed out that he
was nice enough to point out that I had
predicted that we were entering now I
called it the Golden Age when all of the
real problems were solved or on the way
to being solved the real problems being
you know poverty war a crime you know
the real problems and that they would be
replaced by psychological problems in
other words the the way we were thinking
about our world was getting worse at the
same time the world itself was getting
way better and so we're seeing that
start to develop so Mike was nice enough
to call that out as a prediction that
looks like it's heading toward
fruition now apparently Trump is
considering designating the Muslim
Brotherhood a terrorist group and now
the pushback to that is that the Muslim
Brotherhood is not just one one
organization that's doing some bad stuff
there are people in the Muslim
Brotherhood who were terrorists that
seems to be just a fact nobody nobody's
questioning except maybe the Muslim
Brotherhood doesn't call themselves
terrorists but as I understand it it's
sort of an umbrella term and there are
lots of people who say they are mother
Muslim Brotherhood and especially in
some countries where it just doesn't
mean that so there are people in other
countries were just innocent Muslim
Brotherhood people who abhorred violence
they're against violence against they're
against terrorism but they still like
being whatever you know that label they
like to be part of the Muslim
Brotherhood for whatever the other
benefits the organization presents and
so the idea was that it would be bad to
designate the organization as a
terrorist group because it would have a
bad effect on these people who really
are on our side you know in the sense
that they're peaceful and they don't
want terrorism so they're marginally on
our side the same interests to which I
say that's our problem if you can't tell
me that if a if a nice person I mean the
the Democrats have just finished telling
us that if somebody who thinks they're a
nice person marches with neo-nazis well
they're sort of neo-nazis and I agree
with that which is why that wasn't
relevant in Chavez Ville because nobody
nobody is making the case that they were
actually marching with the neo-nazis the
people who were fighting people but I
think it must be said that if you
identify yourself as a member of a group
with known terrorists I don't think it
matters that you
personally are not in favor of terrorism
does it because you can just change
change your membership you can just say
oh shoot now that you've designated them
a terrorist group I denounce my
membership
I'll join another group I don't think we
should see that as our problem I think
that we should very much encourage the
good people who are nonviolent
- maybe disavow the group that is that's
not asking a lot so without knowing the
details of this it would be dangerous to
have a strong opinion on this because I
don't think any of us know all that the
nuance of the situation but if the only
problem is that there are a bunch of
people that we really genuinely like and
they're basically on our side but they
call themselves Muslim Brotherhood for
you know nonviolent reasons I think
that's just something they need to work
out I don't think for a second that
should influence what we do somebody
else's decision to join a despicable
group should not be determining our
foreign national interests at all now I
know I'm oversimplifying but just just
on that one point I have a pretty strong
opinion but there may still be good
reasons not to do it I'm sure that'll
get worked out in the conversations all
right oh so I have a challenge questions
in I'm gonna ask this question as if I
know the answer but I really don't
because there might actually be an
answer to this question that I can't
imagine so I'm going to open it up to
the public and see if you can come up
with an answer
president Trump has been blamed for or
credited with defending out you once a
with ten thousand lies ten thousand lies
now I'm assuming that since he started
office now I'm assuming that lie in this
context is anything that doesn't pass
the fact-checking and I'm assuming that
ten thousand means repeating the same
thing though that they don't think is
true more than once so I think there
would it's not ten thousand individual
lies I assume
I assume right check me on that I think
it's 10,000 things he said that they say
aren't true but that would include a lot
of repeats of the same thing that they
say is not true now on the other side
there are two giant lives that the press
has been telling one is the fine people
lie that they continue to tell and one
is the rush of collusion lie which they
continue to sell indirectly as they are
today if you do a search on fine people
you get a million hits almost every one
of those hits is a lie about the
president because they would tell the
story the wrong way almost all of them
and if you do a search on rush inclusion
you get 1.4 million hits on Google I'm
guessing at least a million in them are
blaming the president for being the
Russian spy so or a Russian puppet or
something so if you took those two lies
to find people lie and you add it
together with the rush of collusion line
that's just two things
imagine all the lies told about this
president that's just two of them and
you have two million lies two million
but here's here's what I'd like to
suggest I want you to see if I'm wrong
on this in fact check madness it seems
to me that the ten thousand lies that
the president has told are almost
entirely what I would call sales lies in
other words they're there in the service
of selling something and for the most
part what he's selling is make America
great again
so yes the thing is lying about gets you
to a better economy do you feel bad
about that if the thing is lying about
reduces Isis recruiting is that bad so
let me give you the specific examples if
the president says the economy is doing
better were they his administration has
