Episode 1539 Scott Adams - How to Solve the Supply Chain Problem, Inappropriate Alec Baldwin Jokes
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: ----------- - Best Cornholio memes of Biden - Alec Baldwin didn't confirm gun was empty? - Let's Get Biden To Quit....LGBTQ - Ryan Peterson, CEO of Flexport on supply chain bottleneck - Whiteboard: What to do with all the empty containers - Enes Kanter, a citizen doing our governments job ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
Well, today will be interesting, won't it? Yes, it will, because it turns out this is far too glaringly white, isn't it? Too glaringly white. We're going to use this in a minute, but let's get it out of my way for now. All right. So congratulations to all of you for showing up at the best place in…
View segment →ow it's the best thing in all of those worlds. Yes. And if you'd like to take it up a level, all you need is a copper mug or glass, a tankard, chalice or stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled plea…
View segment →t the shipping containers. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now. Go. Ahhh. Well, in no particular order, my favorite story of the day. I saw Erica—you all know Erica, right? Erica tweeted this. Apparently at a Louisiana high school there was a violent week of fighting at the high s…
View segment →seem to be Black somehow mattered, but it doesn't matter. The story doesn't require it, but somehow it adds flavor to the story or something. I guess maybe this is the angle on that that makes it a little special. It's just a great solution. Maybe we can see more of it. I don't know. Actor Peter S…
View segment →a conversation. And so you pretend that when he tries out, he auditions, that he's actually just having a conversation with you. He's not actually auditioning. So it goes like this. You know, you'll be, "Hey, what do you think of this? You know, interested in this role?" You make conversation and s…
View segment →note, but you wouldn't ask him to do it again. He would have to volunteer to do it again. So this whole weird etiquette of how to deal with different levels of celebrity. You just can't ask him to audition. He's got to volunteer. Anyway, he didn't get the job, but I will tell you he was very talent…
View segment →n the ski slope. The jet pack was good. Did you see the jet pack one? Lifting off on the jet pack. The riding a tiny horse. He had the reins in his hands. He's on top of a miniature horse. Very good. Very good. And of course Cornholio was my favorite. Did I miss one? The llama. Oh, was there a Homer…
View segment →don't trust? Everyone. Everyone. There's no exception. If the Pope hands you a gun and says "Don't worry, it's not loaded," check it. Check it. Because you don't know the Pope is telling you the truth. Don't take a chance. So somehow they can write that story without mentioning the most basic gun s…
View segment →enjoy the jokes? What do you think? Where do you stand on that? My take is I can't help it. I feel like it's beyond my control. If something's funny, I laugh at it. And I don't know how many of you have the same feeling, but the thing that makes these jokes make you laugh is that they're so deeply…
View segment →d trust anybody's opinion on this because people have been so wrong about inflation and stagflation and national debt. We don't even know what national debt is. We don't even know what it is. Like just the most basic stuff about the economy, I don't think anybody knows. And the problem is that there…
View segment →he year. But if we're in January and we've got these antivirals—I don't know if they can produce enough of them fast enough—but if we had them in January, what would be the argument for any ongoing restrictions? Now the argument of course is to reduce deaths, but if you can reduce them by 50 percen…
View segment →t hauling containers out of Long Beach to other smaller ports that aren't backed up. Now this is not a comprehensive list. So as I said, think in terms of all the different ways that you can get rid of the empties. Don't get obsessed by these specific suggestions. But he does make the case that you…
View segment →pipe than containers. But here's the only question that I ask, is this: Could you create a situation with a heat chimney on a hill—because it's easier to build it on a hill because you don't need to support it. You know, laying something down on the ground is easier than building a structure a mile…
View segment →tell you just a little that actor's story. So the reason I was invited to be on the show as sort of a guest character was because I'd said it was my favorite show at the time. So they liked it. I said that in public, so they invited me to be on as a character. Yeah, Jerry Doyle was the name of the…
View segment →o imagine there's something wrong with the speaker. And sophistry is one of those words you could just throw in there because you don't have to defend it. Well, I don't have to defend it. It's just sophistry. Soporific is the word. Oh, I lost you on the heat chimney stuff. I remember the heat chimn…
View segment →Well, today will be interesting, won't it? Yes, it will, because it turns out this is far too glaringly white, isn't it? Too glaringly white. We're going to use this in a minute, but let's get it out of my way for now.
All right. So congratulations to all of you for showing up at the best place in the entire metaverse. Yeah, yeah, this used to be the best place in the world, but then Facebook announced that it was going to create infinite new metaverse worlds in virtual reality and AR, and now we know it's the best thing in all of those worlds.
