Episode 1302 Scott Adams - Texas Chooses Freedom, AOC and the Minimum Wage, and Dr. Seuss

well today is gonna be one of the best coffees with scott adams of all time i'm going to say that again but make it sound like extreme sports today coffee with scott adams extreme it's better that way it really is if you'd like to make it even more extreme even better what would it take hmm would it take a couple of muggle glasses tank or challenge to sign a canteen jager flask vessel of any kind yes it would and i recommend filling that vessel with the liquid of your choice any kind for the dopamine push of the day the thing that makes everything better it's called the simultaneous sip yeah it's that good it's that good don't miss it here it comes go ah i feel so bad for the people who missed this don't you a little bit a little bit of guilt well let's talk about all the things possibly my favorite story of the day you might not have heard this yet apparently the bbc and in this context the bbc refers to the british broadcasting corporation if you thought bbc meant something else well you've been spending a little bit too much time on the wrong websites or the right websites i'm not going to make a judgment but anyway the bbc the one that does news has apologized for airing an interview with someone posing as senator booker is that perfect so apparently some imposter called up saying he was senator booker cory booker and did an entire interview on the bbc now here's my first question was the interview by the fake cory booker better or worse than the real cory booker because what is missing from the story is all the crazy stuff that the imposter said what if the imposter was just as good as the original what if they couldn't tell do we need an original if the imposter does just as well i suppose we did yes and the joke is i am not spartacus sometimes sometimes you think i'm spartacus but i'm not actually spartacus maybe he's spartacus definitely not me i'm not spartacus but that guy looks a little spartacus-y if you know what i'm talking about go talk to him so what happens now this was a radio interview i i should have mentioned that so it was audio only so it's easier to fake but what happens what happens when somebody can make a uh a deep fake that just mimics their own mouth motions so you think you're calling in on a zoom to do an interview or something and and somebody just puts up a fake how how far are we from an entire fake video answering interview questions now it would require a real person behind the scenes i'm not talking about ai but ai pretty soon too right pretty soon 20 years it's going to take longer for an ai to look exactly like a human in terms of how it acts but maybe not 20.

maybe 10.

