Episode 1130 Scott Adams - Supreme Court Gender Discrimination, Escape a BLM Mob, Schumer Threats
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: ----------- - Senator Schumer and Blumenthal threaten...violence? - It is NOT okay, to say you hope half the country dies - COVID19 ethnic differences in mortality - Monetized incentive to code deaths as COVID19 - Potential SCOTUS strategies for President Trump - SCOTUS candidate gender discrimination ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
Hey everybody, come on in. Come on in. It's time. You came to the right place at the right time. Yes, we're going to have a great start to the day. Today is going to
View segment →be incredible. I mean, really just incredible. And all you need to get it off to the right start is a copper mug or a glass, a tankard, chalice, stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the dopamine hit of the day. T…
View segment →it happens right now. Christina taught me a brand new beverage. It's called coffee with about half of it filled with hot water so it's like a weak coffee that gives you the suggestion of
View segment →coffee without all the jitters. I need that today. All right, what have we got going on? Are there crazy things happening in the world? Yeah, there are. At the top of my list is a new tropical storm and the name of the tropical storm is Tropical Storm Beta. That's right. The simulation is serving u…
View segment →How weird is that? And they said, yeah, it's really weird. We normally could have people filling the hallways but today, no real reason, just nobody's here. And I keep running into these situations where I see fewer and fewer people at the same time. Have you noticed that? It's called social distan…
View segment →you're clever but maybe other people don't. You know who you are. If you have ever tweeted that actor Rob Reiner is a quote meathead, you may not be a creative person because you're the same people who tweeted me, or actually it's people on the other side tweeted me saying that they've just discover…
View segment →n the car was like a little iffy on it. He's like, okay, I'll put the fist up a little bit. And then they insisted that he wasn't enthusiastic enough. Like he wasn't really putting his fist up. He was just sort of raising it a little bit. So they were on him and it was pretty threatening. It looked…
View segment →y hypothesis. That people are drawn to the thing that they can conceive the most easily and you can conceive a story, one that looks like a story, more readily than you can conceive of something that's random. And that we're drawn toward the story to the point of making it happen. This is the part o…
View segment →ould it be as interesting no matter what it is? But before the election I've got a feeling you're going to see something about Brennan and Clapper, at least Brennan. So there's going to be something I think interesting because that would be the best story. The best story would be that Durham not onl…
View segment →know if this is money on the table because there's going to be a fight but if there might be money on the table you want your president to pick it up. That's what he got elected to do. He didn't get elected to leave money on the table. All right, nobody wanted that guy. So I would say that I respec…
View segment →have to have a revolution and do an armed revolution of the country? I don't know. Could be dangerous. But I do like the fact that Trump took everything else out of the headlines and is going to concentrate in an area that I think is stronger for him. I do believe that Trump has an advantage if thi…
View segment →ng his mind but it doesn't matter. No it doesn't matter what his reason is. If he didn't have those reasons he would have made up another reason because one thing he's not going to do is go against the president while he's running for his own re-election and it's a razor thin. Lindsey Graham wants t…
View segment →revolution and violence. They say it directly. Now given that violence and revolution are literally on the table these Democrat senators saying that nothing is off the table basically have threatened violence against, here's the key part, against you and me. Our politicians have actually threatened…
View segment →e don't have to drag them. Drag the 53 percent and the 62 percent. What does drag them mean? I mean actually like tie them to the back of the car and drag them? Does it mean hurt them? What does drag them mean? If you could tweet in public specifically against an entire ethnicity and gender, white…
View segment →omeplace useful. Probably takes a while. Probably a whole lot of planning. A whole lot of figuring out what really needs to be done. So maybe it just took two years. But I don't think that's the full answer obviously. It's not a coincidence that there's an election coming up and it's not a coincide…
View segment →him. So the claims about Trump are hey he's a big old racist. So what's one thing you can do if people are accusing you of being racist? How about putting a world record amount of money into Puerto Rico? It's a pretty good idea because it's hard to argue that that's some big racist thing even though…
View segment →acle and Walmart. What do they have in common other than I guess they had the cash and the willingness to do it? But there's some word that what China might do is keep the algorithm but sell the company to which I say how hard would it be for the United States to build its own algorithm? What if we…
View segment →dy says tie goes to the lower court decision. Oh that makes sense, right? So it doesn't get to the Supreme Court until the lower court has ruled. If the Supreme Court is tied somebody is saying this sounds right that that means there's no decision at the Supreme Court so the lower court ruling would…
View segment →Hey everybody, come on in. Come on in. It's time. You came to the right place at the right time. Yes, we're going to have a great start to the day. Today is going to be incredible. I mean, really just incredible.
And all you need to get it off to the right start is a copper mug or a glass, a tankard, chalice, stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the dopamine hit of the day. The thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens right now.
Christina taught me a brand new beverage. It's called coffee with about half of it filled with hot water so it's like a weak coffee that gives you the suggestion of coffee without all the jitters. I need that today.
All right, what have we got going on? Are there crazy things happening in the world? Yeah, there are. At the top of my list is a new tropical storm and the name of the tropical storm is Tropical Storm Beta. That's right. The simulation is serving up a beta storm at the same time beta males are rioting all over the country.
So what did I tell you about code reuse? I have this theory that one of the ways that you can tell if you are in a simulation is if there's something happening somewhere in the world that would take a great deal of processing power, that there might be other things that slow down or they have to reuse code to compensate for the fact that all the energy is going into one part of the program.
Does it seem to you like there's a tremendous amount of activity and complexity going on just because of politics, but at the same time we have these weird coincidences going on where it seems like the same names are getting reused for stuff and we're seeing these familiar patterns? It's like, haven't we seen this before? It just seems like there's a lot of repeats going on.
I noticed this the other day. I told you the story about I went to the emergency room the other day and what was really interesting about it is that it wasn't busy. And I kept saying to them, is this weird? I'm at the emergency room of a major emergency room and there are only two other people here. How weird is that? And they said, yeah, it's really weird. We normally could have people filling the hallways but today, no real reason, just nobody's here.
And I keep running into these situations where I see fewer and fewer people at the same time. Have you noticed that? It's called social distancing. So suddenly the complexity of my personal life has shrunk and shrunk way down. It's way less complicated because I don't have a social life, as most of you are experiencing some version of that too. So the world is way more complicated in politics but there are other areas of life that suddenly, coincidentally, became way less complicated. Is that a coincidence? Probably yes. But it's fun to talk about the simulation.
All right, I have a suggestion for all of you who think you're clever but maybe other people don't. You know who you are. If you have ever tweeted that actor Rob Reiner is a quote meathead, you may not be a creative person because you're the same people who tweeted me, or actually it's people on the other side tweeted me saying that they've just discovered that I'm not actually the cartoonist but I'm really the pointy-haired boss in my comic strip.
Please, if I can beg of you one thing, you can insult me all you want. That's cool. I'm used to that. You can insult Rob Reiner all you want. I've done it myself. I enjoy it honestly. Insulting Rob Reiner is one of the things I enjoy. And if other people enjoy insulting me, well okay, good for you. But can you be a little more creative? A little more creative than accusing them of being a character they played on TV? You just need to raise your game a little bit. I'm begging you. Only because there's a certain level of lack of creativity that hurts my eyes sort of in the back, you know, when I read this. If I read one more tweet calling Rob Reiner a meathead, there's like this shooting pain behind my eyes and I go, ah, wow, it's so uncreative. So that's just a personal favor. I'm just begging you, just stop being uncreative. Call them something else. Anything else.
All right, many of you saw the video. It's a little viral video of a couple of guys who got stopped in their car by protesters, I think it was Portland. And they were surrounded by the protesters and the protesters, at least the ones in the video, looked mostly like white men. And they were insisting that the men in the car, who may have been Hispanic, I don't know if it matters to the story, you can decide, but they were being forced to declare Black Lives Matter.
Now one of the guys in the car was like a little iffy on it. He's like, okay, I'll put the fist up a little bit. And then they insisted that he wasn't enthusiastic enough. Like he wasn't really putting his fist up. He was just sort of raising it a little bit. So they were on him and it was pretty threatening. It looked pretty dangerous actually. If they had resisted more than they did, it looked like their vehicle would be destroyed. They might be hurt, could get dragged out. Who knows? Just about anything could happen.
So here's my suggestion of how to handle that situation if you find yourself in it. Now you're going to say to yourself, Scott, that won't work because they will immediately know you're joking. No they won't. No they won't. They will not know you're joking if you say the following. If they say, say it, say Black Lives Matter, here's what I would say and I would say it really loudly and I would repeat it as many times as I needed to to make sure everybody heard it. And it would go like this: Black lives matter more than white lives. Heil Hitler. BLM. Heil Antifa. Death to whitey.
So that's how you do it. You want to agree with them but amplify it. Don't just say Black Lives Matter because you know you don't want to be a Tropical Storm Beta if you know what I mean. Just go for it and just say Black lives matter more than white people. Heil BLM. Heil Antifa. Death to whitey.
Now again you think to yourself, Scott, they're going to know you're joking. No they won't. This is the only thing I promise you. No they won't. They will not think you're joking. In fact they might nominate you to be the leader of their group. You could end up, you know, they might give you snacks from the snack van if you wanted free snacks from the Antifa snack van. I think all you have to do is say that and they say, hey would you like a snack? We've got some bottled water here. It's nice and frozen. Would you like it?
So that's my recommendation. By the way, if anybody gets killed using any of my recommendations, what the hell were you thinking? I'm a cartoonist. Don't take my advice on self-defense. If you're getting self-defense tips from a cartoonist, well you kind of deserve what you get. So that's my warning there.
One of my methods for predicting the future, I've talked about this before but there's an actual theory behind it. And the technique is this. If there's a situation in the world in which you can anticipate, well things could go this way or they could go that way or they could go that way but it's fairly well defined, the things are either going to go one of these defined ways, you can usually bet that the way it will go is whichever way makes the most interesting story.
Now you say to me there is no reason that would be true, right? Why would it be that if there are three possibilities and you don't have any way to know which one is more likely, why would it be that the one that's the best story ends up being more likely? Not every time, right? Just a bias toward the good story.
Here's why. I don't think it applies to natural disasters. In other words if there are no human beings making decisions, well that is just news and it was going to happen. You know, the cliff collapsed, the earthquake happened, whatever happened. But when there's a situation in which human beings are involved, humans are very affected by the fact that we live in a world of stories. We learn by stories. We're entertained by stories. We tell stories. We listen to stories. And stories have sort of a form that you recognize. And movies in particular have a three-act form. Books are a little different but we all recognize what a story is. We would know if somebody told a bad story. We would all recognize it was like, oh that was a bad story. There was no conclusion. There was no third act. It just was flat.
So here's my hypothesis. That people are drawn to the thing that they can conceive the most easily and you can conceive a story, one that looks like a story, more readily than you can conceive of something that's random. And that we're drawn toward the story to the point of making it happen. This is the part of the hypothesis that has the most question to it I would say. People are drawn to what they think about. If you think about an accident all the time you're more likely to have one. If you think about a particular bad thing happening, have you noticed it's more likely to happen? It's almost like you bring it on yourself. You could almost wish yourself to get sick. Have you noticed that?
If one spouse dies, let's say the two people have been married for 60 years, if one of them dies the other one's usually going to be gone in a year and it's because that person is following the story. Right? Not intentionally but you know if your partner dies you kind of want to follow them and you don't want to wait too long. So the odds of you dying pretty quickly go way up and that's shown to be true.