Yes. And if you'd like to take it up a level, all you need is a copper mug or glass, a tankard, chalice or stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better except the shipping containers. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now. Go.
Ahhh.
Well, in no particular order, my favorite story of the day. I saw Erica—you all know Erica, right? Erica tweeted this. Apparently at a Louisiana high school there was a violent week of fighting at the high school, and a bunch of dads got together to basically help out at the school. So this volunteer group of dads—I'm looking at a meme of me as Cornholio. That's happening over in Locals right now.
So the Dads on Duty, they put their little shirts on. They say "Dads on Duty," and they go hang out with the kids. And it turns out the kids kind of like it, which is weird. I'm not sure the reporting is all accurate, but it looks like the students appreciated having some adult, dad-like figures. And the funny part of the story is that the dads were just making dad jokes, and the kids were laughing at the dad jokes. But it just changed the vibe of the school and apparently made a big difference.
So kudos to Dads on Duty. If you saw this story, I feel like this is one of those weird periods in history right now. If you saw the visual of the story, all the dads are African-American, and they're all big guys too. They're just really big guys. And I feel like I had to mention that even though it's not relevant to the story. Like we're in that weird time where the fact that all the dads involved seem to be Black somehow mattered, but it doesn't matter. The story doesn't require it, but somehow it adds flavor to the story or something.
I guess maybe this is the angle on that that makes it a little special. It's just a great solution. Maybe we can see more of it. I don't know.
Actor Peter Scolari passed away at age 66 from cancer. I have a Peter Scolari story. One of the weird things about my life is I just end up meeting a lot of people who end up being in the news. And years ago when I was doing a Dilbert TV show, we were casting for the talent for the various Dilbert parts. And just the interesting thing I learned that involved Peter Scolari, because he was one of the people who—well, I can't use the word "tried out" for the part, and that's the point of the story.
So apparently in Hollywood there are three levels of actors. At the bottom level, the people who are new to the game—I see you all fighting you naked. I saw your comment. So the three levels of celebrities. I learned this when I was working there. At the bottom level they have to audition for every role because they're not famous. Nobody knows them. You just have to audition or you're not going to get the job.
At the next level up you still need to audition, but you're a little bit famous or even a lot famous, and they don't want to call it an audition. So you do a fake audition, but you call it a meeting. And so Peter Scolari was already quite successful from Bosom Buddies and other stuff. And so when his name came up and we invited him in to—I think he was trying for the role of the Dilbert voice, if I recall—and you have to do this whole thing where you pretend you're not actually doing an interview. You just have a conversation.
And so you pretend that when he tries out, he auditions, that he's actually just having a conversation with you. He's not actually auditioning. So it goes like this. You know, you'll be, "Hey, what do you think of this? You know, interested in this role?" You make conversation and stuff. And at some point the actor will say, "Yeah, you know, let me look at this. Were you looking for something like..." He'll do a voice. He'll do a take. And you'll say, "Yeah, yeah, that's pretty good. Well, we're thinking about that. Maybe a little more serious or something." Maybe give him a note, but you wouldn't ask him to do it again. He would have to volunteer to do it again.
So this whole weird etiquette of how to deal with different levels of celebrity. You just can't ask him to audition. He's got to volunteer. Anyway, he didn't get the job, but I will tell you he was very talented. The people who were successful professional actors and actresses—I'm not even sure if you use "actors" anymore—they could do different takes on the same character, and other people couldn't. And it was fascinating to watch.
So somebody like a Peter Scolari could come in and give you one kind of vibe, and then you'd say, "Well, make this change," and they could give you a whole different vibe for the voice. And others just couldn't do it. They could do ten versions of the same voice. So there is a difference between those who can act and those who can't. And I will say Peter Scolari had it. He had the gift, and I got to see it live, and it was a treat.
And by the way, at the top level of stardom you don't ask them to do anything. You just offer them the part, right? If it's Tom Cruise, you just offer them the part.
The best Biden memes that we saw coming out of the strange behavior where Biden's hands were in front of him like Beavis and Butthead and Cornholio. I don't know how many you saw, but the ones I liked were the meme where somebody put ski poles in his hands, put him on the ski slope. The jet pack was good. Did you see the jet pack one? Lifting off on the jet pack. The riding a tiny horse. He had the reins in his hands. He's on top of a miniature horse. Very good. Very good. And of course Cornholio was my favorite. Did I miss one? The llama. Oh, was there a Homer? Or the ice cream cones. That was actually my idea. He was holding two ice cream cones, and somebody photoshopped that in there. Holding corn dogs. I absolutely love this era where you can turn something into a video or visual meme in an hour. Oh yeah, the Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robots. That was a good one too.