i've noticed a difference in my trolls my trolls are very very different lately these days my trolls come in and they blame me publicly on twitter usually for not criticizing trump on some topic that i did criticize trump so it's not like i haven't criticized them but all of my all my trolls are coming in and saying why didn't you say something when trump was putting kids in cages to which i say i did i did and why didn't you say something when you know trump wasn't doing all the right things in the the pandemic to which i say i did i did i did do that so i've completely run out of trolls can somebody put out the word that i'm under trolled it's just not the same i don't want people who agree with me trying to troll me can i get somebody who disagrees please just somebody who disagrees with me could you troll me anybody just somebody who's got a different opinion i miss you i miss you the good trolls well texas and mississippi are leading the way and i'm going to give texas the the big credit here so the governor has said governor abbott has said texas is going to open up every business is allowed to open of course the businesses can decide on their own but they're allowed to open and there is no state mandate for masks now does saying there is no state mandate for masks mean that everybody will stop wearing masks no no it doesn't mean that do you know why because texans are not a bunch of freaking morons surprise surprise turns out there's a lot of smart responsible people living in texas and those who damn well better protect themselves until they get the vaccination yeah they'll wear masks or they'll not socially you know mingle with people who might be infected so i think you can trust at least at this point i don't think you could trust it early on in the pandemic because people were not as well informed not as well trained but i think you can trust that the people in texas who are at risk will make the damn decision themselves they will make the decision now let's talk about whether texas is doing the right thing or the wrong thing how many of you are positive that texas is doing the right thing and then how many of you are positive that it's the wrong thing it's too early whereas the governor of california said it's reckless as reckless well here's the argument and you have to look at all the variables if you look at one variable of course you're being dumb variable number one will opening up texas lead to more infections and death what do you think do you think that texas opening up is is pretty much guaranteed to have some extra deaths we don't know how many hoping it's not a new surge but when you say reasonably it's it's fair to say there will be more deaths if you loosen up a little bit now even even if you're arguing you know that sweden did well etc they still had extra deaths so i don't think anybody's arguing that there won't be extra deaths right are we on the same page the the texas is pretty much guaranteed by their actions to have some extra deaths now anybody who says no i think you're just not informed because there's no expert who thinks that the that the measures have zero effect there are plenty of people who say i don't know if it's enough of an effect to be worth the the pain is causing but i don't believe there's anybody who says anybody who's an expert who says that you'd have exactly the same death rate no matter what you do i don't believe anybody says that um at least in terms of the the virus they might they might say it in terms of net but not in terms of the virus so is it the right decision or the wrong decision here's the best argument i heard and i would recommend this as a good filter on this question question number one does the government know the right answer for you say you you are one individual you live in texas you're just one person you're not an average person because nobody is the average everybody's a person does texas know what would be the best thing for you specifically i'm not talking about what's best for the state but does texas know what's best for you specifically the answer is no because if if our government was so well informed and our science was so accurate that the government could say something like look there's a 99 chance that what we're doing is the right thing i know it's inconvenient i know people are gonna have lots of costs but we're 99 sure we're doing the right thing in general now if that were the situation i would feel that the government had some moral right in other words if they're really they got good information they're trying to save the most lives they can i feel as if they do have a moral right to maybe force people like me to do some things i don't want to do in the short run right i don't have a big problem with that concept but what happens if the government doesn't know what to do what if the government is not sure if keeping things closed is better net if you look at the net effect of mental health and everything else suicides drug addictions what if the government itself can't tell it can't tell if it's good for you or not well then you default to personal freedom that is the correct decision we live in a country where the correct default the thing you do if you don't know what to do is individual freedom now if we had really strong indication that that so-called individual freedom would lead to a catastrophe of untold proportions well then i think that the state government has a role in being the adult in the room and forcing you to do what you don't want to do because it's good for everybody right there can be those situations but this isn't that we we are close enough to the end of the pandemic whether it's six months from now or whatever it is that i do think that texas has a completely valid argument that they texas can't tell they can't tell what's good for you and if you can't tell there is only one morally and ethically responsible thing to do leave it to the people now educate them as much as you can right do as much as you can to minimize minimize risk but you have to default to freedom in this situation now should everybody do it do you think all of the other states california should just say ah texas is doing it let's do it nope no even if you think that what texas is doing is 100 the right thing to do that does not mean that the other states should do it because i'm in california we'll probably stay locked down longer than other people even in california although i am jealous i'm envious of the texans who have more freedom that i have i'm okay waiting and the reason i'm okay waiting is that i don't mind texas being the control the control case right i would like to see if texas runs into a big problem because they're handling things differently but i want to keep california the same just long enough to know for sure all right i feel as if it's worth risking a state or two to leave them behind long enough to see if there's some big difference if it happens to be my state that's not ideal but whether or not my state had changed things i probably would have acted the same or very similarly i mean i could have gone to more places but i probably would have stayed out of uh you know even if the restaurant said you could go there and for full capacity put yourself in my shoes i've got asthma i'll be 64 in a few months so i'm sort of on the edge of the bubble depending on your point of view of risky risky people if california opened up like texas i wouldn't go back to normal because i might have only one more month before i'm vaccinated maybe a month i'll tell you my my personal risk management assessment is if it's really one month and i think it is before i get vaccinated i'm going to be extra careful for one month does that mean does that not make sense that i should be extra careful because now that's only one month that's not big risk to save my life you know if there's some deadly risk if it were six months maybe maybe i'd say i gotta live but one month i can wait one month you know i'm gonna and i think a lot of texans especially anybody over 60 is going to say the same thing you know if they want to take the risk they have the option now so i think this is great i just don't know that you could say with any confidence that it will work as well as they hope it will but it's great that they've made the decision with this bias a bias toward freedom every time you see a bias toward freedom you got to be happy about that right even if it's the wrong even if it works out poorly you sort of got to be glad that texas exists so thanks for texas you know i keep watching this developing situation of immigration and you know the more unattended kids and i guess the predictions are over a hundred thousand unattended kids will show up and and there does seem to be clear indication that the smugglers are you know the people who smuggle the kids across the border that they've stepped up operations because they think biden will be soft on immigration and and they seem to be right so given that every republican in the world said hey if you make it desirable and easy and better to come to the united states than staying where you will where you are you'll get more people and sure enough that's exactly what's happening now i feel like what's different and special about this border situation is you had such a a clear democrat standard of what what you could or or could not do at the border and i don't think they're going to be able to hold it because they're either going to create a humanitarian disaster by being too good to people which looks like that's developing or they're going to have to change the policy and make it like trump so what happens if this what's special about the border situation is you don't have to wait a long time to see how it turned out how long would it take you to find out if something you did for the green new deal worked it could take decades right you might not know for years and years whether the vast expenses or changes you're doing for the green new deal are going to work but with the border stuff i think we'll know with complete certainty within one year right within one year i don't think we'll be arguing whether letting everybody in and being friendly to the children and especially kind we're not going to wonder what that did because we'll just look at it we'll know so what happens if it's a disaster because it it looks like it's shaping up that way but honestly i would still like to still like to bet on the government i know that's the worst bet betting on the government to do anything right it's a terrible bet but the thing i don't do that a lot of you and my audience do is that just because we i can't figure out how something could be done i don't assume that it can't be done now in my mind i can't think of any way that making it really really easy and desirable to get into this country illegally i don't see any way that can work but i'm also open to maybe somebody does maybe we maybe we test something um i've always wondered what would happen if you built in a special opportunity zone right along the southern border of the united states i'm just going to toss this idea out here suppose the united states says we're going to build a zone where you can move your manufacturing from china to here and for however many years you won't pay any taxes or there'd be tax rebates maybe there's no minimum wage and what you would do is build this like you know manufacturing zone that would absorb the people coming over the border so they would come over the border but then they would learn english and they would learn a skill they would have a job they'd be doing something that's good for the country and they wouldn't even get into the interior of the country because you would have a whole you know zone which would be the very best place for them to go because it would be built for them it would be built for a place that wants as many employees as they can get come on over but it would be american owned and run and you would just use it as an immigration control that has the secondary benefit of um you know reducing our dependence on china could you do that i don't know so i don't know if any of that would be practical or economic but you can imagine you could imagine really creative ways to approach immigration which as aoc says and i'm the only person on this live stream who's willing to say this i like the fact that she wants to do something that we don't know how to do i like that i want my leaders to be pushing us to do things that look kind of impossible and this looks kind of impossible let being kind to people on the border at the same time you're controlling your own country's fate i don't know how to do it do you i don't know anybody who knows how to do it aoc is pushing it without knowing how to do it i don't hate that we can't do it until we know how to do it but i can't hate the fact that she pushes the impossible i kind of like it i think that's you know mentally that's where i like to be is you know how do we do the impossible as opposed to saying well that's impossible walk away can't do it so i think she's a valuable asset even if you think all of her ideas are bad but what's going to happen with the kids in cages situation should have some carryover effect to other democrat stuff what happens if the let's say hypothetically and it looks like it's heading in that direction let's say the disaster poli or the immigration policies of the biden administration become an un uh unambiguous disaster so much so that even democrats say oh this is a disaster it didn't work what would happen to their other policies because isn't the main problem with democrat policies that they have somewhat lofty objectives which you might like you know everybody's doing well and making money and there's fairness and equality those things all sound great who's against any of that but if you don't know how to get there that's the problem so i'm thinking that even the green new deal will suffer if the immigration thing falls apart because it will feel the same immigration has this weird quality where you say to yourself wait a minute human nature guarantees that your plan can't work and i think people will just take that thinking to other democrat policies so i think the democrats are really in trouble with immigration not just because of immigration here's a question to you and i'll base this on overhearing something the other day i was in a position the other day to overhear some teens talking about you know i'm gonna be as generic as possible talking about lifestyle things and you know some things that would be in the general social discussion let's say and i was blown away i mean absolutely blown away because things coming out of the mouths of young people very unfamiliar to what i would have heard in my day is it better or is it worse probably better probably better because what i heard was an insane amount of lack of bigotry insane like a kind of an open mindedness that is just shocking in a good way it's shockingly healthy to hear young people with not even a trace of what you would have considered i guess a normal amount of bigotry use sexism anti whatever anti this is that it's really weird but at the same time the young people will talk quite bluntly about ethnicity like that's very much on the top of people's thoughts you know this group and this but has more to do with clicks and who's friends with who and it doesn't seem to be about race it seems about more about who's hanging out with who but i'll tell you if you want to if you want to feel or as or see the future if you want to see the future you got to listen to kids talking candidly it's pretty positive but here's the bigger question i have could you teach kids if you get them young to be politically independent you could but would we because you'd be taking away the parents responsibility in some sense because you know you think the parents are the ones who should determine their their opinions as opposed to the school but i wonder if you couldn't teach young kids that blindly joining a political party and assuming that everything that one party says is right and everything the other party says is wrong couldn't you teach them just that that's always wrong just to prepare them for the fact that the other side some has sometimes is right i feel as if you could prime them to make them a little bit more fluid in later life about whether they would you know cross-party lines or or just be open-minded to stuff so i know you couldn't teach a kid to be a republican or a democrat because that would be way over the line but couldn't you teach them how to not fall into a team mentality and you don't even have to mention which team you're talking about just don't don't make your decisions based on the team that's it i think you could we get them young enough and that seems like that would be valuable because most of our current problems are this team play stuff um there was an article on february 21st in wall street journal by martin uh koldorf koldorf seems to know what he's talking about from john johns hopkins so he's you know a medical professional from a credible place and he's saying that in this article it's now a few weeks old that the number of uh coveted cases that how rapidly it dropped in in january can't be explained by the holiday traffic now i i had been saying uh duh infections are down because it's not christmas anymore and you could pretty much track the holidays or the spikes and then after the holidays things calm down it's pretty universal and so i thought it was pretty clear to me it seemed i could be wrong but to me it seems really obvious that the uh traveling for the holidays is the big big problem and that when it's done you would get less of it and it makes sense to me because i would think if i were to put the single biggest variable it would have to be the amount of time you spend indoors with a bad ventilation so i'm not counting let's say if you're in africa or india you always have your windows open because it's always hot so that's different but if you're indoors with the windows closed it's how many people are coming in and out and are in close contact it's probably just that when i say just is probably 60 of all infections or exactly that something that happens in your own house or in a house so i don't know how the i don't know how holidays could not be the explanation of most of the dip but his claim is that um the only way to explain it would be if people have t cell immunity from related coronaviruses maybe or there's way more infection so we have more demonic herd immunity than we know what do you think do you think that we can just look at this data can we just look at the curves and look at the data and make the conclusion that it's t cell immunity i feel like i feel like that's a little too far i feel like we don't have the data to say that that's the case but his his case is uh it's an argument by uh ruling out the other things so can you rule out the most obvious thing which is that holiday travel brought people together who don't get together and put them indoors for a long period of time so i'm going to say i don't buy it i don't buy it i do buy the general notion that there might be more immunity in the public than we know and then it might be a pretty big variable but i think the big dip had to be the holidays i just feel that way all right we need more yeah need more information so apparently uh some more rocket attacks are happening in iraq on american military bases and there was a contractor who died from a heart attack during an airstrike so i don't know was it the air strike that killed him i guess you could say so and here's the real question so now that biden had responded to the last attack by iranian surrogates is this iran just seeing how far they can push biden is that what's going on because if iran is saying oh we'll just keep pushing just keep pushing would they have done this under trump do you think that iran would have attacked a second military base through a proxy not directly do you think they would have approved that attack under trump i feel as if no but you can't know right but the thing that trump had going for him is that he was less predictable and i feel like we put mr predictable into the office and iran is just running with it because they can predict him maybe we'll see um so i guess uh governor cuomo of new york was stripped of his emergency coveted powers uh you know just weeks before they would have expired anyway can new york get any dumber i think new york is just it seems to be setting new records for dumbness because i don't believe that the governor's emergency powers were really the problem here was anybody arguing you know he did he did ask if he could kiss that woman two years ago so therefore he should not have emergency covert powers what i feel like new york is just shooting themselves in the foot because they're mad at their governor why would you want to take away his tools if you're keeping him in the job yeah we'd like you to still be you know in charge but could you do it with fewer tools well why would i do it with fewer tools no reason it's you know has something to do with a girl you tried to kiss a woman you tried to kiss so how does that make sense it's just like new york proving how dumb they are no matter how mad you are at your governor all right are you ready for the most controversial part of this periscope are you ready i'm going to bring up a topic you hate but i'm going to put a new twist on it so you should stay for the new twist all right because it's even new for me there's a erasmus and poll on what people think about uh transgender athletes and specifically of course everybody's talking about um transgender athletes playing women's sports and we found that the majority of the public is against it majority of the public doesn't favor uh transgender being able to play on women's sports teams and uh so we should go with the majority right what do you say live it we live in a sort of a democracy-ish kind of a place should we go with the majority all right well here's something that you could pull out of these numbers the rasmussen poll women under 40.