So with this situation of let's say Trump running for president, one of the filters I saw was that the most amazing story would be if he came from behind and won. That was the best story. If you're going to make a movie of 2016 it had to end that way, didn't it? It had to end with Trump winning because that was just the best story. You might not enjoy it if you're a Democrat but you can't ignore the fact it's the best story.
Likewise one year ago when people were talking about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's health I said to myself, all right what would be the best story? The best story is not that she died a year before an election. No. The best story would not be that she died a month after the election. The best story to make it like a regular plot of a movie is if she dies 45 days before the election. Why 45? President is number 45.
Now that's just a coincidence but the exact timing of her death feels entirely like a movie plot. And I did in fact, privately, I don't think I said this publicly, I don't like to publicly predict somebody's death, but privately I was saying, you know it's going to happen a month before the election because that's the story.
So watch for that pattern. See how many times the best story wins. And if you were to take that concept to let's say Durham. So the Durham investigation is happening now. What would be the best story? The best story would be Durham comes out before the election. Again it's like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Right before the election is the better story. After the election I don't know, would it be as interesting no matter what it is? But before the election I've got a feeling you're going to see something about Brennan and Clapper, at least Brennan. So there's going to be something I think interesting because that would be the best story. The best story would be that Durham not only found something but found something that just makes your whole head come off. And I feel like we might be heading that way only because it's the best story. We'll see.
Let's see what else we got here. I was talking yesterday about the strategy that Trump might want to look at. One strategy would be what apparently he's going to do which is try to get his nominee for the Supreme Court pushed through before election day. I did say that it would be interesting and maybe clever as a strategy to not do that. Imagine if he decided not to and just say, how about I'll wait, we'll wait, and then just use it as a means of getting your voters to show up. Now that would be risky but also it wouldn't be Trump, would it?
Do you think that if you had heard that Trump said, you know maybe you're right, you're right, maybe we'll just wait, wait till after the election, that sounds fair to me, if he ever said that you'd say to yourself, what happened to Trump? You think we elected the guy who doesn't know how to do anything but fight. We intentionally elected the guy who doesn't quit. We very specifically elected the guy who would be the pirate who if he needs to kill somebody to get something done he's going to kill somebody to get something done. Legally we hope, right?
So if Trump did not do exactly what Trump did, which is say, oh yeah we're going to try to get this through before the election, if he hadn't done that, who is he really? I mean who would he be? He wouldn't be the guy you elected. You'd be a different guy. So I think that politicians do have some responsibility for being the person they got elected and not baiting and switching.
So independent of whether it was a good strategy or a bad strategy to push it through versus waiting, you still want Trump to be Trump, don't you? Don't you still want him to be the fighter who never even probably never even considered holding off? You know it's hard to know but if I had to guess I'll bet there was never a time when Trump said yeah let's hold back. I just don't think he, I don't think his brain works that way. And that's exactly why he got elected. He got elected because he won't hold back. That he'll, you know, he sees some potential money on the table. We don't know if this is money on the table because there's going to be a fight but if there might be money on the table you want your president to pick it up. That's what he got elected to do. He didn't get elected to leave money on the table. All right, nobody wanted that guy.
So I would say that I respect and I appreciate this method. I don't know if it'll succeed and also because I don't know if it'll succeed I don't know if it's the best strategy but it could be. It could be.
Here's what's good about it. Number one thing that's good about it is that by actually having the nomination it forces Kamala Harris to come back to Washington so he can take Kamala Harris off the board. That's pretty good, right? Taking Harris off the board might help just because she'll be bogged down but at the same time she'll also get a stage in front of the world to say her thing and you know that could be to her credit. So it could work either way. A little dangerous there.
The other thing it does is, did you look at the headlines today? Everything else disappeared. There's nothing else that anybody wants to talk about. If Trump can keep this going I would say that that's an advantage because he just took everything else off the table. And if the only question is Supreme Court and let's say that Trump actually got the nomination through and actually got it completed right before election day, hypothetically, what would that do? Well if you're a Democrat maybe you would be demoralized as in, you know, we're so far behind. Or do you decide that you have to have a revolution and do an armed revolution of the country? I don't know. Could be dangerous.
But I do like the fact that Trump took everything else out of the headlines and is going to concentrate in an area that I think is stronger for him. I do believe that Trump has an advantage if this is the option, if this is the topic everybody's talking about. I think he has an advantage.
Now about some more about this. If you're watching the news you know that Senator Lindsey Graham was in a ticklish situation because he's on record in two different times on camera saying that in this exact situation that he would delay the nomination. That would be his choice. And then he came out and said, oh I'm totally not going to delay the nomination.
Now if any of you thought that he was going to rely on principle or that he would keep his word and you know I said I'd do it so I guess I'm bound by my word, I gotta throw you an lol because we're not in a world where people keep their promises on stuff like that. That was just so obvious that he was going to find a workaround, you know a lawyer workaround, which he did. And he gave his reasons that were so ridiculous that I forgot them already. So I read his reasons about why he's changing his mind but it doesn't matter. No it doesn't matter what his reason is. If he didn't have those reasons he would have made up another reason because one thing he's not going to do is go against the president while he's running for his own re-election and it's a razor thin. Lindsey Graham wants to get elected. Our system allows him to do that, right?
It is not, this is just my personal opinion, but to me it is not unethical to do legal things that get you elected even if it means changing your mind. He's allowed to do that if that's what it takes to get him elected and he's doing it transparently. There's not really any secrets to it. You know what he said before. You know what he says now. You know it's the opposite. He puts it right out there. You know you can do what you want with that and at least it's transparent.
So the Democrats, the leadership has decided to threaten the public. That's the way I take it. So Schumer said that quote, everything's, nothing is off the table if the president pushes through this nomination. Nothing is off the table. What's that mean, nothing is off the table? And Richard Blumenthal, Democrat senator, said similarly. He tweeted if Republicans recklessly and reprehensibly force a SCOTUS vote before the election, nothing is off the table.
Now if this were normal times and a politician said nothing is off the table what would you think that meant? You would think it meant, oh parliamentary procedures. It might mean that they're trying hard to raise money. They're gonna push all the envelopes. You'd probably think it was something peaceful and clever and strategic. But it doesn't feel like that today, does it? As you're watching the riots and you're watching people say in public, you see the number of blue check people say in public that if they don't get their way it's going to be revolution and violence. They say it directly.
Now given that violence and revolution are literally on the table these Democrat senators saying that nothing is off the table basically have threatened violence against, here's the key part, against you and me. Our politicians have actually threatened the public. They haven't threatened just Trump. And I'm not saying it's because you're a Trump supporter necessarily. I'm saying that they've threatened the public. The public. Because this is not exactly a limited threat. It's not a we'll do anything to stop President Trump. They literally said nothing is off the table in the context of violence and people making death threats right and left. This is really dangerous stuff.
So I think that this is a tremendous advantage for Republicans because they're creating a situation where Democrats feel like they want to win and they have their concerns and they're quite worked up but they've framed it as Republicans are really in trouble, like physically in trouble. If that doesn't get you to the voting booth or to mail in your vote I don't know what will. But it feels like a gigantic error on the part of the Democrats.
Here, listen to the sort of things that people are saying. This is Rae Sunny. I think she's, I don't want to judge people's ethnicity from their profile picture but not a white woman let's say. I won't say what she is but probably does not identify as a white one would be fair to say. And she tweeted this: Respectfully white men got us into this. I don't know what this is. And it frustrates me endlessly that white men voted Trump in and somehow get away scot-free as if because their racism and selfishness is a given we don't have to drag them. Drag the 53 percent and the 62 percent. What does drag them mean? I mean actually like tie them to the back of the car and drag them? Does it mean hurt them? What does drag them mean?
If you could tweet in public specifically against an entire ethnicity and gender, white men, and your tweet doesn't get taken down, you don't lose your job, I don't know. I think she's a comedian or something. That's a pretty dangerous situation.
There was a Marshall University professor who said on video the other day, yesterday or something, that she wishes every Trump supporter would die before the election. What? How do you go on video? You're a semi public person because you teach at a college and you say in public with no reservations at all because apparently you've been only dealing with people who agree with you for a long time and didn't realize that it wasn't okay to say in public that you hope half of the country dies. And actually mean it because she wasn't joking. She sorta, I mean she wasn't being literal but she was certainly being, it looked like she was being accurate to her own feeling about Trump supporters. Like she wouldn't mind if some of them died. Certainly not all of them.
So it's just crazy that these things can be said out loud. This is the sort of stuff that should predict a Trump landslide because I think Republicans are staying quiet and doing two things. They're ordering their ballots if they don't have them and they're stocking up on ammo just in case. Just in case.
So this is a pretty dangerous situation. I continue to believe that the republic can handle this quite easily. So every now and then I feel it's my role to put things in context to make you feel better. All right?
If it's so easy to get caught up in these, you know each topic is the end of the world. Oh the replacement of the Supreme Court seat, it's the end of the world. We'll all kill each other if we don't get our way. The coronavirus is the end of the world. The economy is crashing. It feels like every story is going to be the end of the world but how many of them have been the end of the world so far? None. This won't be the end of the world either.
As problems go, if you were to look at the history of the United States it's easy to forget how many things this country has survived. We've survived some really big stuff, way bigger than this. So if you were to rank where the Supreme Court thing is in terms of ripping the country apart it's a two out of ten. If you're trying to say how worried should I be about the future because of the Supreme Court stuff, two out of ten. That's about it.
But it will be treated like it's a 10 out of 10 because that's what we do now. We're all going to treat it like it's 10 out of 10 but no matter how it goes we'll still be the United States. Our economy will still be improving. We'll still be inventing things. We'll still be fixing things and solving things and we will be fine. And we're a lot closer to solving our more recent big problems than we are to not solving them.
Speaking of which I forgot to mention this. I thought it was politically brilliant for Trump to approve 90 billion dollars for Puerto Rico. Now the people who are critics of the president will say, and I think it's a completely fair statement, they'll say why did it take so long? I remember I always kid, I always mock people for saying that if somebody did something good that you mock them for taking so long because that's just the easy cheap thing to say. Well why'd you take so long? I will criticize you for doing the wrong thing but I'll also criticize you for doing the right thing because you could have done it sooner. Now of course you can do anything sooner so it's the universal non-thing.
But with the Puerto Rico thing I think there's a better argument for why not sooner. If you ask me the reason why not sooner is, you know, number one it was probably helpful for the election but there are a couple of reasons why maybe not sooner made sense. One is there's a tremendous corruption problem there. It might have taken them a while to figure out how to pump money into Puerto Rico and not have it all stolen or wasted because stolen or wasted is exactly what would have happened if you would put 90 billion into there a month after the hurricane. Do we all agree that if you just said let's throw money at this place a month after the hurricane it would just all be wasted? Because they just, they don't have the systems, the controls. They just didn't have a way to watch that money and keep track of it and get it to the right places. It could be. I don't know. This that it probably takes a while to get some confidence that you've got a structure in place that you can now put money into it and it'll go someplace useful. Probably takes a while. Probably a whole lot of planning. A whole lot of figuring out what really needs to be done. So maybe it just took two years.
But I don't think that's the full answer obviously. It's not a coincidence that there's an election coming up and it's not a coincidence that the president would like to shore up his Hispanic support and do everything he could. That's counterfactual to whatever the claims are about him. So the claims about Trump are hey he's a big old racist. So what's one thing you can do if people are accusing you of being racist? How about putting a world record amount of money into Puerto Rico? It's a pretty good idea because it's hard to argue that that's some big racist thing even though it's obviously a politically motivated. So that was good.