done more things than he's really done
or that the cutting of the regulation is
more important to the economy than
he says or that his contribution to the
stock price going up is far more than
actually the evidence suggests what is
the outcome of all of those lies about
the economy well the outcome is that the
economy improves that is the point of
those lies the point of saying
everything is great is to make people
think our economy is great so I guess I
should invest and when they invest it
makes the economy great when he says I
mean we're hiring like crazy and
employments up and everything's good
these are good lies
these are salesperson lies because the
salesperson might lie to you but you
still could end up buying the thing you
wanted all right so there are lots of
lies that are hyperbole they're
exaggeration or they're overstating but
they're for a very clear positive
purpose now of course it helps them get
elected it helps them be president
etc and I'm not minimizing the fact that
their self-interest involved but the
lies are very very positive they're so
positive that you could argue that the
president's lies about the economy are
the best thing that have ever happened
to the country think about that the
president's lies about how good the
economy is are literally making the
economy better I mean that's not an
exaggeration that is a fact I would die
on I would you could put a bullet to my
head and say Scott say with confidence
that the president's lies about the
economy are actually good for the
economy and I would say I'll say it
right now our president's lies are good
for the economy okay I would put a
bullet in my mouth and tell you that
there's no fricking question that his
lies helped the economy let's take
another topic Isis so the president said
you know Isis is defeated blah blah was
that and over a claim absolutely it was
definitely more than what was true it
was hyperbole it was
maybe doesn't pass the fact-checking but
if you're isis and you're watching the
news or you're thinking of becoming Isis
do you want to join the group that is
being decimated more than estimated it's
decimated technically means 10 percent
worse so Isis is more like 95 percent
worse now and heading in the wrong
direction when the president lies about
how well Isis is doing
that's bad for Isis because they can't
recruit if the news is saying Isis is
losing everywhere
it's a lie but it's the best freaking
lie anybody ever told I want more of
those lies
let's give us more of those those are
good lies all right those are smart lies
those are leader lies now compare those
lies and again I'm not saying those are
the only things that that there lies
about but compare them to just the two
lies coming from the press the fine
person lie and and the rush of collusion
what are those two things done to the to
the moral fabric of this country so
speaking to Joe Biden's campaign theme
about you know the moral center of the
country what did the fine person lie do
to the moral fabric of this country if
Rickon ripped its gizzards out it's the
worst political lie except for Russia
collusion those two things are the worst
political lies maybe of all time and
because if you look at the racial divide
in this country so much of it Springs
from the fine people lie now some of you
are gonna say now you you could you
could throw that one away and the
president has done so many other things
that sound racist that that's just one
of them so Scott you're overstating the
importance of that one and I would state
that that one line is the one where
they're sure that the president was a
racist
all the other ones are ones that even
the people who think he's a racist can
sort of see that it might be something
taken Anna context so that the the
countries think even if you're
sure the presidents are racist for other
reasons you hear that whole thing
and I think even if you don't say it out
loud you're thinking to yourself okay
kind of was talking about the country's
alright I I started to get that it's not
a good spot a clean one
but because the Charlottesville one I'm
so sure is true and that one he really
showed that he's in favor of neo-nazis
that makes me think that common
is true take another one
the Mexicans are animals fake news well
of course the president was actually
talking about ms-13 if you're someone
who thinks the president is racist and
you hear that story you say okay call
them animals but it's pretty clear he
was talking about ms-13 alright that's a
gray area
it feels racist to me though not because
of the situation because that's that's
obviously he was talking about him as 13
but because of Charlottesville
since I know Charlottesville really
happened all these other things seem
truer than the facts would make them
seem so the point is that
Charlottesville is the Alpha lie for all
of the other lies and the reason I'm I'm
taking it out is because it's the is the
third leg of the TDS stool so the TDS
stool the thing that supports people's
insanity about the president are three
legs Russia collusion find people hoax
and racism etc and the thought these
literally crazy he's got a mental
problem all right as time goes by and
the results in this country continue to
be stellar the he's crazy
mentally incompetent one is starting to
fade on its own you know you have you
noticed you don't hear that as much have
you noticed that the headlines are not
full of the president is crazy and
impulsive and all that that just went
away
that's one of the legs of the stool
Russia collusion went away the fine
people hoax is the list
last little brittle leg that is also
going away because it's not true and I
think my blog post should kick that leg
out because it will give you a link and
by the way you should save it you should
save my blog post link and you should
turn it into a bitly
and you should put it on a nope like a
no file so you always know where it is
and then forever on social media when
somebody brings up that lie send them a