57 favor transgender athletes playing female sports so the the category of people who are most directly affected besides the athletes the transgender athletes themselves are women under 40 because they would be the ones on professional teams the ones who recently uh recently played sports you know not that long ago in high school and college and would even be having kids at 40 you know that's the age where your kids are getting into athletics early in school and that group the ones most directly victimized can i use that word because that's how it's being spoken i don't use that word to speak of this but some people are saying hey what about that um that uh biologically born female athlete who now can't get first place because the transgender athlete is just getting all the medals and winning everything if the people who are most affected are by a strong majority in favor of doing it is it any of your business do you think everybody should have the same weight of opinion if there's only one group that is the is impacted by it right should these two people have the same vote on this topic there's a there's a hermit living in the alaska outback american citizen so american citizens get to vote get to have an opinion but doesn't have a kid it's a man it's a hermit living in alaska how is that person in any way important to this question of transgender athletes completely unrelated does that person's opinion should account as much as somebody who is the very center of the question which is non-transgender athletes who would be affected by having people on the team that are superior athletes what is fair so forget about the question forget about the topic forget about the the topic being transgender athletes just forget about it just as answer the question in the generic question if the people who are most affected victimized if you want to call it that say let's do this by a strong majority this is a strong majority right it's overwhelming shouldn't they get what they want what what why is it the hermit in alaska who gets an equal vote somebody says stop all right you're going to go away rose you don't get to be here anymore um a hide user on this channel okay you're gone now again uh i'm open to any counter arguments i like counter arguments and in fact this is weird but i enjoy being proven wrong because i think it makes this better you know the the thing i do anytime i can be proven wrong and and it's confirmed that's kind of exciting to me because i don't i don't feel any shame from that i feel like everybody's wrong so if you can learn something good all right so my only thing i'm going to add to that is although legally everybody gets the same vote in this country we don't want to change that sometimes you should look at who's affected right and to me that matters all right aoc is making more news by saying the minimum wage should be raised of course but i want to show you her argument style all right so here's a tweet and we'll we'll talk about whether the minimum rate wage should be raised but that's going to be separate here i'm just going to talk about her her technique her persuasion okay so i told you i try to teach you something every live stream and here we're going to learn from aoc's technique the same way we would learn from trump's persuasion technique here's the tweet aoc says it is utterly embarrassing that quote pay people enough to live is a stance that's even up for debate override the parliamentarian and raise the wage so she's asking her own party to act differently asking biden and uh and harris to override this uh mcdonald's workers in denmark are paid twenty two dollars an hour plus six weeks paid vacation fifteen 15 an hour which is what she wants in this country is a deep compromise a big one considering the phase-in i mean considering you don't even get the 15 for a number of years now let's talk about her her technique i love starting out with it's utterly embarrassing because she's taken an economic question and moved it directly into feelings if you're going to influence somebody you want to go for the fields because they'll always argue you on the data if she made her argument entirely upon data people would just argue the data they'd say well you don't know that and can't be sure that's it so arguing with data would have no real value so she doesn't that that's what makes her you know a little bit better than other politicians she doesn't do the thing that won't work in terms of persuasion then she says that to pay people enough to live is a stance that's even up for debate that is really really good framing even if you don't agree with her point we're not talking about the politics of the policy but uh that's just so well said i mean it's just framed with perfect persuasion and then she goes on saying what she would like to be done again perfect persuasion your persuasion is useless if you make a point and don't have a specific thing you're asking for so she makes her point goes right to the specific request again perfect form and then she says that then she does the comparison thing where you make a big first ask so that whatever you're asking for sounds not so bad so she uses the denmark comparison because 22 is such a big number when you're only talking about raising it to 15 that your brain starts to say wait a minute denmark's at 22 and and the country is now falling apart denmark's doing okay 15 doesn't sound so bad don't get ahead of me don't get ahead of me i know what you're going to do i'll get there i'll get there it's not all good so i read that i thought well that's pretty good argument now for background aoc has a background in economics a lot of people don't understand that in college he she actually has an economics degree as do i i have a degree in economics in an mba and if you were to ask me scott forget about the morality part forget about the morality just does this work economically because the things you're looking at is you're not just raising you know somebody's pay is coming out of somebody's pocket so how many businesses will go on a business how many fewer employees can be employed because now you can't afford as many of them how do you do the math and figure out what works now wouldn't you say scott every time you depart from the free market and you put the government in there you get a worse result how many of you believe that in the comments tell me is that the fair thing to say there's a good general statement that whenever you remove the free market and insert government control that's never good right never good well if you believe that why do we have a minimum wage now why do we have a minimum wage now do you know i wasn't i can't remember specifically but don't you think that whenever the minimum wage was put in place or the minimum wage was raised don't you think we had this same argument every time was it right the last time do you remember when they raised the minimum wage to what it is now and then the economy fell apart it didn't it didn't it's the same argument that we know wasn't true before we don't have to guess we know because the minimum wage has been raised before and and the country survived now did it cost people jobs yes of course did some businesses probably go out of business yeah the ones that were so weak so weak they couldn't afford to do this were those businesses going to last were those the businesses were paying a lot of taxes no they couldn't have been paying a lot of taxes because they didn't have enough margin to even give their employees a raise so you have you have two arguments here and they're both pretty good and they're on different sides the pretty good argument against raising it is free markets are better you won't get people coming into the market who would only take those low jobs they couldn't get a better one so you're not training people yeah so the argument against it is completely solid completely i mean it's you know human motivation is very predictable there will be fewer people hired in in the short run but on the other hand the aoc argument is there are plenty of cases where people argue this same thing was going to happen and it didn't we just adjusted we just adjusted somehow so here i am sitting here with uh two degrees that should allow me to answer this question and have a like a really smart opinion that it's a good idea or that it's a bad idea to raise the minimum wage i don't do you you've watched me for a long time and i honestly don't know if this is a good idea or a bad idea and i don't even know how you check because i wouldn't believe anybody's prediction would you would would you believe anybody's economic projection of what would happen if we did it i wouldn't because the one thing i do know is that i wouldn't trust any economic prediction would you and if you don't trust the experts what are you going on what are you going on all right but here's the punchline to the whole thing while it is a tremendously good persuasion play to say that denmark has 22 dollars an hour and all this paid vacation and stuff uh it took about a minute for somebody to come into the comments and say denmark doesn't have a minimum wage the whole thing is denmark doesn't have a state mandated minimum wage they just don't have one so the whole argument is just completely but did it work yeah yeah it works really well as an argument it works really well it works as well as president trump saying you know your your tv won't work when the windmills stop turning right it's not exactly the most honest argument in the world but you get the point right you get the point so it's the same technique all right so just as president trump uh did not pass a lot of the fact checking but yet he was amazingly like good at persuading and the things that he persuaded toward were also good i can't even think of an exception right i mean arguably i can't think of any exception so i don't mind that trump you know plays fast and loose with the facts as long as the direction he's going is quite obviously a good direction for the country and a lot of people's opinion that's fair aoc is doing the same um here's a question for you um well actually let's let's talk about dr seuss how many of you have now seen the so-called offensive uh racially offensive dr seuss drawings it's been in the news for a while that there are some dr seuss books with racially offensive drawings how many of you have seen them because i'll bet you all have opinions don't you how many of you have seen them i have now seen them thanks to a tweet by joel and it's the only place i've seen them i haven't seen them anywhere else except one tweet pointing to a blog article and that was you know joel pollock who pointed to the article he didn't write the article and i'm looking at your answers and i only see one person says they've seen them but you all have opinions don't you oh some number if you've seen them so for those who hadn't seen them and then you did did it change your opinion did you get a different opinion after you looked at them i did i did let me tell you what my first thought was we we weren't being shown the pictures and that led me to believe that maybe they weren't that bad because if they were that bad wouldn't they just show them because the media leans left right so if they were really that bad i feel like we would definitely would have seen them so i was i was biased toward thinking there's probably nothing there it's probably imagination and you're you're reading into it a little bit and then i looked at them they're pretty bad by today's standards by today's standards pretty bad pretty bad by the standards of when they were drawn not at all not at all i mean if you put it back in its historical context i don't even know if anybody would have even raised an eyebrow the the most i'll describe them for you so there are three images i saw in particular one was some probably a middle eastern um i imagine an islamic guy riding a camel wearing sort of traditional look and having you know a cartoon face that looks caricaturish of the region not too bad i would say i would say on that one if that had been the worst one i would say give it a pass because really it looked like more they were trying to get the clothing right it didn't look like i don't know is riding a camel somehow an insult if people actually ride camels and it's a thing i don't know that one didn't look bad then i looked at the next one it was some uh characters drawn as chinese characters that looked like a fu manchu you know with robes and you know little facial hair that you would see in some stereotype and they were carrying on their head i think there were three or four of them they were carrying on their heads as if they were porters you know carry things on their heads a big cage with some dr seuss animal but then at the top the top of the cage was this drawing of a little white hunter so you've got the the chinese characters carrying on their head a cage of an animal and on top of it the white guy not so good but if you take it back in time who was it who were the porters if you went to china and you organized an expedition who would be carrying the stuff chinese citizens right so if you just put it in its context it's actually what it would look like if you don't factor in that he made all the chinese characters look um let's say stereotypical of that day and not in a good way so that what i would say was was a problem yeah i i could see how somebody would say yeah let's let's let's this is a little marginal let's uh get rid of this one but then the third one showed some uh black characters from africa carrying some other dr seuss character and then i get a little bit more of a problem the black characters may i may i use an offensive word if i tell you that there's no offensive intention okay so what i'm gonna say next will sound defensive but it's not my intention so intention matters more than words or they should i'm just gonna say it all right he drew the black characters to look like monkeys all right now if that doesn't offend you i don't know what would i mean that's about as offensive as you can get now was he thinking that when he drew them or is it just an artifact from his drawing style which is it just fell out that way but he wasn't thinking of it in any way like that it's a problem now i said before that the easiest way to solve it would just be find find a black cartoonist and just say hey do us a favor can you redraw these so that we can tell they're african natives but they don't seem offensive to you just just give us a hand i mean if you looked at like the whole body of dr seuss works they're only just a few pictures why don't we just have the people who are most you know the victim of that characterization have them you know take a shot at it just redraw it annotate it make sure everybody can see the original and tell them why you changed it i don't think it's a big problem i think it's easy to solve just have a little bit of technique just get the right person involved it's just it literally would be one drawing out of a whole book no big deal i wouldn't lose the original though um here's a provocative sexist hypothesis from user novicus on twitter and i'll try to characterize the claim is that the societies that have the most gender equality are also the most ethically and morally superior so it's a two-part opinion do you agree with the first part that societies that have the most uh um gender equality are and it's not a coincidence that they're more ethically and morally superior do you buy that might be an opinion social opinion sort of thing but i do that's that's you i would say observationally that feels about right doesn't i've seen a lot of people say no i don't think that the people saying no have a bad argument by the way but i'm a little surprised that there is many no's oh interesting okay all right but let me just finish the point so this is not my point i'm just putting it out there that wherever you have more women with more equality there's more moral superiority but it's also the reason you're doomed it's also the reason you're doomed because the country with the most morality and equality will be the weakest country in terms of homeland defense that all of those things that make you ethically and morally superior put you in peril right because if you want to be protected you want the person on your side who's the worst person in the world you don't want the ethically and morally appropriate warriors on your side you want the ones who will burn the village right i mean you wouldn't say it out loud but if you had a choice between your country being destroyed and you being killed or your military people might be kind of bad ass might kill a little bit more than you expected might take more chances might do a lot of things that maybe you wouldn't think are a good idea but maybe you need that see the trouble is that the more dangerous you are the more likely uh even if you lose nine out of ten times if you're the more dangerous one you only have to win that one time and then you're in charge so somebody says that's why sweden is in bad shape i don't know if that can be proven by any data but i do think this is an interesting point that the nicer you are as a society the more vulnerable you are to societies that are not as nice now the way novak has put it is that they are male dominated societies if you look at russia male dominated china male dominated those are two biggest problems and would those male-dominated cultures produce let's say let's take china for example we believe that china is doing all these terrible things to us from shipping as fentanyl to stealing our ip to spying to gathering our dna to all these things would china be doing all of those things if they had a gender gender equal society with women in charge as much as men would they do all those things what do you think what do you think would would china be as aggressive if they had gender equality i feel like they would be less aggressive and that there's something to this hypothesis so anyway i just put that out there it's very sexist but it does match it matches observation even if my observation is so biased that i can't see i can't see it clearly somebody says the ccp is not china yeah that's that's a fair statement but the communist party is male dominated so that's the point um they have 100 million excess men somebody says do they um china has no diversity on their corporate boards of directors um in the future yeah all right so that's all i got for today and i will talk to you tomorrow all right youtubers um yeah it's from the one child family rule i guess swedes get paid five weeks vacation somebody says um why do i always wear the same shirt uh i i do this in my pajamas so the the the shirt you see is the shirt that i wore to bed so i i'm always in my pajamas i can prove it pajamas and i'm always barefoot so um i i've created this entire show which now has you know national uh prominence and i've never once worn uh pants i mean i have i have pajamas on and i've never done it in my shoes so i like a job that you can do in your pajamas without shoes and make a lot of money now i'm not making a lot of money but it is monetized um yeah this is the best way to do a show do i still go on other people's podcasts not at the moment the i'll confess something to you right now the enjoyment i get and then doing this and also the content i do for locals which is a subscription site where i put a lot of my content that you don't get to see um i enjoy that so much that my cartooning it's just hard for me to do it like it's 30 years of drawing these same characters it's really hard now to make myself sit down and do it one more time which is what i have to do today and uh i'm way behind deadline or i'm too close to the deadline actually so i've got to get ahead on deadlines it's going to take me a few months and that's all um will you have on jovan pulitzer no no there's a certain type of guest that i'll never have on and that's anybody who can make a claim that i don't know enough about to ask the right questions and he would be in that category what school of economics did you learn i wouldn't say it was a school of economics i just have a degree in economics so we we got to see a lot of stuff um all right that's all for now and i will talk to you later