And then of course the TikTok looks like the sale is going to go through to Oracle and Walmart. If you ever told me two companies that I thought should never be in a business deal it would probably be Oracle and Walmart. What do they have in common other than I guess they had the cash and the willingness to do it?
But there's some word that what China might do is keep the algorithm but sell the company to which I say how hard would it be for the United States to build its own algorithm? What if we took everything from TikTok, you know the assets, the customer base, but the only thing we got rid of was the algorithm? We just delete it and replace one that just says something simple such as you'll see more things from your friends, the people you follow, and maybe you'll see more things from, you know just some easy algorithm. But couldn't you put, given that it's mostly for children, it's young people who use it mostly, don't you think we should have an open algorithm that we can all see?
I feel as if the Oracles of the world and Walmarts, they should guarantee the government that the algorithm will be public so everybody can see what it does. Is that wrong? No I don't know. Maybe they can't make money that way but given that it's directed at children, well how about this for a law? How about a law that says if children use your platform you have to reveal your algorithm. Oh that's pretty good. I'm so happy I just thought of that. Has anybody ever come up with that idea?
You know the big platforms from your Facebooks to your Snapchats to your Instagrams etc. Twitter is a little different because kids don't follow politics and stuff so I'm not sure how many kids use Twitter compared to other platforms but less I guess. Wouldn't it be reasonable that given that we want to protect children more than we might want to protect adults who know what they're getting into, shouldn't we require that any platform that has children on it has to reveal their algorithm, has to be public? Anybody can see it so parents can see it. Now it would be hard to understand it but at least be public for people who do know how to read the code and look at the algorithm. That would be my idea.
All right, here's a little mind effort for you. You ready for this one? So there's increasingly news out of Europe that they're having another wave and that infections are spiking, coronavirus. And here was a statistic I saw that was useful because it simplified things. All right so hold on to just a few numbers here. I'll keep it really simple. Just hold these in your head. That Europe has 750 million people let's say. The US has 330 million. So we've got a little less than half as many people in the United States as there is in all of Europe. But although Europe has more than twice as many people they have almost the same amount of deaths. 217,000 ours is about 200,000. So about the same amount of deaths but Europe has a little bit more than twice as many people. So that's pretty clean, right?
That's one of those things where you can say oh okay now I see how the United States is really doing poorly because we've got twice as many deaths you know that they do relative to population. But I ask myself this. Are they the same? Is there something about the United States that's different from Europe on average? And here's one thing that's different. What's the black population of the United States? Because as we know the black population has something like four to five times the problem with coronavirus. It's a gigantic difference, right? It's something like four or five times worse if you're African American let's say black. Because we're talking about Europe it's about four or five times worse.
So wouldn't you expect that the country that has the biggest population of black residents should, all things being equal, would have way more deaths? Because unfortunately the coronavirus is not an equal opportunity virus. It's just slamming the black populations. Just slamming them, right?
So I said to myself well if it were true that the black percentage of black population is skewing our coronavirus death count you would be able to see that easily. For example you'd go to Europe and you'd say well if there's anything to this hypothesis if you looked at Europe shouldn't you see that whatever country in Europe has the most black population would have the highest death rate? And sure enough that would be France. So France not only has a close to nine percent I think black population but it is not too far behind the United States at 13. So this is just one data point so don't make too much out of one data point, right?
So the United States is doing poorly and also has 13 percent black population who are doing far worse. France within Europe, France is one of the bad ones, right? It's one of the worst countries in Europe and also has the highest percentage of black population, about nine percent.
Now is there any other country that you could look at that would be maybe confirming or disconfirming this hypothesis? So I took a look at Brazil. Now Brazil's a tough one because Brazil is like super racially mixed so they've got a whole bunch of wonderful stuff all mixed up. The people are just like almost every person in Brazil seems to be some mixture of interesting stuff. But we can glean a few things. I think they have nine percent black population but somewhere between nine and thirty percent at least partly black. So Brazil has an enormous percentage of black population and is one of the worst in terms of coronavirus deaths.
Now what about those countries in Europe that have almost no black population, below two percent? How are they doing? Pretty well. Pretty well it turns out. Turns out that having almost no black population really gets your death count down. Surprise? Shouldn't be because this is a well-known thing.
So let's say that's one normal calculation that needs to be done which is you have to normalize it for ethnic differences in terms of mortality. And what about differences in incentive for coding something a coronavirus death? Can you compare the United States where people get the hospitals anyway, we get a large dollar amount profit if they code something coronavirus whereas in Europe they don't. Do you think that you get the same count? No. In no world do you get the same count if somebody is monetized in one case and not monetized in the other case. You don't get the same result. Never. We don't live in a world where people are immune to monetary incentive. It just isn't a thing. Now it might be a five percent difference not a hundred percent difference but still that's something pretty important you need to calculate.
And then of course you've got the number of obese Americans which is greater than others. We're a bigger country. And then how about this? Is it fair to treat the United States as one big ball given that we have lots of states with power? You know we have an unusual situation. Our states have a lot of power. Shouldn't we be comparing each state to Europe? Wouldn't that be better? How many of the individual states in the United States are doing as well or comparable to Europe? And I think the answer is a lot of them. Right? Out of our 50 states 30 or 40 of them maybe, what would you say, 30, 40 are doing as well as Europe. So that's another way to look at it. Anyway there's a million ways to look at it and I don't believe we've looked at all the best ways.
You are noticing that the Ruth Bader Ginsburg stuff has just kicked everything off the news. It makes everything a little bit boring for a while because there's just really one story that's all we're going to talk about for a while.
All right, I'm watching your comments. A lot of people are agreeing. There's a 15 plus payment differential for coding COVID on medical bills. Yeah 15 is certainly enough. Too many variables to compare. That is correct.
Somebody's talking about putting, oh let me bring up this idea. So President Trump has said publicly that he's probably going to pick a woman and I think that's true. He probably is. Now here's what's wrong with that. And let me say before I start I am completely in favor of a diverse Supreme Court. I think we're all better off if we've got all the voices accounted for so long as everybody's capable to do the job. That's all great and obviously there are plenty of capable people. I'm just saying as long as you have capable people it would also be good to have them diverse.
But we have this thing called the Constitution and we have this thing called the Supreme Court whose job it is to uphold it. How is it constitutional for the president of the United States to say that he can't pick me for the Supreme Court because of my gender? Seriously I personally, this is there's no exaggeration here, I personally have been told by the president of the United States that I would not be eligible. Not that there was much risk I was going to get picked. Let's say Ted Cruz, you know somebody who actually would be in the top 20 or whatever, he can't get the job. Do you think that if somebody sued the president of the United States for job discrimination and said hey you're saying right out loud that you're not going to even consider a man, what's up with that?
And what about your genders that are not either male or female entirely? What about all of your in-between genders? You know your shades and your various, what would be the best way to say it, the rainbow of different genders. What about all that? Don't we care about that anymore? What about transsexual? If you're transsexual can you be on the Supreme Court? I don't know. Maybe that's okay as long as you've transitioned in the right direction. Maybe so.
So here's what I'd ask you. If somebody sued the president of the United States, which I actually think would be a good idea, if somebody sued the president of the United States and said that is job discrimination, you're saying that men can't have this job, where is that in the Constitution? I would like a constitutional ruling from the Supreme Court about whether the president can limit his choices to one gender. I don't think that's going to pass constitutional muster. Am I wrong about this? Can somebody who's smarter than I am about the law tell me? Am I just off in outer space here or is it completely obvious that what the president is doing by limiting his choice to a woman or even just saying it, you know we don't have the actual choice yet but even just saying it in public and saying this is what I'm looking for, is there anybody who could argue that that is constitutional? Because it looks to me like grossly illegal. It looks to me as illegal as anything could ever be.
Now I do not have this feeling about somebody running for office. Different situation. If somebody says hey I'm running to be a senator or a president and I think we need more women in this job, you know give us more representation or whatever, that doesn't seem illegal to me because that's a case of the public gets to vote and that's just one of the variables. It's like oh I care about that variable or I don't but I get to vote. It's not like a job. But the Supreme Court is picked like a job interview. It's you know I don't get to vote on the Supreme Court. If I did I'd be fine with that. If I got to vote on the Supreme Court along with all of you, you know if all the voters got to vote on the Supreme Court and somebody was saying yeah we should have a woman replace RBG, no problem at all. I would have no problem with that at all.
Somebody says I think you're off but what would be the reason? Somebody is laughing white privileged. I don't even know. See you can't tell a parody from reality anymore so people are making comments with little laughy faces and I don't even know if you're agreeing with me or disagree with me. That's how weird things are.
Somebody says this is playing the lefties game. Well saying in advance that you're going to pick a woman is definitely playing the lefties game. Maybe he was speaking of someone specific. I don't think that helps. I mean maybe that would be a defense but I don't think that's what's happening necessarily because there are, apparently there are two women who have risen to the top of the likely list so it's not just one woman. It's his choice man or woman. Well it is his choice but if you say to the public that you're limiting it by gender is it still legal? I don't know. It could be. I would be willing to believe that it wouldn't be treated like regular employment and if the president has complete power to do what the president wants well maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe he could be completely discriminatory and sexist.
President picks and he disclosed and you vote for the president. Read my comments and you will see the reason. Somebody says although I don't see where your comment is. As long as he gives the opportunity to all he can say anything. He's not giving the opportunity to all. That's the opposite of what he's doing. All right he's not discriminating. How is he not discriminating?
Who breaks a tie? That's a good question. What happens if the Supreme Court has a tie? You know one of the reasons you don't want to elect me for president is that I would lock up the Supreme Court if I could. I would try to make it a tie. So if there were more conservatives than liberals I would add a liberal. If it was the other way I'd add a conservative. And if I were president I would make the Supreme Court eight people, four and four. I wouldn't even replace a ninth person. Do you know why? The reason is this. If the Supreme Court can't make a decision that breaks out of the liberal and or conservative silos, hell with it. I don't want them to do anything.
If the only reason that a decision goes one way is you have more liberal or you have more conservative judges, if that's the reason the decision went the way it went that's not legitimate. I mean it's the law and it's legitimate in terms of that is the system that we've all bought into but it doesn't seem to me like a good idea. I only want things that somebody is willing to, here we'll take care of this for you. Whoever said boring and stayed on here, there you're blocked. It's okay to be bored and then leave but don't be bored and then tell me you're bored. Just leave. You got a choice.
All right, somebody says tie goes to the lower court decision. Oh that makes sense, right? So it doesn't get to the Supreme Court until the lower court has ruled. If the Supreme Court is tied somebody is saying this sounds right that that means there's no decision at the Supreme Court so the lower court ruling would stand. Seems reasonable.