link to my blog post and it will take
them all the way down the hoax funnel
down to the question and get rid of that
leg so I would say if you were going to
compare the the destructive power of
lies the Russia collusion and the fine
people lie were destructive lies and
they got 2 million hits that is the
biggest lying I don't know if we've ever
seen bigger lies maybe a world war 2 or
something they were bigger lies but
feels like the most powerful super lie
situation we've ever seen the president
has told 10,000 salesperson lies and the
result is a better economy less
recruiting for Isis and what happened
when they said is there a rise in white
supremacy and the president downplayed
it and they they fact checked him and
said yeah but they're like two dozen
people killed this way but there are two
dozen plus three people killed this way
in a context where more more people die
in swimming pools and on bicycles that
are killed by white supremacists
I mean literally and it's not even close
there are far more people who drown in
the backyard swimming pool that are ever
killed by killed by terrorists in this
country so the president downplayed it
partly because he's the one being blamed
for the rise and white supremacy if
somebody is blaming you for something
are you gonna say there's a lot of it if
somebody said hey Scott you're you're to
blame for a pollution do you think
there's a lot of pollution I might be
tempted to say there's
not too much me because I don't want to
take the blame because I know I'm gonna
get the blame so of course I'm gonna
minimize it anyway so the president's
lies if you want to call them that are
seemingly all toward a greater good the
lies against the president are not for a
greater good the fine person hoax had no
good intentions it was just to change
who was in power same with the Russia
collusion stuff all right did I cover
all of my topics is there anything I
didn't talk about yet so I watched a
clip of Don Lemon talking to
I forget who but it was some Trump
supporter who was just who was just
annihilating him until the point where
Don Lemon had to just shout it over him
and and until the guy couldn't talk and
that was funny Oh
nuclear let's talk nuclear so I hope you
enjoyed my interview with Michael
Shellenberger yesterday a world expert
advisor on the subject of nuclear energy
and you saw a little bit of a
disagreement and that's your
disagreement that might be too strong of
a word but there was a different view
let's say on older nuclear technology
versus generation four but I wanted to
put that in context now so there are two
points of view roughly so Shellenberger
is saying that that generation three
nuclear which is the type France s and
not the type of the United States has I
don't think we might have a few I think
we have mostly generation one which were
they relatively more dangerous designs
France has generation three and I'll be
looking for some fact-checking on this
because I'm out of my depth here has
generation three very successful and as
far as I know zero nuclear accidents
somebody or at least of any
of any consequence so fact-checking on
that I don't believe there's ever been a
generation 3 nuclear accident
can somebody fact check me on that I
forget what Fukushima was but certainly
Chernobyl was a different thing Three
Mile Island with none of those were
generation 3 so Michael Sheldon Berger
is saying quite reasonably why would you
mess around with these new generation
for stuff that would take a lot of work
and testing and there's a lot of risk
involved on the unknown versus
generation 3 where we have such a long
history and no problems and we've
refined it to the point where we've
taken out all of the opportunity for
problems why wouldn't you go with that
and you know worry less about generation
3 because we already have a solution and
my take on that was you know I certainly
get that if you're gonna start today you
have to start with generation 3 because
generation 4 is not quite there all
right so that part we agree on but what
I disagree on is that the potential for
generation 4 isn't better than gen gen 3
and the reason I say that is some of you
saw I did if you are I did with the
person I call the smartest person in the
world and of all raava comp it was a
founder of AngelList
and generally considered one of those
smartest people in the world and
certainly specifically smart in the
world of startups and entrepreneurial
stuff that's that's really his greatest
area of at least what the public thinks
of his expertise is is his brains pretty
big but the we would recognize him as
maybe one of the smartest people in the
world on that topic now when he talks
about nuclear he says yeah talking about
it as startups the way you would talk
about is startups is that nuclear you
can't iterate designs because if
something goes wrong and there's a long
approval process and blah blah it's her
to quickly test things the way every
other technology is developed so other
things can be tested quickly and then
you can get to a better point because
they even if things go wrong you know it
doesn't matter if your smartphone
doesn't work it's not like a nuclear
meltdown I've got something in my eye
now the government has funded and there
there's at least one test site in the
world where there could rapidly test
generation for designs and there are a
dozen or so startups in the generation
four world and Bill Gates is a major
investor in one of those so I say why
don't you do both as hard as you can you
know why not build the generation 3
power plant so we know how to do right
now and still keep iterating the hack in
a generation 4 because someday someday
they might be better and it's hard for
me to imagine that all of the geniuses
and they would have to be geniuses
literally geniuses working on all these
nuclear startups it's hard for me to
imagine that they don't know what
Michael Shellenberger knows that
generation 3 is it has been refined to