[Applause]

well

today is gonna be one of the best

coffees with scott adams of all time i'm

going to say that again but make it

sound

like extreme sports

today coffee with scott adams extreme

it's better that way it really is if

you'd like to make it

even more extreme even better

what would it take hmm would it take a

couple of muggle glasses

tank or challenge to sign a canteen

jager flask vessel of any kind

yes it would and i recommend

filling that vessel with the liquid of

your choice

any kind for the dopamine push of the

day the thing that makes everything

better it's called the simultaneous sip

yeah it's that good it's that good don't

miss it here it comes go

ah i feel so bad for the people who

missed this

don't you a little bit a little bit of

guilt

well let's talk about all the things

possibly

my favorite story of the day you might

not have heard this yet

apparently the bbc and in this context

the bbc refers to the british

broadcasting corporation

if you thought bbc meant something else

well you've been spending a little bit

too much time on the wrong websites

or the right websites i'm not going to

make a judgment

but anyway the bbc the one that does

news

has apologized for airing an interview

with someone posing as senator booker

is that perfect so apparently some

imposter

called up saying he was senator booker

cory booker

and did an entire interview on the bbc

now here's my first question was the

interview by the fake

cory booker better

or worse than the real cory booker

because what is missing from the story

is all the crazy stuff

that the imposter said what if the

imposter was just as good as the

original

what if they couldn't tell do we need an

original if the imposter does just as

well i suppose we did

yes and the joke is i am not spartacus

sometimes sometimes you think i'm

spartacus

but i'm not actually spartacus maybe

he's spartacus

definitely not me i'm not spartacus but

that guy looks a little

spartacus-y if you know what i'm talking

about

go talk to him so what happens

now this was a radio interview i i

should have mentioned that so it was

audio only so it's easier to fake

but what happens what happens

when somebody can make a uh

a deep fake that just mimics their own

mouth motions so you think you're

calling in on a zoom to do an interview

or something

and and somebody just puts up a fake

how how far are we from an entire fake

video answering interview questions

now it would require a real person

behind the scenes i'm not talking about

ai

but ai pretty soon too right pretty soon

20 years it's going to take longer for

an ai to look exactly like a human in

terms of how it acts

but maybe not 20. maybe 10.