All right that's all for now and I will talk to you later.
hey everybody come on in come on in it's time you came to the right place at the right time yes we're going to have a great start to the day today is going to be incredible i mean really just incredible and all you need to get it off to the right start is a copper mug or a glass of tanker chelsea stein a canteen jugger flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the dopamine head of the day the thing that makes everything better it's called the simultaneous sip and it happens right now go christina taught me a brand new beverage it's called coffee with about half of it filled with hot water so it's like a week coffee that gives you the suggestion of coffee without all the jitters i need that today all right what we got going on are there crazy things happening in the world yeah there are at the top of my list is new tropical storm and the name of the tropical storm is tropical storm beta that's right the simulation is serving up a beta storm at the same time beta males are are riding all over the country so what do i tell you about code reuse so i have this theory that one of the ways that you can tell if you if you are a simulation is if there's something happening somewhere in the world that would take a great deal of processing power that there might be other things that slow down or they have to reuse code to compensate for the fact that all the energy is going into one one part of the program does it seem to you like there's a tremendous amount of activity and complexity going on just because of politics but at the same time we have these weird coincidences going on where where it seems like the same names are getting reused for stuff and we're seeing like these familiar patterns it's like haven't we seen this before it just seems like there's a lot of repeats going on i noticed this the other day i told you the story about i went to the emergency room the other day and what was really interesting about it is that it wasn't busy and i kept saying to them is this weird i'm at the emergency room of a major emergency room and there are only two other people here how weird is that and they said yeah it's really weird we normally we could have people you know filling the hallways but today no real reason just nobody's here and i keep running into these situations where i see fewer and fewer people at the same time have you noticed that it's called social distancing so suddenly the complexity of my personal life has like shrunk and shrunk way down it's way less complicated because i don't have a social life as most of you are experiencing some version of that too so the world is way more complicated in politics but there is other areas of life that suddenly coincidentally became way less complicated is that a coincidence probably yes but it's fun to talk about the simulation all right i have a suggestion for all of you who think you're clever but maybe other people don't you know who you are if you have ever tweeted that actor rob reiner is a quote meathead may not be a creative person because you're the same people who tweeted me or actually it's people on the other side tweeted me saying that they've just discovered that i'm not actually the cartoonist but i'm really the pointy-haired boss in my comic strip please if i can beg of you one thing you can insult me all you want that's cool i'm used to that you can insult rob ryder all you want i've done it myself i enjoy it honestly insulting rob reiner is one of the things i enjoy and if other people enjoy insulting me well okay good for you but can you be a little more creative a little more creative than accusing them of being a character they played on tv you just need to raise your game a little bit i i'm begging you only because there's a certain level of lack of creativity that hurts my eyes sort of in the back you know when i read this if i read one more tweet calling rob reiner and meathead there's like this shooting pain behind my eyes and i go ah wow it's so uncreative so that's just a personal favor i'm just i'm begging you just stop being uncreative call them something else anything else all right many of you saw the video it's a little viral video of a couple of guys who got stopped in their car by protesters i think it was portland and they were surrounded by the protesters and the protesters at least the ones in the video looked uh mostly like white men and they were insisting that the the men in the car who may have been hispanic i don't know if it matters to the story you can decide but they were being forced to uh declare black lives matter now one of the guys in the car was like a little iffy on it he's like okay i'll put the fist up a little bit and then they insisted that he wasn't enthusiastic enough like he wasn't really putting his fist up he was just sort of raising it a little bit so they were on him and it was pretty threatening it looked pretty dangerous actually if if they had resisted more than they did it looked like their vehicle would be destroyed they might be hurt could get dragged out who knows just about anything could happen so here's my suggestion of how to handle that situation if you find yourself in it now you're going to say to yourself scott that won't work because they will immediately know you're joking no they won't no they won't they will not know you're joking if you say the following if they say say it say black lives matter here's what i would say and i would say it really loudly and i would repeat it as many times as i needed to to make sure everybody heard it and it would go like this black lives matter more than white lives high albila blm heil antifa death to whitey so that's how you do it you want to you want to agree with them but amplify it don't just say black lives matter because you know you don't want to be a tropical storm beta if you know what i mean just go for it and just say black lives matter more than white people heil blm heil antifa death to whitey now again you think to yourself um scott they're going to know you're joking no they won't this is the only thing i promise you no they won't they will not think you're joking in fact they might nominate you to be the leader of their group you could end up you know they might give you snacks from the snack fan if you wanted free snacks from the antifa snack van i think all you have to do is say that and they say hey would you like a snack we've got some bottled water here it's nice and frozen would you like it so that's my recommendation by the way if anybody gets killed using any of my recommendations what the hell were you thinking i'm a cartoonist don't take my advice on self-defense if you're getting self-defense tips from a cartoonist well you kind of deserve what you get so that's my warning there um one of my methods for predicting the future i've talked about this before but there's an actual theory behind it and the and the uh the technique is this if there's a situation in the world in which you can anticipate well things could go this way or they could go that way or they could go that way but it's fairly well defined the things are either going to go one of these defined ways you can usually you can usually bet that the way it will go is whichever way makes the most interesting story now you say to me uh there is no reason that would be true right why would it be that if there are three possibilities and you don't have any way to know which one is more likely why would it be that the one that's the best story ends up being more likely not every time right just a just a bias toward the good story here's why i don't think it applies to natural disasters in other words if there are no human beings making decisions well that is just news and it was going to happen you know the the the cliff collapsed the earthquake happened whatever happened but when there's a situation in which human beings are involved humans are very affected by the fact that we live in a world of stories we learn by stories we're entertained by stories we tell stories we listen to stories and stories have sort of a form that you recognize and movies in particular have a three-act forum books are a little different but we all recognize what a story is we would know if somebody told a bad story we would all recognize it was like oh that was a bad story there was no conclusion there was no there was no third act it just was flat so here's my hypothesis that people are drawn to the thing that they can conceive the most easily and you can conceive a story one that looks like a story more readily than you can conceive of something that's random and that we're drawn toward the story to the to the point of making it happen this is the this is the part of the hypothesis that has the most question to it i would say people are drawn to what they think about if you think about an accident all the time you're more likely to have one if you if you think about a particular bad thing happening have you noticed it's more likely to happen it's almost like you you bring it on yourself you could almost wish yourself to get sick have you noticed that if a if one spouse dies let's say the the two people have been married for 60 years if one of them dies the other one's usually going to be gone in a year and it's because that person is following the story right not intentionally but you know if your partner dies you kind of want to follow them and you don't want to wait too long so the odds of you dying pretty quickly go way up and that's shown to be true so with this situation of let's say uh trump running for president one of the filters i saw was that the most amazing story would be if he came from behind in one right that was the best story if you're going to make a movie of 2016 it had to end that way didn't it it had to win it had to end with trump winning because that was just the best story you might not enjoy it if you're a democrat but you can't you can't ignore the fact it's the best story likewise one year ago when people were talking about uh ruth bader ginsburg's health i said to myself all right what would be the best story the best story is not that she died a year before before an election no the best story would not be that she died a month after the election the best story to make it like a regular plot of a movie is if she dies 45 days before the election why 45 president is number 45.
now that's just a coincidence but the exact timing of her death feels entirely like a movie plot and i did in fact privately i don't think i said this publicly i don't i don't like to publicly predict somebody's death but privately i was saying you know it's going to happen a month before the election because that's the story so watch for that pattern see how many times the best story wins and if you were to take that concept to let's say durham so the durham investigation is happening now what would be the best story the best story would be durham comes out before the election again it's like ruth bader ginsburg right before the election is the better story after the election i don't know would it be as interesting no matter what it is but before the election i've got a feeling you're going to see something about brennan and clapper at least brennan so there's going to be something i think interesting because that would be the best story the best story would be that durham not only found something but found something that just makes your whole head come off and i feel like we might be heading that way only because it's the best story we'll see let's see what else we got here i was talking yesterday about the strategy that trump might want to look at one strategy would be what apparently he's going to do which is try to get his nominee for the supreme court pushed through before election day i did say that it would be interesting and maybe clever as a strategy to not do that imagine if he decided not to and just say how about i'll wait we'll wait and then just use it as a as a means of getting your uh getting your voters to show up now that would be risky but also it wouldn't be trump wouldn't it do you think that you know if if you had heard that trump said you know maybe you're right you're right maybe we'll just wait wait till after the election that sounds fair to me if if he ever said that you'd say to yourself what happened to trump you think uh we elected the guy who doesn't know how to do anything but fight we we intentionally elected the guy who doesn't quit we very specifically elected the guy who would be the pirate who if he needs to kill somebody to get something done he's going to kill somebody to get something done legally we hope right so if trump did not do exactly what trump did which is say oh yeah we're going to try to try to get this through before the election if he hadn't done that who is he really i mean who would he be he wouldn't be the guy you elected you'd be a different guy so i think that um you know politicians do have some responsibility for being the person they got elected and not not baiting and switching so independent of whether it was a good strategy or a bad strategy to push it through versus waiting you still want trump to be trump don't you don't you still want him to be the the fighter who never even probably never even considered holding off you know it's hard to know but if i had to guess i'll bet there was never a time when trump said yeah let's hold back i just don't think he i don't i don't think his brain works that way and that's exactly why he got elected he got elected because he won't hold back that he'll you know he sees some potential money on the table we don't know if this is money on the table because there's going to be a fight but if there might be money on the table you want your president to pick it up that's what he got elected to do he didn't get elected to leave money on the table all right nobody wanted that guy so i i would say that i respect and i appreciate this this method i don't know if it'll succeed and also because i don't know if it'll succeed i don't know if it's the best strategy but it could be it could be um here's here's what's good about it number one thing that's good about it is that by actually having the nomination it forces kamala harris to come back to washington so he can take kamala harris off the uh off the board that's pretty good right taking harris off the board might help just because she'll be bogged down but at the same time she'll also get a a stage in front of the world to say her thing and you know that could be to her credit so it could work either way a little dangerous there the other thing it does is did you look at the headlines today everything else disappeared there's nothing else that anybody wants to talk about if trump can keep this going i would say that that's an advantage because he just took everything else off the table and if the only question is supreme court and let's say let's say let's say that trump actually got the nomination through and actually got it completed right before election day hypothetically um what would that do well if you're a democrat maybe you would be demoralized as in uh you know we're so far behind or do you decide that you have to have a revolution and do an armed revolution of the country i don't know could be dangerous but i do like the fact that trump took everything else out of the headlines and and is going to concentrate in an area that i think is stronger for him i do believe that trump has an advantage if this is the option if this is the topic everybody's talking about i think he has an advantage now about some more about this uh if you're watching the news you know that senator lindsey graham was in a ticklish situation because he's on record in two different times on camera saying that in this exact situation that he would delay the delay the nomination that would be his choice and then he came out and said oh i'm totally not going to delay the nomination now if any of you thought that he was going to rely on principle or that he would you know keep his word and you know i said i'd do it so i guess i'm bound by my word i i i gotta throw you an lol because we're not in a world where people keep their promises on stuff like that that that was just so obvious that he was going