the point where it's the safe smart way
to go how could all of those startups
not know that now I'm probably
overstating it so I don't want to
misrepresent Michael's point of view but
I think his point of view has more to do
with where you put your your emphasis I
don't think he's saying that there's no
way we would ever get to a better design
through generation four I think he just
thinks that's the bad play statistically
and timing-wise
which I wouldn't I wouldn't disagree
with because I don't have the expertise
to disagree with that but I want to make
a case for doing both hard because we
don't we don't have a money problem in
other words there is funding for these
startups Bill Gates etc so it wouldn't
make sense not to push them as hard as
we can within a safe the safe zone at
the same time we're doing generation 3
if we need to build stuff right away and
we do
and that and then Michael also had a
little I say a more negative opinion
about green technologies potential and
made a beta compelling case that the
people who are claiming the economics
are good are let's say they're leaving
things out well let's say let's say that
their analyses I'm being as kind as
possible that the people who say the all
green solution is ready now and we can
just roll this stuff out and we're all
good to go that those people are not
quite considering all of the all of the
variables let's say that's the kindest
thing I can say and I think he's
probably right on that but like
generation four I will take the than of
all point of view which is I don't think
you can really know where a green
technology mostly solar and wind I don't
think you can know what their upper
limit is I think if it's like every
other thing in the world people will
discover new improvements and ways to
optimize that we didn't know let's take
just the simplest example one of the
things people say about solar is that it
takes up too much physical space don't
you think somebody's going to invent a
way to make it more vertical and then
physical space is not important what
happens when robots can build solar
facilities and you just say okay robots
go out there and we'll check back in a
month and we want a whole new full solar
facility built in the desert well what
does that do to the cost structure when
you can just point the robots in a
direction and the next thing you know
there's a solar facility and maybe it
doesn't take much room maybe it's
vertical I think I tweeted around an
article in which there's one plan for
turning air conditionings and in
skyscrapers yeah somebody's talking
about this already the solar skyscraper
somebody has a plan and I don't think is
quite as practical as they're thinking
but they think
maybe they can get there in which an
office building would have lots of
air-conditioning facilities and those
air conditioners create a heat so if
you're cooling something you're
necessarily making something else hotter
because you're just moving the heat
you're not you're not taking heat away
you're you're just changing where it is
so something's getting hotter in order
for an air conditioning to do what it
does and the idea is that heat could
maybe be used as to create fuel and of
the co2 in the air in other words you
convert these air conditioners to do two
things one is to cool the building but
the other is to use the heat that they
generate in the process as part of the
solution for dragging co2 out of the air
and converting it chemically into a fuel
that could be used where you can't use
green energy so that's usually a ship or
an aircraft they they don't run it's not
likely that they'll run on electric
energy of any time soon so you create
fuel end of the co2 so then you put
solar panels all over your building so
if you imagine a building it's got solar
panels all the way up and the
air-conditioning for each building is
optimized to create to pull a little co2
end of the air and to convert it to fuel
that replaces the need for carbon in
airplanes and boats now can they ever
build that if I said to you in 40 years
will we be able to do what I just
described build a skyscraper that is
energy neutral and actually drag co2 end
of the air doesn't require any
electricity beyond what is generating on
its own
and oh you're watching the bar damn it I
need to go watch that too anyway so the
point is nobody can really tell you
where solar and green energy are going
to be in 40 years
anybody who says they can I don't trust
them let me let me just toss this out
right now the biggest problem with solar
is that you can't store it right we
can't figure out have
batteries but imagine if you will that
we solve instead the transmission
problem suppose instead of making
batteries we figure out how to send
electricity over long distances without
losing losing the energy and right now I
think you could do that with maybe super
conductivity or something but a
breakthrough and that would allow you to
network together all of the skyscrapers
with their solar all over the world so
even if the Sun were not shining where
you are you could be networked by super
conductive cables to another part of the
world where the sun is shining just
great so if you had the entire world
networked with super conductivity do you
need batteries that's a question would
you need batteries if it was dark where
you are but you're networked to the
other side of the world where there's
plenty of Sun and there's plenty of
solar and it's just sending you the
electricity from the other side of the
world now you would have to have super
conductivity and underwater cables and
all that and those are things we haven't
solved but if you can tell me and I'm
not suggesting that that exact scenario
will happen I'm just trying to I'm
trying to stimulate your imagination so
you can say to yourself okay we really
don't know what it looks like in 40
years
there's just no way to predict that so I
say go hard and everything and I'm gonna
go watch Bill Barr and I will talk to
you later bye