i've noticed a difference in my trolls

my trolls are very very different lately

these days my trolls come in and they

blame me publicly on twitter usually

for not criticizing trump

on some topic that i did criticize trump

so it's not like i haven't criticized

them but all of my

all my trolls are coming in and saying

why didn't you say something when

trump was putting kids in cages to which

i say

i did i did and

why didn't you say something when you

know trump wasn't doing all the right

things in the the pandemic

to which i say i did i did i did do that

so i've completely run out of trolls

can somebody put out the word that i'm

under trolled

it's just not the same i don't want

people who agree with me trying to troll

me

can i get somebody who disagrees please

just somebody who disagrees with me

could you troll me

anybody just somebody who's got a

different opinion

i miss you i miss you the good trolls

well texas and mississippi are leading

the way and

i'm going to give texas the the big

credit here so the governor has said

governor abbott has said texas is going

to open up

every business is allowed to open of

course the businesses

can decide on their own but they're

allowed to open and

there is no state mandate for masks

now does saying there is no state

mandate for masks

mean that everybody will stop wearing

masks

no no it doesn't mean that do you know

why

because texans are not a bunch of

freaking morons

surprise surprise turns out there's a

lot of

smart responsible people living in texas

and those who damn well better protect

themselves until they get the

vaccination

yeah they'll wear masks or they'll

not socially you know mingle with people

who might be infected

so i think you can trust at least at

this point i don't think you could trust

it early on in the pandemic

because people were not as well informed

not as well trained

but i think you can trust that the

people in texas who are at risk

will make the damn decision themselves

they will make the decision

now let's talk about whether texas is

doing the right thing

or the wrong thing how many of you are

positive that texas is doing the right

thing

and then how many of you are positive

that it's the wrong thing it's too early

whereas the governor of california said

it's reckless

as reckless well

here's the argument and you have to look

at all the variables if you look at one

variable

of course you're being dumb variable

number one

will opening up texas lead to more

infections and

death what do you think do you think

that texas opening up

is is pretty much guaranteed to have

some extra deaths we don't know how many

hoping it's not a new surge

but when you say reasonably it's it's

fair to say there will be more deaths

if you loosen up a little bit now even

even if you're arguing you know that

sweden did well etc

they still had extra deaths so i don't

think anybody's arguing that there won't

be

extra deaths right are we on the same

page

the the texas is pretty much guaranteed

by their actions to have some extra

deaths now anybody who says no i think

you're just not informed

because there's no expert who thinks

that the

that the measures have zero effect

there are plenty of people who say i

don't know if it's enough of an effect

to be worth the the pain is causing but

i don't believe there's

anybody who says anybody who's an expert

who says that you'd have exactly the

same death rate no matter what you do

i don't believe anybody says that um at

least in terms of

the the virus they might they might say

it in terms of net

but not in terms of the virus so is it

the right decision

or the wrong decision here's the best

argument i heard

and i would recommend this as a good

filter on this

question question number one

does the government know the right

answer

for you say you you are one individual

you live in texas

you're just one person you're not an

average person

because nobody is the average

everybody's a person

does texas know what would be the best

thing for you

specifically i'm not talking about

what's best for the state

but does texas know what's best for you

specifically the answer is no

because if if our government was so well

informed

and our science was so accurate that the

government could say something

like look there's a 99

chance that what we're doing is the

right thing i know it's inconvenient i

know people are gonna

have lots of costs but we're 99 sure

we're doing the right thing in general

now if that were the situation

i would feel that the government had

some

moral right

in other words if they're really they

got good information they're trying to

save the most

lives they can i feel as if they do have

a moral

right to maybe force people like me to

do some things i don't want to do

in the short run right i don't have a

big problem with that concept

but what happens if the government

doesn't know what to do

what if the government is not sure if

keeping things closed is better net

if you look at the net effect of mental

health and everything else suicides drug

addictions

what if the government itself can't tell

it can't tell if it's good for you or

not well then you default

to personal freedom

that is the correct decision we live in

a country where the correct

default the thing you do if you don't

know what to do

is individual freedom now if we had

really strong indication

that that so-called individual freedom

would lead to

a catastrophe of untold proportions well

then i think that

the state government has a role in being

the adult in the room and forcing you to

do what you don't want to do

because it's good for everybody right

there can be those situations

but this isn't that we we are close

enough to the end of the pandemic

whether it's six months from now or

whatever it is

that i do think that texas has a

completely

valid argument that they texas

can't tell they can't tell what's good

for you

and if you can't tell there is only one

morally and ethically responsible thing

to do

leave it to the people now educate them

as much as you can

right do as much as you can to minimize

minimize risk but you have to default to

freedom in this situation

now should everybody do it

do you think all of the other states

california should just say ah

texas is doing it let's do it nope

no even if you think that what texas is

doing is 100

the right thing to do that does not mean

that the other states should do it

because i'm in california

we'll probably stay locked down longer

than other people even in california

although i am jealous i'm envious of the

texans who have more

freedom that i have i'm okay waiting

and the reason i'm okay waiting is that

i don't mind

texas being the control

the control case right i would like to

see if texas

runs into a big problem because they're

handling things differently

but i want to keep california the same

just long enough

to know for sure all right i feel as if

it's worth

risking a state or two to leave them

behind long enough to see if there's

some big difference

if it happens to be my state that's not

ideal but whether or not my state had

changed things i probably would have

acted the same

or very similarly i mean i could have

gone to more places

but i probably would have stayed out of

uh you know even if the restaurant said

you could go there and

for full capacity

put yourself in my shoes i've got asthma

i'll be 64 in a few months so i'm sort

of on the edge of the bubble

depending on your point of view of risky

risky people

if california opened up like texas i

wouldn't go back to normal

because i might have only one more month

before i'm vaccinated maybe a month

i'll tell you my my personal risk

management assessment

is if it's really one month and i think

it is before i get vaccinated

i'm going to be extra careful for one

month

does that mean does that not make sense

that i should be extra careful

because now that's only one month that's

not big risk to save my life

you know if there's some deadly risk if

it were

six months maybe maybe i'd say i gotta

live

but one month i can wait one month

you know i'm gonna and i think a lot of

texans

especially anybody over 60 is going to

say the same thing

you know if they want to take the risk

they have the option now

so i think this is great i just don't

know

that you could say with any confidence

that it will work

as well as they hope it will but it's

great

that they've made the decision with this

bias

a bias toward freedom every time you see

a bias toward freedom

you got to be happy about that right

even if it's the wrong

even if it works out poorly you sort of

got to be glad

that texas exists so thanks for texas

you know i keep watching this developing

situation of immigration

and you know the more unattended kids

and i guess the predictions are over a

hundred thousand

unattended kids will show up and and

there does seem to be clear indication

that the smugglers are you know the

people who smuggle

the kids across the border that they've

stepped up operations because they think

biden will be soft on immigration

and and they seem to be right so

given that every republican in the world

said hey if you make it desirable and

easy and

better to come to the united states than

staying where you will

where you are you'll get more people and

sure enough

that's exactly what's happening now i

feel like

what's different and special about this

border situation

is you had such a a clear democrat

standard of what what you could or or

could not do at the border

and i don't think they're going to be

able to hold it because they're either

going to create a humanitarian disaster

by being too good to people which looks

like that's developing

or they're going to have to change the

policy and make it like trump

so what happens if this what's special

about the border situation

is you don't have to wait a long time to

see how it turned out

how long would it take you to find out

if something you did for the green new

deal

worked it could take decades right you

might not know

for years and years whether the vast

expenses or changes

you're doing for the green new deal are

going to work

but with the border stuff i think we'll

know with complete certainty within one

year right

within one year i don't think we'll be

arguing

whether letting everybody in and being

friendly to the children and especially

kind

we're not going to wonder what that did

because we'll just look at it we'll know

so what happens if it's a disaster

because it it looks like it's shaping up

that way

but honestly i would still like to

still like to bet on the government

i know that's the worst bet betting on

the government to do anything right

it's a terrible bet but the thing i

don't do

that a lot of you and my audience do is

that just because we

i can't figure out how something could

be done

i don't assume that it can't be done now

in my mind i can't think of

any way that making it really really

easy and desirable

to get into this country illegally i

don't see

any way that can work but i'm also open

to

maybe somebody does maybe we maybe we

test something um i've always wondered

what would happen if you built

in a special opportunity zone

right along the southern border of the

united states