to he was going to find a workaround you know a lawyer work around which he did and he gave his reasons that were so ridiculous that i forgot them already so i read his reasons about why he's changing his mind but doesn't matter no it doesn't matter what his reason is if he didn't have those reasons he would have made up another reason because one thing he's not going to do is go against the president while he's running for his own re-election and it's a razor thin lindsey graham wants to get elected our system allows him to do that right it is not uh this is just my personal opinion but to me it is not unethical to do legal things that get you elected even if it means changing your mind he's allowed to do that if that's what it takes to get him elected and he's doing it transparently there's not really any secrets to it you know you know what he said before you know what he says now you know it's the opposite he puts it right out there you know you can do what you want with that and at least it's transparent so the democrats the leadership has decided to threaten the public that's the way i take it so schumer said that quote everything's nothing is off the table if if the president pushes through this nomination nothing is off the table what's that mean nothing's off the table and richard blumenthal democrat senator said similarly he tweeted if republicans recklessly and reprehensibly force a a scotus vote before the election nothing is off the table now if this were normal times and a politician said nothing is off the table what would you think that meant you would think it meant oh parliamentary procedures it might meant might mean that they're trying hard to raise money they're gonna they're gonna push all the envelopes you'd probably think it was something peaceful and clever and strategic but it doesn't feel like that today does it as you're watching the riots and you're watching people say in public you see the number of uh you know blue check people say in public that if they don't get their way it's going to be revolution and violence they say it directly now given that violence and revolution are literally on the table these democrat senators saying that nothing is off the table basically have threatened violence against here's the key part against you and me our politicians have actually threatened the public they haven't threatened just trump and i'm not saying it's because you're a trump supporter necessarily i'm saying that they've threatened the public the public because this is not exactly a limited threat it's not a uh we'll do anything to stop president trump they literally said nothing is off the table in the context of violence and and people making death threats right and left this is really dangerous stuff so i think that this is a tremendous advantage for republicans because they're creating a situation where democrats feel like they want to win and they they have their concerns and they're quite worked up but they've they've they framed it as republicans are really in trouble like like physically in trouble if that doesn't get you to the voting booth or to mail in your vote i don't know what will but it feels like a gigantic error on the part of the democrats um here listen to the sort of things that people are saying um this is uh ray sunny it's a i think she's uh i don't want to judge people's ethnicity from their profile picture but not a white woman let's say i i won't say what she is but probably does not identify as a white one would be fair to say and she tweeted this respectfully white men got us into this i don't know what this is and it frustrates me endlessly that white men voted trump in and somehow get away scot-free as if because their racism and selfishness is a given we don't we don't have to drag them drag the 53 percent and the 62 percent what does drag them mean i mean actually like tie them to the back of the car and drag them does it mean hurt them what does drag them mean if you could tweet in public specifically against an entire ethnicity and gender white men and your your tweet doesn't get taken down you don't lose your job i don't know i think she's a comedian or something that's that's the pretty dangerous situation there was a marshall university professor who said on video the other day yesterday or something that she wishes every trump supporter would die before the election what how do you how do you go on video you have you're a semi public person because you teach at a college and you say in public with no with no reservations at all because apparently you've been only dealing with people who agree with you for a long time and didn't realize that it wasn't okay to say in public that you hope half of the country dies and actually mean it because she wasn't joking she sorta i mean she wasn't being literal but she was certainly being it looked like she was being accurate to her own her own feeling about trump supporters like she wouldn't mind if some of them died certainly not all of them um so it's just crazy that these things can be said out loud this is the sort of stuff that should predict a trump landslide because i think republicans are staying quiet and doing two things uh they're ordering their ballots if they don't have them and they're stocking up on ammo just in case just in case so um this is this is a pretty dangerous situation um i continue to believe that the republic can handle this quite easily so uh every now and then i feel it's it's my role to uh to put things in context to make you feel better all right if it's so easy to get caught up in these you know each topic is the end of the world oh the replacement of the supreme court seat it's the end of the world we'll all kill each other if we don't get our way the coronavirus is the end of the world the economy is crashing it feels like every story is going to be the end of the world but how many of them have been the end of the world so far none this won't be the end of the world either as problems go if you were to look at the history of the united states it's easy to forget how many things this country has survived we've survived some really big stuff way bigger than this so if you were to rank where the supreme court thing is in terms of ripping the country apart it's a two two out of ten if you're trying to say how worried should i be about the future because of the supreme court stuff two out of ten that's that's about it but it will be treated like it's a 10 out of 10 because that's what we do now we're all going to treat it like it's 10 out of 10 but no matter how it goes we'll still be the united states our economy will still be improving we'll still be inventing things we'll still be fixing things and solving things and we will be fine and we're a lot closer to solving our more recent big problems than we are to not solving them speaking of which i forgot to mention this i thought it was politically brilliant for trump to um what did he he approved 90 billion dollars for uh for puerto rico now the people who are critics of the president will say and i think it's a completely fair statement they'll say why did it take so long i remember i always kid i always mock people for saying that if somebody did something good that you mock them for taking so long because that's just the easy cheap thing to say well why'd you take so long i will criticize you for doing the wrong thing but i'll also criticize you for doing the right thing because you could have done it sooner now of course you can do anything sooner so it's the universal you know non-non-thing but with the puerto rico thing i think there's a better argument for why not sooner if you ask me the reason why not sooner is you know number one it was probably helpful for the the election but there are a couple of reasons why maybe not sooner made sense one is there's a tremendous corruption problem there it might have taken them a while to figure out how to pump money into puerto rico and not have it all stolen or wasted because stolen or wasted is exactly what would have happened if you would put 90 billion into there you know a month after the hurricane do we all agree that if you just said let's throw money at this place a month after the hurricane it would just all be wasted because they're just they don't have the systems the controls they just didn't have a way to watch that money and keep track of it and get it to the right places it could be it could be i don't know this that it probably takes a while to get some confidence that you've got a structure in place that you can now put money into it and it'll go someplace useful probably takes a while probably a whole lot of planning a whole lot of figuring out what really needs to be done so maybe it just took took two years but i don't think that's the full answer obviously the you know it's not a coincidence that there's an election coming up and it's not a coincidence that the president would like to shore up you know his his hispanic support and do everything he could that's counterfactual to whatever the claims are about him so the claims about trump are hey he's a big old racist so what's one thing you can do if people are accusing you of being racist how about putting a world record amount of money into puerto rico it's a pretty good idea because it's hard to it's hard to argue that that's some big racist thing even though it's obviously a politically motivated so that was good and then of course the tick tock looks like the sale is going to go through to oracle and walmart if you if you ever if you told me two companies that i thought should never be in a business deal it would probably be oracle and walmart what do they have in common other than i guess they had the cash and the willingness to do it but there's some there's some word that what uh what china might do is is keep the algorithm but sell the company to which i say how hard would it be for the united states to build its own algorithm what if we took everything from tick doc you know the assets the customer base but the only thing we got rid of was the algorithm we just delete it and replace one that just says something simple such as you'll see more things from your friends the people you follow and maybe you'll see more things from you know just some easy algorithm but couldn't you put given that it's mostly for children it's young people who use it mostly don't you think we should have an open algorithm that we can all see i i feel as if i feel as if the uh the oracles of the world and walmarts do they should guarantee the government that the algorithm will be public so everybody can see what it does is that is that wrong no i don't know maybe they can't make money that way but given that it's directed at children well how about this for a law how about a law that says if children use your platform you have to reveal your algorithm oh that's pretty good i'm so happy i just thought of that has anybody ever come up with that idea you know the big the big platforms from your facebooks to your snapchats to your instagrams etc twitter is a little different because kids don't follow politics and stuff um so i'm not sure how many kids use twitter compared to other platforms but less i guess wouldn't it be reasonable that given that we want to protect children more than we might want to protect adults who know what they're getting into shouldn't we require that any platform that has children on it has to reveal their algorithm has to be public anybody anybody can see it so parents can see it now it would be hard to understand it but at least be public for people who do know how to read read the code and look at the algorithm that would be my idea all right here's a little mind effort for you you ready for this one so there's increasingly news and of europe that they're having another wave and that infections are spiking coronavirus and here was a statistic i saw that was useful because because it's simplified things all right so so hold on to just a few numbers here i'll keep it really simple just hold these in your head that the europe has 750 million people let's say the us has 330 million so we've got a little less than half as many people in the united states as there is in all of europe but although europe has more than twice as many people they have almost the same amount of deaths 217 000 ours is about 200 000 so about the same amount of deaths but europe has a little bit more than twice as many people so that that's pretty clean right that's one of those things where you can say oh okay now i see how the united states is really doing poorly because we've got twice as many deaths you know that they do are relative to population but i ask myself this are they the same is there something about the united states that's different from europe on average and here's one thing that's different um how many what's the black population of the united states because as we know the black population has something like four to five times the problem with coronavirus it's a gigantic difference right it's a is something like four or five times worse if you're african-american let's say black because we're talking about europe it's about four or five times worse so wouldn't you expect that the country that has the biggest population of black residents should all things being equal would have way more deaths because unfortunately it does not the coronavirus is not an equal opportunity virus it's just slamming the black populations just slamming them right so i said to myself well if it were true that the black the percentage of black population is skewing our coronavirus death count you would be able to see that easily for example you'd go to europe and you'd say well if there's anything to this hypothesis if you looked at europe shouldn't you see that whatever country in europe has the most black population would have the highest you know death rate and sure enough that would be france so france not only has a close to nine percent i think uh black population but it is not too far behind the united states at 13 so this is just one data point so don't don't make too much out of one data point right so the united states is doing poorly and also has 13 black population who are doing far worse france within europe france is one of the bad ones right it's one of the worst countries in in europe and also has the highest percentage of black population about nine percent now is there any other country that you could look at that would be maybe confirming or disconfirming this hypothesis so i took a look at brazil now brazil's a tough one because brazil is like super racially mixed so they've got a whole bunch of you know wonderful stuff all mixed up the people are just like almost every person in brazil seems to be some mixture of interesting stuff but we can glean a few things i think they have nine percent uh black population but somewhere between nine and thirty percent at least partly black so brazil has an enormous percentage of black population and is one of the worst in terms of coronavirus deaths now what about those countries in europe that have almost no black population below two percent how are they doing pretty well pretty well it turns out turns out that having almost no black population really gets your death count down surprise shouldn't be because this is it's well-known thing so let's say that's one one uh you know normal one calculation that needs to be done which is you have to uh normalize it for ethnic differences in terms of mortality and what about what about differences in incentive for coding something at coronavirus death can you compare the united states where people get the hospitals anyway we get a large large dollar amount profit if they code something chronovirus whereas in europe they don't do you think that you get the same count no in no world do you get the same count if somebody is is monetized in one case and not monetized in the other case you don't get the same result never we don't live in a world where people are immune to monetary incentive it just isn't a thing now it might be a five percent difference not a hundred percent difference but still that's something pretty important you need to to calculate and then of course you've got the the number of uh obese americans which is greater than