i'm just going to toss this idea out

here suppose the united states says

we're going to build a

zone where you can move your

manufacturing from

china to here and for however many years

you won't pay any taxes or there'd be

tax

rebates maybe there's no minimum wage

and what you would do is build this like

you know manufacturing

zone that would absorb the people coming

over the border

so they would come over the border but

then they would learn english and they

would learn a skill

they would have a job they'd be doing

something that's good for the country

and they wouldn't even get into the

interior of the country because you

would have a whole

you know zone which would be the very

best place for them to go

because it would be built for them it

would be built for a place that

wants as many employees as they can get

come on over

but it would be american owned and run

and you would just use it as

an immigration control that has the

secondary benefit

of um you know reducing our dependence

on china

could you do that i don't know so i

don't know if any of that would be

practical or economic but

you can imagine you could imagine

really creative ways to approach

immigration

which as aoc says and i'm the only

person

on this live stream who's willing to say

this

i like the fact that she wants to do

something that we don't know how to do

i like that i want my leaders to be

pushing us to do things

that look kind of impossible and this

looks kind of impossible

let being kind to people on the border

at the same time you're controlling your

own country's fate

i don't know how to do it do you i don't

know anybody who knows how to do it

aoc is pushing it without knowing how to

do it

i don't hate that we can't do it until

we know how to do it

but i can't hate the fact that she

pushes the impossible

i kind of like it i think that's you

know mentally that's where i like to be

is you know how do we do the impossible

as opposed to saying well that's

impossible

walk away can't do it so

i think she's a valuable asset even if

you think all of her ideas are bad

but what's going to happen with the kids

in cages situation

should have some carryover effect to

other democrat stuff

what happens if the let's say

hypothetically

and it looks like it's heading in that

direction let's say the disaster poli

or the immigration policies of the biden

administration

become an un uh unambiguous disaster

so much so that even democrats say oh

this is a disaster it didn't work

what would happen to their other

policies because isn't the main problem

with democrat policies

that they have somewhat lofty objectives

which you might like

you know everybody's doing well and

making money and there's fairness and

equality those things all sound great

who's against any of that but if you

don't know how to get there

that's the problem so i'm thinking that

even the green new deal will suffer

if the immigration thing falls apart

because it will

feel the same immigration has this weird

quality where you say to yourself

wait a minute human nature guarantees

that your plan can't work

and i think people will just take that

thinking to other democrat

policies so i think the democrats are

really in trouble

with immigration not just because of

immigration

here's a question to you

and i'll base this on overhearing

something the other day

i was in a position the other day to

overhear some teens

talking about you know

i'm gonna be as generic as possible

talking about

lifestyle things and you know some

things that would be

in the general social discussion let's

say

and i was blown away

i mean absolutely blown away because

things coming out of the mouths

of young people very unfamiliar

to what i would have heard in my day is

it better or is it worse

probably better probably better because

what i heard was

an insane amount of lack of bigotry

insane like a

kind of an open mindedness that

is just shocking in a good way

it's shockingly healthy

to hear young people with not even a

trace

of what you would have considered i

guess a normal amount of bigotry use

sexism

anti whatever anti this is that it's

really weird

but at the same time the young people

will talk

quite bluntly about ethnicity like

that's very

much on the top of people's thoughts you

know

this group and this but has more to do

with clicks and who's friends with who

and it doesn't seem to be about race it

seems about more about

who's hanging out with who but i'll tell

you if you want to

if you want to feel or as or see the

future

if you want to see the future you got to

listen to kids

talking candidly it's pretty positive

but here's the bigger question i have

could you teach

kids if you get them young to be

politically

independent you could

but would we because you'd be taking

away the parents

responsibility in some sense because you

know you think the parents are the ones

who should determine their

their opinions as opposed to the school

but i wonder if you couldn't teach young

kids

that blindly joining a political party

and assuming that everything that one

party says is right

and everything the other party says is

wrong couldn't you teach them just

that that's always wrong just to prepare

them

for the fact that the other side some

has sometimes is right

i feel as if you could prime them to

make them a little bit more fluid in

later life

about whether they would you know

cross-party lines or

or just be open-minded to stuff so i

know you couldn't teach a kid to be a

republican

or a democrat because that would be way

over the line but couldn't you teach

them how to not

fall into a team mentality

and you don't even have to mention which

team you're talking about just

don't don't make your decisions based on

the team that's it

i think you could we get them young

enough and that seems like that would be

valuable because

most of our current problems are this

team play stuff

um there was an article

on february 21st in wall street journal

by martin

uh koldorf koldorf seems to know what

he's talking about from

john johns hopkins so he's you know a

medical professional from a credible

place

and he's saying that in this article

it's now a few weeks old

that the number of uh coveted cases

that how rapidly it dropped in in

january

can't be explained by the holiday

traffic

now i i had been saying uh duh

infections are down because it's not

christmas anymore

and you could pretty much track the

holidays or the spikes

and then after the holidays things calm

down it's pretty universal

and so i thought it was pretty clear

to me it seemed i could be wrong

but to me it seems really obvious

that the uh traveling for the holidays

is the big

big problem and that when it's done

you would get less of it and it makes

sense to me because i would think

if i were to put the single biggest

variable

it would have to be the amount of time

you spend indoors

with a bad ventilation so i'm not

counting

let's say if you're in africa or india

you always have your windows open

because it's always hot so that's

different but if you're indoors with the

windows closed

it's how many people are coming in and

out and are in close contact

it's probably just that when i say just

is probably

60 of all infections or exactly that

something that happens in your own house

or in a house

so i don't know how the i don't know how

holidays could not be the explanation

of most of the dip but his claim is that

um

the only way to explain it would be if

people have

t cell immunity from related

coronaviruses maybe

or there's way more infection so we have

more demonic

herd immunity than we know what do you

think

do you think that we can just look at

this data

can we just look at the curves and look

at the data

and make the conclusion that

it's t cell immunity

i feel like i feel like that's a little

too far

i feel like we don't have the data to

say that that's the case

but his his case is uh it's an argument

by

uh ruling out the other things so

can you rule out the most obvious thing

which is that holiday travel brought

people together who don't get together

and put them indoors for a long period

of time

so i'm going to say i don't buy it i

don't buy it

i do buy the general notion that there

might be more immunity in the public

than we know

and then it might be a pretty big

variable

but i think the big dip had to be the

holidays i just feel that way

all right we need more yeah need more

information

so apparently uh some more rocket

attacks are happening in iraq

on american military bases

and there was a contractor who died from

a heart attack during an airstrike

so i don't know was it the air strike

that killed him

i guess you could say so and here's the

real question

so now that biden had responded to the

last

attack by iranian surrogates is this

iran

just seeing how far they can push biden

is that what's going on

because if iran is saying oh we'll just

keep pushing

just keep pushing would they have done

this under trump

do you think that iran would have

attacked

a second military base through a proxy

not directly

do you think they would have approved

that attack under trump

i feel as if no but you can't know right

but the thing that trump had going for

him is that he was less predictable

and i feel like we put mr predictable

into the office

and iran is just running with it because

they can predict him

maybe we'll see um

so i guess uh governor cuomo of new york

was stripped of his emergency coveted

powers

uh you know just weeks before they would

have expired anyway

can new york get any dumber i think new

york is just

it seems to be setting new records for

dumbness

because i don't believe that the

governor's emergency powers

were really the problem here was anybody

arguing you know

he did he did ask if he could kiss

that woman two years ago so therefore

he should not have emergency covert

powers

what i feel like new york is just

shooting themselves in the foot

because they're mad at their governor

why would you want to take away his

tools

if you're keeping him in the job yeah

we'd like you to still be

you know in charge but could you do it

with fewer tools

well why would i do it with fewer tools

no reason

it's you know has something to do with a

girl you tried to kiss a woman you tried

to kiss

so how does that make sense it's just

like new york

proving how dumb they are

no matter how mad you are at your

governor all right are you ready for the

most

controversial part of this periscope

are you ready i'm going to bring up a

topic you hate

but i'm going to put a new twist on it

so you should stay for the new twist

all right because it's even new for me

there's a erasmus and poll on what

people

think about uh transgender athletes and

specifically of course everybody's

talking about

um transgender athletes playing

women's sports and

we found that the majority of the public

is against it majority of the public

doesn't favor uh transgender

being able to play on women's sports

teams

and uh so we should go with the majority

right

what do you say live it we live in a

sort of a democracy-ish kind of a place

should we go with the majority

all right well here's something that you

could pull out of these numbers

the rasmussen poll women under 40.

57 favor transgender

athletes playing female sports so the

the category of people who are most

directly affected besides the athletes

the transgender athletes themselves

are women under 40 because they would be

the ones on professional teams

the ones who recently uh recently played

sports you know not that long ago

in high school and college and would

even be having kids

at 40 you know that's the age where your

kids are getting into

athletics early in school and that group

the ones most directly

victimized can i use that word

because that's how it's being spoken i

don't use that word to speak of this

but some people are saying hey what

about that

um that uh biologically born

female athlete who now can't get first

place

because the transgender athlete is just

getting all the medals and winning

everything if the people who are most

affected

are by a strong majority in favor of

doing it

is it any of your business

do you think everybody should have the

same weight

of opinion if there's only one group

that is the

is impacted by it

right should these two people have the

same

vote on this topic there's a there's a

hermit

living in the alaska outback

american citizen so american citizens

get to vote get to have an opinion

but doesn't have a kid it's a man it's a

hermit

living in alaska how is that person

in any way important to this question of

transgender athletes

completely unrelated does that person's

opinion

should account as much as somebody who

is the very

center of the question which is

non-transgender athletes who would be

affected by having

people on the team that are superior

athletes

what is fair so forget about the

question forget about the topic

forget about the the topic being

transgender athletes

just forget about it just as answer the

question in the generic

question if the people who are most

affected

victimized if you want to call it that

say let's do this by a strong majority

this is a strong majority

right it's overwhelming

shouldn't they get what they want what

what

why is it the hermit in alaska who gets

an equal vote

somebody says stop all right you're

going to go away

rose you don't get to be here anymore

um a hide user on this channel okay

you're gone

now again uh i'm open to any counter

arguments i like counter arguments and

in fact

this is weird but i enjoy being proven

wrong

because i think it makes this better you

know the the thing i do

anytime i can be proven wrong and and

it's confirmed

that's kind of exciting to me because i

don't i don't feel any shame from that

i feel like everybody's wrong so if you

can learn something

good all right so my only thing i'm

going to add to that is

although legally everybody gets the same

vote in this country we don't want to

change that

sometimes you should look at who's

affected

right and to me that matters all right

aoc is making more news by saying the

minimum wage

should be raised of course but i want to

show you her

argument style all right

so here's a tweet and we'll we'll talk

about whether the minimum

rate wage should be raised but that's

going to be separate here i'm just going

to talk about her

her technique her persuasion okay so i

told you i try to teach you something

every

live stream and here we're going to

learn from aoc's technique the same way

we would learn from trump's

persuasion technique here's the tweet

aoc says

it is utterly embarrassing that quote

pay people enough to live

is a stance that's even up for debate

override the parliamentarian and raise

the wage

so she's asking her own party to act

differently asking

biden and uh and harris to override this

uh mcdonald's workers in denmark are

paid twenty two dollars an hour plus six

weeks paid vacation

fifteen 15 an hour which is what she

wants in this country

is a deep compromise a big one

considering the phase-in

i mean considering you don't even get

the 15 for a number of years

now let's talk about her her technique

i love starting out with it's utterly

embarrassing

because she's taken an economic question

and moved it directly into

feelings if you're going to influence

somebody you want to go for the fields

because they'll always argue you on the

data

if she made her argument entirely upon

data

people would just argue the data they'd

say well you don't know that and

can't be sure that's it so arguing with

data would have no

real value so she doesn't

that that's what makes her you know a

little bit better than

other politicians she doesn't do the

thing that won't work in terms of

persuasion

then she says that to pay people enough

to live is a stance that's even up for

debate

that is really really good framing

even if you don't agree with her point

we're not talking about the politics of

the policy

but uh that's just so well said

i mean it's just framed with perfect

persuasion

and then she goes on saying what she

would like to be done

again perfect persuasion your persuasion

is useless

if you make a point and don't have a

specific thing you're asking for

so she makes her point goes right to the

specific request

again perfect form and then she says

that

then she does the comparison thing where

you make a big first

ask so that whatever you're asking for

sounds not so bad

so she uses the denmark comparison

because 22 is such a big number when

you're only talking about raising it to

15

that your brain starts to say wait a

minute denmark's at 22

and and the country is now falling apart

denmark's doing okay

15 doesn't sound so bad don't get ahead

of me don't get ahead of me

i know what you're going to do i'll get

there i'll get there

it's not all good so i read that i

thought

well that's pretty good argument now for

background

aoc has a background in economics a lot

of people don't understand that

in college he she actually has an

economics degree

as do i i have a degree in economics in

an mba

and if you were to ask me scott forget

about the morality part

forget about the morality just does this

work

economically because

the things you're looking at is you're

not just raising

you know somebody's pay is coming out of

somebody's pocket

so how many businesses will go on a

business how many fewer employees can be

employed because now you can't afford as

many of them

how do you do the math and figure out

what works

now wouldn't you say scott every time

you depart from the free market

and you put the government in there you

get a worse result

how many of you believe that in the

comments tell me

is that the fair thing to say there's a

good general statement

that whenever you remove the free market

and insert

government control that's never good

right never good

well if you believe that why do we have

a minimum wage

now

why do we have a minimum wage now do you

know

i wasn't i can't remember specifically

but don't you think

that whenever the minimum wage was put

in place

or the minimum wage was raised don't you

think we had this same argument every

time

was it right the last time do you

remember when they raised the minimum

wage to what it is now and then the

economy

fell apart it didn't

it didn't it's the same argument that we

know

wasn't true before we don't have to

guess

we know because the minimum wage has

been raised before

and and the country survived now did it

cost people jobs yes of course

did some businesses probably go out of

business yeah the ones that were so weak

so weak they couldn't afford to do this

were those businesses going to last

were those the businesses were paying a

lot of taxes

no they couldn't have been paying a lot

of taxes because they didn't have enough

margin

to even give their employees a raise so

you have you have two arguments here and

they're both

pretty good and they're on different

sides

the pretty good argument against raising

it is

free markets are better you won't get

people coming into the market who would

only take those low jobs

they couldn't get a better one so you're

not training people

yeah so the argument against it is

completely solid completely

i mean it's you know human motivation is

very

predictable there will be fewer people

hired

in in the short run but on the other

hand

the aoc argument is there are plenty of

cases

where people argue this same thing was

going to happen

and it didn't we just adjusted

we just adjusted somehow

so here i am sitting here with

uh two degrees

that should allow me to answer this

question and have a

like a really smart opinion that it's a

good idea

or that it's a bad idea to raise the

minimum wage

i don't do you

you've watched me for a long time and i

honestly don't know

if this is a good idea or a bad idea and

i

don't even know how you check because i

wouldn't believe anybody's

prediction would you would would you

believe anybody's

economic projection of what would happen

if we did it i wouldn't

because the one thing i do know is that

i wouldn't trust any economic prediction

would you and if you don't trust the

experts

what are you going on what are you going

on

all right but here's the punchline to

the whole thing

while it is a tremendously good

persuasion play

to say that denmark has 22 dollars an

hour and all this

paid vacation and stuff uh it took about

a minute

for somebody to come into the comments

and say

denmark doesn't have a minimum wage

the whole thing is denmark

doesn't have

a state mandated minimum wage

they just don't have one so the whole

argument is just completely

but did it work

yeah yeah it works really well as an

argument it works really well

it works as well as president trump

saying

you know your your tv won't work when

the windmills

stop turning right it's not exactly

the most honest argument in the world

but you get the point

right you get the point so it's the same

technique

all right so just as

president trump uh did not pass a lot of

the fact checking

but yet he was amazingly like good

at persuading and the things that he

persuaded toward were also good

i can't even think of an exception right

i mean arguably i can't think of any

exception so i don't mind

that trump you know plays fast and loose

with the facts as long as the direction

he's going

is quite obviously a good direction for

the country and a lot of people's

opinion

that's fair aoc is doing the same um

here's a question for you

um well actually let's let's talk about