others we're a bigger country and then how about this is it fair to treat the united states as one big ball given that we have lots of states with power you know we have an unusual situation our states have a lot of power shouldn't we be comparing each state to europe wouldn't that be better how many of the individual states in the united states are doing as as well or comparable to europe and i think the answer is a lot of them right out of our 50 states 30 or 40 of them maybe what would you say 30 40 are doing as well as europe so that's another way to look at it anyway there's a million ways to look at it and i don't believe we've looked at all the best ways we can you are noticing that the the ruth bader ginsburg stuff has just kicked everything off the news it makes everything a little bit boring for a while because there's just really one story that's all we're going to talk about for a while all right um i'm watching your comments a lot of people are agreeing um there's a 15 plus payment differential for coding covet on medical bills yeah 15 is certainly enough too many variables to compare that is correct um oh somebody's talking about putting oh let me let me bring up this idea so president trump has said publicly that he's probably going to pick a woman and i think that's true he probably is now here's what's wrong with that and let me say before i start i am completely in favor of a diverse you know a very diverse supreme court i think we're all better off if we've got all the voices you know accounted for so long as everybody's capable to do the job that's all great and uh obviously there are plenty of capable people i'm just saying as long as you have capable people it would also be good to have them diverse but we have this thing called the constitution and we have this thing called the supreme court whose job it is to uphold it how is it constitutional for the president of the united states to say that he can't pick me for the supreme court because of my seriously i personally this is there's no exaggeration here i personally have been told by the president of the united states that i would not be eligible not not that there was much risk i was going to get picked let's say ted cruz you know somebody who actually would be in the top 20 or whatever he can't get the job do you know why ted cruz can't get the job his do you think that if somebody sued the president of the united states for job discrimination and said hey you're saying right out loud that you're not going to even consider a man what's up with that and and what about um what about your genders that are not either male or female entirely what about all of your in between genders you know your your shades and your your you know various uh what would be the best way to say it the the rainbow of different you know genders what about all that you know don't we care about that anymore what about um uh transsexual if you're transsexual can you be on the supreme court i don't know maybe that's okay as long as as long as you've transitioned in the right direction maybe so so here's what i'd ask you if somebody sued the president of the united states which i actually think would be a good idea if somebody sued the president of the united states and said that is job discrimination you're saying that men can't have this job where is that in the constitution i would like a constitutional ruling from the supreme court about whether the president can limit his choices to one gender i don't think that's going to pass constitutional muster am i wrong about this can somebody who's smarter than i am about the law tell me am i am i just often out of space here or is it completely obvious that what the president is doing by limiting his choice to a woman or even just saying it you know we don't have the actual choice yet but even just saying it in public and saying this is what i'm i'm looking for is there anybody who could argue that that is constitutional because it looks to me like grossly illegal it looks to me as illegal as anything could ever be now i do not have this feeling about somebody running for office different situation if somebody says hey i'm running to be a senator or a president and i think you know i think we need more women in this job you know give us more representation or whatever that doesn't seem illegal to me because that's a case of the public gets to vote and that's just one of the variables it's like oh i care about that variable or i don't but i get to vote it's not like a job but the supreme court is picked is picked like a job interview it's you know i don't get to vote on the supreme court if i did i'd be fine with that if if i got to vote on the supreme court along with all of you you know if all the voters got the vote on the supreme court and somebody was saying yeah we should have a woman replace rgb no problem at all i would have no i would have no problem with that at all somebody says i think you're off uh but what would be the reason uh somebody is laughing white privileged i don't even know see you can't tell a parody from reality anymore so people are making comments with little laughy faces and i don't even know if you're agreeing with me or disagree with me that's that's how weird things are somebody says this is playing the lefties game well well saying in advance that you're going to pick a woman is definitely playing the lefties game maybe he was speaking of someone specific i don't think that helps i mean maybe that would be a defense but i don't think that's what's happening necessarily because there are i apparently there are two women who have risen to the top of the likely list so it's not just one woman it's his choice man or woman well it is his choice but if you say to the public that you're limiting it by gender is it still legal i don't know it could be you know i would be willing to believe that it's not it wouldn't be treated like regular employment and if the president has complete power to do what the president wants well maybe it doesn't matter maybe he can be maybe he could be completely discriminatory and and sexist um president picks and he disclosed and you vote for the president um read my comments and you will see the reason somebody says although i don't see where your comment is as long as he gives the opportunity to all he can say anything he's not giving the opportunity to all that's the opposite of what he's doing all right he's not discriminating how is he not discriminating who breaks a tie that's a good question what happens if the supreme court has a tie you know one of the reasons you don't want to elect me for president is that i would i would lock up the supreme court if i could i would try to make it a tie so if there were more conservatives than liberals i would add a liberal if it was the other way i'd add a conservative and if i were president i would make the supreme court eight people four and four i wouldn't even replace i wouldn't even replace a ninth ninth person do you know why the reason is this if the supreme court can't make a decision that breaks out of the liberal and or conservative silos hell with it i don't want them to do anything if the only reason that that a decision goes one way is you have more liberal or you have more conservative judges if that's the reason the decision went the way it went that's not legitimate i mean it's it's the law and it's legitimate in terms of that is the system that we've all bought into but it doesn't seem to me like a good idea i only want things that somebody is willing to here we'll take care of this for you whoever said boring and stayed on here there you're blocked it's okay to be bored and then leave but don't be bored and then tell me you're bored just leave you got a choice all right um somebody says ty goes to the lower court decision oh that makes sense right so it doesn't get to the supreme court until the lower court has ruled if the supreme court is tied somebody is saying this sounds right that that means there's no decision at the supreme court so the lower court ruling would stand seems reasonable all right uh that's all for now and i will talk to you later
[Music]
hey everybody
come on in come on in it's time you came
to the right place
at the right time yes we're going to
have
a great start to the day
today is going to be incredible
i mean really just incredible and all
you need to get it off to the right
start is a
copper mug or a glass of tanker chelsea
stein a canteen jugger flask a vessel of
any kind
fill it with your favorite liquid i like
coffee
and join me now for the dopamine head of
the day
the thing that makes everything better
it's called the simultaneous sip
and it happens right now go
christina taught me a brand new beverage
it's called
coffee with about half of it filled with
hot water
so it's like a week coffee that gives
you the suggestion of coffee
without all the jitters i need that
today
all right what we got going on are there
crazy things happening in the world yeah
there are at the top of my list is new
tropical storm and the name of the
tropical storm
is tropical storm beta
that's right the simulation is serving
up
a beta storm at the same time
beta males are are riding all over the
country
so what do i tell you about code
reuse so i have this theory
that one of the ways that you can tell
if you
if you are a simulation
is if there's something happening
somewhere in the world
that would take a great deal of
processing
power that there might be other things
that slow down
or they have to reuse code to compensate
for the fact that all the energy is
going into one
one part of the program does it seem to
you like
there's a tremendous amount of activity
and complexity going on just because of
politics
but at the same time we have these weird
coincidences going on where where it
seems like the same names are getting
reused for stuff and we're seeing like
these familiar patterns it's like
haven't we seen this before it just
seems like there's a lot of repeats
going on i noticed this the other day
i told you the story about i went to the
emergency room the other day
and what was really
interesting about it is that it wasn't
busy and i kept saying to them
is this weird i'm at the emergency room
of a
major emergency room and there are only
two other people here
how weird is that and they said yeah
it's really weird we normally we could
have people
you know filling the hallways but today
no real reason
just nobody's here and
i keep running into these situations
where i see
fewer and fewer people at the same time
have you noticed that it's called social
distancing
so suddenly the complexity of my
personal life
has like shrunk and shrunk way down
it's way less complicated because i
don't have a social life
as most of you are experiencing some
version of that too
so the world is way more complicated in
politics
but there is other areas of life that
suddenly
coincidentally became way less
complicated
is that a coincidence
probably yes but it's fun to talk about
the simulation
all right i have a suggestion for all of
you
who think you're clever
but maybe other people don't
you know who you are if you have ever
tweeted
that actor rob reiner is a quote
meathead
may not be a creative person because
you're the same people who tweeted me
or actually it's people on the other
side tweeted me
saying that they've just discovered that
i'm not
actually the cartoonist but i'm really
the pointy-haired boss
in my comic strip please
if i can beg of you one thing you can
insult me all you want that's cool
i'm used to that you can insult rob
ryder all you want
i've done it myself i enjoy it
honestly insulting rob reiner is one of
the things i enjoy
and if other people enjoy insulting me
well okay
good for you but can you be a little
more creative
a little more creative than accusing
them of being a character they played
on tv you just need to
raise your game a little bit i i'm
begging you
only because there's a certain level of
lack of creativity that hurts my eyes
sort of in the back
you know when i read this if i read one
more tweet
calling rob reiner and meathead there's
like this shooting pain behind my eyes
and i go ah
wow it's so uncreative
so that's just a personal favor i'm just
i'm begging you
just stop being uncreative call them
something else anything else all right
many of you saw the video it's a little
viral video
of a couple of guys who got stopped in
their car by
protesters i think it was portland and
they were
surrounded by the protesters and the
protesters at least the ones in the
video looked uh mostly like white men
and they were insisting that the the men
in the car
who may have been hispanic i don't know
if it matters to the story you can
decide
but they were being forced to uh
declare black lives matter now one of
the guys in the car was like a little
iffy on it he's like
okay i'll put the fist up a little bit
and then they
insisted that he wasn't enthusiastic
enough like he wasn't really putting his
fist up he was just
sort of raising it a little bit so they
were on him
and it was pretty threatening it looked
pretty dangerous actually if if they had
resisted more than they did
it looked like their vehicle would be
destroyed they might be hurt
could get dragged out who knows just
about anything could happen
so here's my suggestion of how to handle
that situation
if you find yourself in it now you're
going to say to yourself
scott that won't work because they will
immediately know you're joking
no they won't no they won't they will
not know you're joking
if you say the following if they say
say it say black lives matter
here's what i would say and i would say
it really loudly
and i would repeat it as many times as i
needed to
to make sure everybody heard it and it
would go like this
black lives matter more than white lives
high albila
blm heil antifa death to whitey
so that's how you do it you want to you
want to agree with them
but amplify it don't just say black
lives matter
because you know you don't want to be a
tropical storm beta if you know what i
mean
just go for it and just say black lives
matter more than white people
heil blm heil antifa
death to whitey now
again you think to yourself um scott
they're going to know you're joking
no they won't
this is the only thing i promise you no
they won't
they will not think you're joking in
fact
they might nominate you to be the leader
of their group
you could end up you know they might
give you snacks from the snack fan
if you wanted free snacks from the
antifa snack van
i think all you have to do is say that
and they say hey would you like a snack
we've got some bottled water here it's
nice and frozen would you like it
so that's my recommendation by the way
if anybody gets
killed using any of my recommendations
what the hell were you thinking i'm a
cartoonist
don't take my advice on self-defense if
you're getting self-defense tips from a
cartoonist
well you kind of deserve what you get
so that's my warning there um
one of my methods for predicting the
future
i've talked about this before but
there's an actual theory behind it
and the and the uh the technique is this
if there's a situation in the world
in which you can anticipate well things
could go this way
or they could go that way or they could
go that way but it's fairly well defined
the things are either going to go one of
these defined ways
you can usually you can usually bet
that the way it will go is whichever way
makes the most
interesting story now you say to me
uh there is no reason that would be true
right why would it be that if there are
three possibilities and you don't have
any way to know which one is more likely
why would it be that the one that's the
best story
ends up being more likely not every time
right just a
just a bias toward the good story
here's why i don't think it applies to
natural disasters
in other words if there are no human
beings making decisions
well that is just news and it was going
to happen you know the
the the cliff collapsed the earthquake
happened whatever happened
but when there's a situation in which
human beings are involved
humans are very affected by the fact
that we live in a world
of stories we learn by stories we're
entertained by stories we tell stories
we listen to stories
and stories have sort of a form
that you recognize and movies in
particular have a three-act
forum books are a little different but
we all recognize what a story is
we would know if somebody told a bad
story
we would all recognize it was like oh
that was a bad story there was no
conclusion
there was no there was no third act it
just was flat
so here's my hypothesis
that people are drawn to the thing that
they can conceive the most easily
and you can conceive a story one that
looks like a story
more readily than you can conceive of
something that's random and that we're
drawn toward the story
to the to the point of making it happen
this is the this is the part of the
hypothesis
that has the most question to it i would
say
people are drawn to what they think
about
if you think about an accident all the
time you're more likely to have one
if you if you think about a particular
bad thing happening
have you noticed it's more likely to
happen it's almost like you you bring it
on yourself
you could almost wish yourself to get
sick
have you noticed that if a if one spouse
dies let's say the the two people have
been
married for 60 years if one of them dies
the other one's usually going to be gone
in a year
and it's because that person is
following the story
right not intentionally but you know
if your partner dies you kind of want to
follow them and you don't want to wait
too long
so the odds of you dying pretty quickly
go way up and that's shown to be true
so with this situation of let's say
uh trump running for president one of
the filters i saw
was that the most amazing story would be
if he came from behind in one
right that was the best story if you're
going to make a movie of 2016
it had to end that way didn't it it had
to win
it had to end with trump winning because
that was just the best story
you might not enjoy it if you're a
democrat but you can't
you can't ignore the fact it's the best
story
likewise one year ago when
people were talking about uh ruth bader
ginsburg's
health i said to myself all right
what would be the best story the best
story is not that she died a year before
before an election no the best story
would not be that she died
a month after the election the best
story to make it like a regular
plot of a movie is if she dies 45 days
before the election why 45
president is number 45. now
that's just a coincidence but the exact
timing of her death
feels entirely like a movie plot and i
did in fact
privately i don't think i said this
publicly i don't i don't like to
publicly predict somebody's death but
privately
i was saying you know it's going to
happen a month before the election
because that's the story so watch for
that pattern
see how many times the best story wins
and if you were to take that concept to
let's say
durham so the durham investigation is
happening now
what would be the best story the best
story would be durham comes out before
the election
again it's like ruth bader ginsburg
right before the election is the better
story
after the election i don't know would it
be as interesting no matter what it is
but before the election i've got a
feeling
you're going to see something about
brennan and clapper
at least brennan so there's going to be
something i think
interesting because that would be the
best story the best story would be that
durham
not only found something but found
something that just makes your whole
head come off
and i feel like we might be heading that
way only because
it's the best story we'll see
let's see what else we got here i was
talking yesterday about
the strategy that trump might want to
look at
one strategy would be what apparently
he's going to do which is try to get his
nominee for the supreme court pushed
through before election day
i did say that it would be interesting
and
maybe clever as a strategy to not do
that
imagine if he decided not to and just
say how about i'll wait we'll wait
and then just use it as a as a means of
getting your
uh getting your voters to show up
now that would be risky but also
it wouldn't be trump wouldn't it
do you think that you know if if you had
heard
that trump said you know maybe you're
right you're right maybe we'll just wait
wait till after the election that sounds
fair to me
if if he ever said that you'd say to
yourself what happened to trump
you think uh we elected the guy who
doesn't know how to do anything but
fight
we we intentionally elected the guy who
doesn't quit
we very specifically elected the guy
who would be the pirate who if he needs
to kill somebody to get something done
he's going to kill somebody to get
something done legally we hope
right so if trump did not do
exactly what trump did which is say oh
yeah we're going to try to
try to get this through before the
election if he hadn't done that
who is he really i mean who would he be
he wouldn't be the guy you elected you'd
be a different guy
so i think that um you know politicians
do have some responsibility
for being the person they got elected
and not
not baiting and switching so independent
of whether it was a good strategy or a
bad strategy to push it through versus
waiting
you still want trump to be trump don't
you don't you still want him to be the
the fighter who never even probably
never even considered
holding off you know it's hard to know
but if i had to guess
i'll bet there was never a time when
trump said
yeah let's hold back i just don't think
he
i don't i don't think his brain works
that way
and that's exactly why he got elected he
got elected
because he won't hold back that he'll
you know he sees
some potential money on the table we
don't know if this is money on the table
because there's going to be a fight
but if there might be money on the table
you want
your president to pick it up that's what
he got elected to do
he didn't get elected to leave money on
the table all right
nobody wanted that guy so
i i would say that i respect
and i appreciate this
this method i don't know if it'll
succeed
and also because i don't know if it'll
succeed
i don't know if it's the best strategy
but it could be
it could be um here's
here's what's good about it number one
thing that's good about it
is that by actually having the
nomination it
forces kamala harris to come back to
washington
so he can take kamala harris off the uh
off the board that's pretty good right
taking harris off the board might help
just because she'll be bogged down
but at the same time she'll also get a a
stage in front of the world
to say her thing and you know that could
be
to her credit so it could work either
way a little dangerous there
the other thing it does is did you look
at the headlines today
everything else disappeared there's
nothing else
that anybody wants to talk about if
trump can keep
this going i would say that that's an
advantage
because he just took everything else off
the table
and if the only question is supreme
court
and let's say let's say let's say that
trump
actually got the nomination through and
actually got it completed
right before election day hypothetically
um what would that do well if you're a
democrat
maybe you would be demoralized as in uh
you know we're so far behind or
do you decide that you have to have a
revolution and do an armed
revolution of the country i don't know
could be dangerous
but i do like the fact that trump took
everything else out of the headlines
and and is going to concentrate in an
area that i think is stronger for him
i do believe that trump has an advantage
if this is the option if this is the
topic everybody's talking about i think
he has an advantage now
about some more about this uh
if you're watching the news you know
that senator lindsey graham
was in a ticklish situation because he's
on record in two different
times on camera saying
that in this exact situation
that he would delay the delay the
nomination that would be his choice
and then he came out and said oh i'm
totally not going to delay the
nomination
now if any of you thought that he was
going to rely on
principle or that he would you know keep
his word and
you know i said i'd do it so i guess i'm
bound by my word
i i i gotta throw you an lol
because we're not in a world where
people keep their promises
on stuff like that that that was just so
obvious that he was going to
he was going to find a workaround you
know a lawyer work around which he did
and he gave his reasons that were so
ridiculous that i forgot them already
so i read his reasons about why he's
changing his mind
but doesn't matter no it doesn't matter
what his reason is
if he didn't have those reasons he would
have made up another reason
because one thing he's not going to do
is go against the president
while he's running for his own
re-election and it's a razor thin
lindsey graham wants to get elected our
system
allows him to do that right it is not
uh this is just my personal opinion but
to me it
is not unethical to do legal things that
get you elected
even if it means changing your mind
he's allowed to do that if that's what
it takes to get him elected
and he's doing it transparently there's
not really any secrets to it
you know you know what he said before
you know what he says now you know it's
the opposite
he puts it right out there you know you
can do what you want with that
and at least it's transparent
so the democrats the leadership has
decided to threaten the public
that's the way i take it so schumer said
that quote
everything's nothing is off the table if
if the president pushes through this
nomination nothing is off the table
what's that mean nothing's off the table
and richard blumenthal democrat
senator said similarly he tweeted
if republicans recklessly and
reprehensibly force a
a scotus vote before the election
nothing is off the table
now if this were normal times and a
politician said
nothing is off the table what would you
think that meant
you would think it meant oh
parliamentary procedures
it might meant might mean that they're
trying hard
to raise money they're gonna they're
gonna push all the envelopes
you'd probably think it was something
peaceful
and clever and strategic
but it doesn't feel like that today does
it
as you're watching the riots and you're
watching people
say in public you see the number of
uh you know blue check people say in
public
that if they don't get their way it's
going to be revolution
and violence they say it directly now
given that violence and revolution are
literally
on the table these
democrat senators saying that nothing is
off the table
basically have threatened violence
against
here's the key part against you and me
our politicians have actually threatened
the public they haven't threatened
just trump and i'm not saying it's
because you're a trump supporter
necessarily
i'm saying that they've threatened the
public the public
because this is not exactly a limited
threat it's not a
uh we'll do anything to stop president
trump
they literally said nothing is off the
table in the context of
violence and and people making death
threats
right and left this is really dangerous
stuff
so i think that this is
a tremendous advantage for
republicans because they're creating a
situation where
democrats feel like they want to win and
they
they have their concerns and they're
quite worked up but they've
they've they framed it as
republicans are really in trouble like
like physically in trouble if that
doesn't get you to the voting booth
or to mail in your vote i don't know
what will
but it feels like a gigantic error on
the
part of the democrats um
here listen to the sort of things that
people are saying
um this is uh ray sunny
it's a i think she's uh i don't want to
judge
people's ethnicity from their profile
picture
but not a white woman let's say
i i won't say what she is but probably
does not identify as a white one would
be
fair to say and she tweeted this
respectfully
white men got us into this i don't know
what this is
and it frustrates me endlessly
that white men voted trump in and
somehow get away
scot-free as if because their racism and
selfishness
is a given we don't we don't have to
drag them
drag the 53 percent and the 62 percent
what does drag them mean i mean actually
like tie them to the back of the car and
drag them
does it mean hurt them what does drag
them mean
if you could tweet in public
specifically
against an entire ethnicity and gender
white men and your your tweet doesn't
get taken down you don't lose your job
i don't know i think she's a comedian or
something
that's that's the
pretty dangerous situation there was a
marshall university professor
who said on video the other day
yesterday or something
that she wishes every trump supporter
would die before the election
what how do you how do you go on video
you have you're a semi public person
because you
teach at a college and you say in public
with no with no reservations at all
because apparently you've been only
dealing with people who agree with you
for a long time
and didn't realize that it wasn't okay
to say in public
that you hope half of the country dies
and actually mean it
because she wasn't joking she sorta i
mean
she wasn't being literal but she was
certainly being
it looked like she was being accurate to
her own her own feeling
about trump supporters like she wouldn't
mind if some of them died
certainly not all of them um
so it's just crazy that these things can
be said
out loud this is the sort of stuff
that should predict a trump landslide
because i think republicans are staying
quiet
and doing two things uh
they're ordering their ballots if they
don't have them
and they're stocking up on ammo just in
case
just in case so
um this is this is a pretty dangerous
situation
um i continue to believe that the
republic
can handle this quite easily
so uh every now and then i feel it's
it's my role to uh
to put things in context to make you
feel better all right
if it's so easy to get caught up in
these you know each
topic is the end of the world oh the
replacement of the supreme court
seat it's the end of the world we'll all
kill each other if we don't get our way
the coronavirus is the end of the world
the economy is crashing
it feels like every story is going to be
the end of the world
but how many of them have been the end
of the world
so far none this won't be the end of the
world either
as problems go if you were to look at
the history of the united states
it's easy to forget how many things this
country has survived
we've survived some really big stuff
way bigger than this so if you were to
rank
where the supreme court thing is in
terms of ripping the country apart
it's a two two out of ten if you're
trying to say
how worried should i be about the future
because of the supreme court stuff
two out of ten that's that's about it
but it will be treated like it's a 10
out of 10 because that's what we do now
we're all going to treat it like it's 10
out of 10 but no matter how it goes
we'll still be the united states our
economy
will still be improving we'll still be
inventing things we'll still be fixing
things
and solving things and we will be fine
and we're a lot closer to
solving our more recent big problems
than we are to not solving them speaking
of which i forgot to mention this
i thought it was politically brilliant
for
trump to um what did he he approved
90 billion dollars for uh
for puerto rico now the people who are
critics of the president will say
and i think it's a completely fair
statement they'll say
why did it take so long i remember i
always kid
i always mock people for saying that if
somebody did something good
that you mock them for taking so long
because that's just the easy cheap thing
to say well why'd you take so long
i will criticize you for doing the wrong
thing but i'll also criticize you for
doing the right thing
because you could have done it sooner
now of course you can do anything sooner
so it's the universal you know
non-non-thing
but with the puerto rico thing i think
there's a better argument for
why not sooner if you ask me the reason
why not sooner is
you know number one it was probably
helpful for the
the election but there are a couple of
reasons why maybe
not sooner made sense one is there's a
tremendous
corruption problem there it might have
taken them a while
to figure out how to pump money into
puerto rico
and not have it all stolen or wasted
because
stolen or wasted is exactly what would
have happened
if you would put 90 billion into there
you know a month after the hurricane
do we all agree that if you just said