dr seuss

how many of you have now seen the

so-called offensive

uh racially offensive dr seuss

drawings it's been in the news for a

while

that there are some dr seuss books with

racially offensive drawings how many of

you

have seen them because i'll bet you all

have opinions don't you

how many of you have seen them i have

now seen them

thanks to a tweet by joel

and it's the only place i've seen them i

haven't seen them

anywhere else except one tweet pointing

to a blog article

and that was you know joel pollock who

pointed to the article he didn't write

the article

and i'm looking at your answers and i

only see

one person says they've seen them but

you all have opinions don't you

oh some number if you've seen them so

for those who hadn't seen them and then

you did

did it change your opinion did you get a

different opinion after you looked at

them

i did i did let me tell you what my

first thought was

we we weren't being shown the pictures

and that led me to believe that maybe

they weren't that bad

because if they were that bad wouldn't

they just show them

because the media leans left right so if

they were really that bad

i feel like we would definitely would

have seen them so i was

i was biased toward thinking there's

probably nothing there it's probably

imagination and you're you're reading

into it a little bit

and then i looked at them

they're pretty bad by today's standards

by today's standards pretty bad

pretty bad by the standards of when they

were drawn

not at all not at all i mean if you put

it back in its

historical context i don't even know if

anybody would have even raised

an eyebrow the the most

i'll describe them for you so there are

three images i saw in particular one was

some probably a middle eastern um

i imagine an islamic guy riding a camel

wearing sort of traditional look and

having

you know a cartoon face that looks

caricaturish

of the region not too bad

i would say i would say on that one if

that had been the worst one

i would say give it a pass because

really it looked like more they were

trying to get the clothing right

it didn't look like i don't know is

riding a camel

somehow an insult if people actually

ride camels and it's a thing i don't

know

that one didn't look bad then i looked

at the next one

it was some uh characters drawn as

chinese characters

that looked like a fu manchu you know

with robes and

you know little facial hair that you

would see in some stereotype

and they were carrying on their head i

think there were three or four of them

they were carrying on their heads as if

they were porters you know carry things

on their heads

a big cage with some dr seuss animal but

then at the top

the top of the cage was this drawing of

a little

white hunter so

you've got the the chinese characters

carrying on their head a cage of an

animal and on top of it

the white guy

not so good but if you take it back in

time

who was it who were the porters if you

went to china

and you organized an expedition who

would be carrying the stuff

chinese citizens right so if you just

put it in its context

it's actually what it would look like if

you don't

factor in that he made all the chinese

characters look

um let's say stereotypical of that day

and not in a good way so that what i

would say was

was a problem yeah i i could see how

somebody would say yeah let's

let's let's this is a little marginal

let's uh

get rid of this one but then the third

one showed some uh

black characters from africa carrying

some other dr seuss

character and then i get a little bit

more of a problem

the black characters may i

may i use an offensive word if i tell

you that there's no

offensive intention okay so what i'm

gonna say

next will sound defensive but it's not

my intention

so intention matters more than words or

they should

i'm just gonna say it all right

he drew the black characters to look

like monkeys

all right now if that doesn't offend you

i don't know what would i mean that's

about as offensive as you can get

now was he thinking that

when he drew them or is it just an

artifact from his drawing style

which is it just fell out that way but

he wasn't thinking of it in any way like

that

it's a problem now i said before that

the easiest way to solve it would just

be

find find a black cartoonist and just

say hey do us a favor

can you redraw these so that we can tell

they're african

natives but they don't seem offensive to

you

just just give us a hand i mean if you

looked at like the whole body of

dr seuss works they're only just a few

pictures

why don't we just have the people who

are most you know

the victim of that characterization

have them you know take a shot at it

just redraw it annotate it make sure

everybody can see the original

and tell them why you changed it i don't

think it's a big problem

i think it's easy to solve just have a

little bit of

technique just get the right person

involved it's just

it literally would be one drawing out of

a whole book

no big deal i wouldn't lose the original

though

um here's a provocative

sexist hypothesis from user

novicus on twitter and i'll try to

characterize the claim is that the

societies

that have the most gender equality are

also the most ethically

and morally superior so it's a two-part

opinion do you agree with the first part

that societies that have the most uh um

gender equality are

and it's not a coincidence that they're

more ethically and morally superior

do you buy that might be an opinion

social opinion sort of thing but i do

that's that's you

i would say observationally that feels

about right doesn't

i've seen a lot of people say no

i don't think that the people saying no

have a bad argument

by the way but i'm a little surprised

that there is many no's

oh interesting okay all right but let me

just finish the point so this is not my

point i'm just putting it out there

that wherever you have more women with

more equality there's more

moral superiority but it's also the

reason you're doomed

it's also the reason you're doomed

because the country with the most

morality and equality

will be the weakest country in terms of

homeland defense

that all of those things that make you

ethically and morally superior

put you in peril right because

if you want to be protected

you want the person on your side who's

the worst person in the world

you don't want the ethically and morally

appropriate warriors on your side you

want the ones who will burn the village

right i mean you wouldn't say it out

loud

but if you had a choice between your

country being destroyed and you being

killed

or your military people

might be kind of bad ass might kill a

little bit more than you expected

might take more chances might do a lot

of things that maybe you wouldn't think

are a good idea

but maybe you need that see the trouble

is that

the more dangerous you are

the more likely uh even if you lose nine

out of ten times

if you're the more dangerous one you

only have to win that one time

and then you're in charge so

somebody says that's why sweden is in

bad shape i don't know if that can be

proven by any data but i do think this

is an interesting point

that the nicer you are as a society the

more vulnerable you are to

societies that are not as nice now the

way

novak has put it is that they are male

dominated societies

if you look at russia male dominated

china

male dominated those are two biggest

problems

and would those male-dominated cultures

produce let's say let's take china for

example

we believe that china is doing all these

terrible things

to us from shipping as fentanyl to

stealing our ip to spying to gathering

our dna

to all these things would china be doing

all of those things if they had a gender

gender equal society with women in

charge as much as men

would they do all those things what do

you think

what do you think would would

china be as aggressive if they had

gender equality

i feel like they would be less

aggressive and that

there's something to this hypothesis

so anyway i just put that out there it's

very sexist

but it does match it matches observation

even if my observation is so biased that

i can't see

i can't see it clearly somebody says the

ccp

is not china yeah that's that's a fair

statement

but the communist party is male

dominated so

that's the point um

they have 100 million excess men

somebody says

do they um

china has no diversity on their

corporate boards of directors

um in the future

yeah all right so that's all i got for

today

and i will talk to you tomorrow

all right youtubers um

yeah it's from the one child family rule

i guess

swedes get paid five weeks vacation

somebody says um

why do i always wear the same shirt uh

i i do this in my pajamas so the the the

shirt you see is the shirt that i wore

to bed

so i i'm always in my pajamas

i can prove it

pajamas and i'm always barefoot

so um i i've created this entire

show which now has you know national uh

prominence

and i've never once worn uh pants

i mean i have i have pajamas on and i've

never done it in my shoes

so i like a job that you can do in your

pajamas

without shoes

and make a lot of money now i'm not

making a lot of money

but it is monetized

um yeah this is the best way to do a

show

do i still go on other people's podcasts

not at the moment

the i'll confess something to you right

now

the enjoyment i get and then doing this

and also the content i do for

locals which is a subscription site

where i put a lot of my content

that you don't get to see um i

enjoy that so much that my cartooning

it's just hard for me to do it like it's

30 years of drawing these same

characters it's really hard now to make

myself sit down and do it one more time

which is what i have to do today and

uh i'm way behind deadline

or i'm too close to the deadline

actually so i've got to get ahead on

deadlines it's going to take me a few

months

and that's all um

will you have on jovan pulitzer no

no there's a certain type of guest that

i'll never have on

and that's anybody who can make a claim

that i don't know enough about

to ask the right questions and he would

be in that category

what school of economics did you learn i

wouldn't say it was a school of

economics i just have a degree in

economics so we

we got to see a lot of stuff

um

all right that's all for now and i will

talk to you later