let's throw money at this place
a month after the hurricane it would
just all be wasted
because they're just they don't have the
systems the controls
they just didn't have a way to watch
that money and
keep track of it and get it to the right
places it could be
it could be i don't know this that it
probably takes a while
to get some confidence that you've got a
structure in place
that you can now put money into it and
it'll go someplace useful
probably takes a while probably a whole
lot of planning a whole lot of figuring
out what really needs to be done
so maybe it just took took two years but
i don't think that's
the full answer obviously the you know
it's not a coincidence that there's an
election coming up
and it's not a coincidence that the
president would like to shore up
you know his his hispanic support
and do everything he could that's
counterfactual to whatever the claims
are about him
so the claims about trump are hey he's a
big old racist
so what's one thing you can do if people
are accusing you of being racist
how about putting a world record amount
of money
into puerto rico
it's a pretty good idea because it's
hard to
it's hard to argue that that's some big
racist thing even though it's obviously
a
politically motivated
so that was good and then of course the
tick tock
looks like the sale is going to go
through to oracle and walmart
if you if you ever if you told me two
companies
that i thought should never be in a
business deal it would probably be
oracle and walmart
what do they have in common other than i
guess they had the cash and the
willingness to do it
but there's some there's some word that
what uh what china might do is
is keep the algorithm but sell the
company
to which i say how hard would it be for
the united states to build its own
algorithm
what if we took everything from tick doc
you know the assets the customer base
but the only thing we got rid of
was the algorithm we just delete it
and replace one that just says something
simple
such as you'll see more things from your
friends
the people you follow and maybe you'll
see more
things from you know just some easy
algorithm
but couldn't you put given that it's
mostly for children it's young people
who use it
mostly don't you think we should have an
open
algorithm that we can all see i
i feel as if i feel as if the uh
the oracles of the world and walmarts do
they should guarantee the government
that the algorithm will be public
so everybody can see what it does is
that
is that wrong no i don't know maybe they
can't make money that way
but given that it's directed at children
well how about this for a law
how about a law that says if children
use your platform
you have to reveal your algorithm oh
that's pretty good
i'm so happy i just thought of that has
anybody ever come up with that idea
you know the big the big platforms from
your facebooks to your snapchats
to your instagrams etc twitter is a
little different because
kids don't follow politics and stuff um
so i'm not sure how many kids use
twitter compared to other platforms but
less i guess wouldn't it be reasonable
that given that we want to protect
children more than we might want to
protect adults who
know what they're getting into shouldn't
we
require that any platform that has
children on it
has to reveal their algorithm has to be
public
anybody anybody can see it so parents
can see it
now it would be hard to understand it
but at least be public for people who do
know how to read
read the code and look at the algorithm
that would be my idea
all right
here's a little mind effort for you
you ready for this one so there's
increasingly news and of europe that
they're having another
wave and that infections are spiking
coronavirus
and here was a statistic i saw that was
useful because because it's simplified
things all right
so so hold on to just a few numbers here
i'll keep it really simple
just hold these in your head that
the europe has 750 million people
let's say the us has 330 million
so we've got a little less than half as
many people in the united states
as there is in all of europe but
although europe has more than twice as
many people
they have almost the same amount of
deaths
217 000 ours is about 200
000 so about the same amount of deaths
but europe has a little bit more than
twice as many people
so that that's pretty clean right that's
one of those things where you can say oh
okay
now i see how the united states is
really doing poorly
because we've got twice as many deaths
you know that they do are relative to
population
but i ask myself this
are they the same is there something
about the united states
that's different from europe on average
and here's one thing that's different
um how many what's the black
population of the united states because
as we know the
black population has something like four
to five
times the problem with coronavirus
it's a gigantic difference right it's a
is something like four or five times
worse
if you're african-american let's say
black because we're talking about europe
it's about four or five times worse so
wouldn't you expect
that the country that has the biggest
population of
black residents should all things being
equal
would have way more deaths because
unfortunately
it does not the coronavirus is not an
equal opportunity virus
it's just slamming the black populations
just slamming them
right so i said to myself well if it
were true
that the black the percentage of black
population
is skewing our coronavirus death count
you would be able to see that easily for
example
you'd go to europe and you'd say well if
there's anything to this hypothesis
if you looked at europe shouldn't you
see that whatever country in europe
has the most black population
would have the highest you know death
rate
and sure enough that would be france
so france not only has a close to nine
percent i think
uh black population but it is
not too far behind the united states at
13
so this is just one data point so don't
don't make too much out of one data
point right
so the united states is doing poorly and
also has
13 black population who are doing far
worse france within europe
france is one of the bad ones right it's
one of the worst countries in in europe
and also has the highest percentage of
black population
about nine percent now is there any
other country
that you could look at that would be
maybe confirming or
disconfirming this hypothesis so i took
a look at
brazil now brazil's a tough one
because brazil is like super
racially mixed so they've got a whole
bunch of
you know wonderful stuff all mixed up
the people are just
like almost every person in brazil seems
to be some mixture of
interesting stuff but we can glean a few
things
i think they have nine percent uh
black population but somewhere between
nine and thirty percent at least partly
black
so brazil has an enormous percentage of
black population
and is one of the worst in terms of
coronavirus deaths now what about those
countries in europe that have almost
no black population below two percent
how are they doing pretty well
pretty well it turns out turns out that
having almost
no black population really gets your
death count down
surprise shouldn't be because this is
it's well-known thing so
let's say that's one one uh you know
normal
one calculation that needs to be done
which is you have to uh
normalize it for ethnic differences in
terms of mortality
and what about what about differences
in incentive for coding something at
coronavirus
death can you compare the united states
where people get
the hospitals anyway we get a large
large dollar amount
profit if they code something
chronovirus
whereas in europe they don't
do you think that you get the same count
no in no
world do you get the same count if
somebody is
is monetized in one case and not
monetized in the other case you don't
get the same
result never we don't live in a world
where people are immune to monetary
incentive it just isn't a thing
now it might be a five percent
difference not a hundred percent
difference
but still that's something pretty
important you need to to calculate
and then of course you've got the the
number of uh
obese americans which is greater than
others we're a bigger country
and then how about this is it fair to
treat the united states as
one big ball given that we have lots of
states with power
you know we have an unusual situation
our states have a lot of power
shouldn't we be comparing each state
to europe wouldn't that be better how
many of the
individual states in the united states
are doing as
as well or comparable to europe and i
think the answer is a lot of them right
out of our 50 states 30 or 40 of them
maybe what would you say 30 40
are doing as well as europe so that's
another way to look at it
anyway there's a million ways to look at
it and
i don't believe we've looked at all the
best ways we can
you are noticing that the the ruth bader
ginsburg stuff has just kicked
everything off the news
it makes everything a little bit boring
for a while because there's just
really one story that's all we're going
to talk about for a while
all right um i'm watching your comments
a lot of people are agreeing
um there's a 15
plus payment differential for coding
covet on medical bills
yeah 15 is certainly enough
too many variables to compare that is
correct
um oh somebody's talking about putting
oh
let me let me bring up this idea
so president trump has said publicly
that
he's probably going to pick a woman and
i think that's true he probably is
now here's what's wrong with that
and let me say before i start i am
completely in favor of a diverse
you know a very diverse supreme court
i think we're all better off if we've
got all the voices
you know accounted for so long as
everybody's capable to do the job that's
all great
and uh obviously there are plenty of
capable people i'm just saying as long
as you have capable people
it would also be good to have them
diverse
but we have this thing called the
constitution
and we have this thing called the
supreme court whose job it is to uphold
it
how is it constitutional for the
president of the united states
to say that he can't pick me for the
supreme court because of my
seriously i personally this is there's
no exaggeration here
i personally have been told by the
president of the united states
that i would not be eligible not not
that there was much risk i was going to
get picked
let's say ted cruz you know somebody who
actually
would be in the top 20 or whatever he
can't get the job
do you know why ted cruz can't get the
job his
do you think that if somebody sued the
president of the united states for job
discrimination
and said hey you're saying right out
loud that you're not going to even
consider a man
what's up with that and and what about
um
what about your genders that are not
either male or female
entirely what about all of your in
between genders
you know your your shades and your your
you know various uh what would be the
best way to say it the
the rainbow of different you know
genders what about all that
you know don't we care about that
anymore what about
um uh transsexual
if you're transsexual can you be on the
supreme court
i don't know maybe that's okay as long
as
as long as you've transitioned in the
right direction
maybe so so here's what i'd ask you
if somebody sued the president of the
united states
which i actually think would be a good
idea if somebody
sued the president of the united states
and said that is
job discrimination you're saying that
men can't have this job
where is that in the constitution i
would like a constitutional ruling from
the supreme court
about whether the president can limit
his choices
to one gender i don't think that's going
to pass constitutional muster
am i wrong about this can somebody who's
smarter than i am about the law
tell me am i am i just often out of
space here
or is it completely obvious
that what the president is doing by
limiting his choice
to a woman or even just saying it you
know
we don't have the actual choice yet but
even just saying it in public and saying
this is what i'm i'm looking for
is there anybody who could argue that
that is
constitutional because it looks to me
like grossly illegal it looks to me
as illegal as anything could ever be
now i do not have this feeling about
somebody running for office
different situation if somebody says hey
i'm
running to be a senator or a president
and i think you know i think we need
more women in this job
you know give us more representation or
whatever
that doesn't seem illegal to me because
that's a case of the public gets to vote
and that's just one of the variables
it's like oh i care about that variable
or i don't
but i get to vote it's not like a job
but the supreme court is picked
is picked like a job interview it's you
know i don't get to vote on the supreme
court
if i did i'd be fine with that if if i
got to vote on the supreme court along
with all of you you know if all the
voters got the vote
on the supreme court and somebody was
saying yeah we should have
a woman replace rgb no problem at all
i would have no i would have no problem
with that at all
somebody says i think you're off
uh but what would be the reason
uh somebody is laughing white privileged
i don't even know
see you can't tell a parody from reality
anymore so people are making comments
with little laughy faces
and i don't even know if you're agreeing
with me or disagree with me
that's that's how weird things are
somebody says this is playing the
lefties game
well well saying in advance that you're
going to pick a woman
is definitely playing the lefties game
maybe he was speaking of someone
specific i don't think that helps
i mean maybe that would be a defense but
i don't think that's what's happening
necessarily
because there are i apparently there are
two women who have
risen to the top of the likely list
so it's not just one woman
it's his choice man or woman well it is
his choice
but if you say to the public that you're
limiting it
by gender is it still legal
i don't know it could be you know i
would be willing to believe
that it's not it wouldn't be treated
like regular employment
and if the president has complete power
to do what the president wants
well maybe it doesn't matter maybe he
can be maybe he could be
completely discriminatory and and sexist
um president picks and he disclosed and
you vote for the president
um read my comments
and you will see the reason somebody
says although i don't
see where your comment is
as long as he gives the opportunity to
all he can say anything
he's not giving the opportunity to all
that's the opposite of what he's doing
all right he's not discriminating how is
he not discriminating
who breaks a tie that's a good question
what happens if the supreme court has a
tie you know
one of the reasons you don't want to
elect me for president is that i would
i would lock up the supreme court if i
could
i would try to make it a tie
so if there were more conservatives than
liberals
i would add a liberal if it was the
other way i'd add a conservative
and if i were president i would make the
supreme court
eight people four and four i wouldn't
even replace
i wouldn't even replace a ninth ninth
person do you know why
the reason is this if the supreme court
can't make a decision that breaks out of
the
liberal and or conservative silos
hell with it i don't want them to do
anything
if the only reason that that a decision
goes one way
is you have more liberal or you have
more conservative judges
if that's the reason the decision went
the way it went
that's not legitimate i mean it's
it's the law and it's legitimate in
terms of
that is the system that we've all bought
into but it doesn't seem to me like a
good idea
i only want things that somebody is
willing to
here we'll take care of this for you
whoever said boring and stayed on here
there you're blocked it's okay to be
bored and then leave
but don't be bored and then tell me
you're bored
just leave you got a choice all right
um somebody says ty goes to the lower
court decision
oh that makes sense right so it doesn't
get to the supreme court until the lower
court has ruled
if the supreme court is tied somebody is
saying this sounds right
that that means there's no decision at
the supreme court so the lower court
ruling would stand seems reasonable
all right uh that's all for now
and i will talk to you later