All right, those are all good. What else is happening?
So CNN is covering the Alec Baldwin story and has a big article about it. And I guess we learned today that allegedly the prop person handed Alec Baldwin this gun and announced that it was quote "a cold gun." Now a cold gun in the lingo of the business means it's not loaded. And then allegedly—and this part is unclear—it looks like Alec Baldwin might have aimed it at somebody, but I don't know that that's true. I think that was debunked. So we've got some sort of conflicting stories. It's unclear if it was intentionally aimed at anybody even in jest or it just went off accidentally in some way.
Now here's the part where I had to be in the comments here. You know exactly where I'm going on this. CNN does this story without ever mentioning that it shouldn't have made any difference what the prop person said. Are you with me? Anybody with the smallest ounce of common sense or gun training, you know, gun safety training—you don't take somebody's word for it that a gun is unloaded. Is there anything more basic than that?
Do you know who I don't believe if they hand me a gun and tell me it's not loaded? Do you know who I don't trust? Everyone. Everyone. There's no exception. If the Pope hands you a gun and says "Don't worry, it's not loaded," check it. Check it. Because you don't know the Pope is telling you the truth. Don't take a chance.
So somehow they can write that story without mentioning the most basic gun safety facts: that it shouldn't have mattered who made that mistake. There were ten ways for the accident not to happen, and all of them involved just normal common sense. So I don't think we can let anybody off the hook by saying "Oh, he didn't know it was loaded." That doesn't count. Sorry. No credit for "didn't know it was loaded."
My favorite joke so far in the totally inappropriate category. Let me give you a test. Are we adult enough that we can handle the contradiction that I think most of us genuinely see this as—I hope—a real tragedy with real people who really will have to suffer forever? The survivors will have to suffer forever the loss of their loved one, and of course the deaths themselves. So it's a tragedy, and as humans we need to point that out. But are we not allowed to enjoy the jokes? What do you think? Where do you stand on that?
My take is I can't help it. I feel like it's beyond my control. If something's funny, I laugh at it. And I don't know how many of you have the same feeling, but the thing that makes these jokes make you laugh is that they're so deeply inappropriate. Am I right? If they were not deeply inappropriate, would they really be funny? No.
So in many ways I'm giving you an out, right? So somebody accuses you of laughing at these jokes, here's your out. They're funny because they're inappropriate. It's true, right? It's the inappropriateness, the fact that it's a tragedy. That's why you're laughing. If it were not deeply inappropriate, you wouldn't have two things in sort of atom balance, which is what triggers the reflex to laugh.
So I'm going to give you permission to enjoy this, but maybe not right in front of the victims or their families, okay? I hope they're staying off the internet today.
But Wendy Rogers, who's an Arizona state senator, had the tweet of the day in my opinion. Now what I like about this tweet is it's coming from somebody who's not a professional humorist who somehow crafted a perfect joke. Okay, so a non-professional, Wendy Rogers, somehow crafted a perfect tweet. You want to hear it? Of course you do.
Here's her tweet: "Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney, and Alec Baldwin go hunting. How does that play out?" Come on, that's pretty clever. That's pretty funny.
Now here's what I liked about it. The ending, "How does that play out?" is perfect just in terms of joke construction. Because—and this is basically where hypnosis and humor overlap—what is beautiful about this punchline is the question "How does that play out?" allows you to imagine your funniest version. That's a hypnosis trick. Now I doubt she's studied hypnosis, but leaving stuff out so that the audience can fill in the joke is really good form.
Now I don't know if she's just really good at this, Wendy Rogers, or if she just hit one out of the park, lucky swing. But this is a perfect joke. I looked at this. I read this like five times. I was like, God, there's not one wasted word in that sentence. There's nothing you could change in that that would make that better.
Anyway, so we've got some runaway inflation, it looks like. Or do we? Does anybody understand how inflation works? Is anybody old enough here—and I know some of you are—do you remember stagflation? Remember in the Jimmy Carter years we had stagflation, and then all the experts said, "Whoa, now we know what stagflation is, and we know what conditions will cause it in the future." And then those conditions happened again in the future, and what happened? No stagflation.
So we don't even know what caused it, apparently. Well, I mean, I don't, because we were pretty sure that it was going to happen again, and then it just didn't. Now of course there are lots of variables in play, so you have to have all the other things lined up to get the same result, and we didn't.
Now how good are we at predicting economic stuff? Not really good. Are we? That doesn't mean it's not a problem. What it does mean is I can't tell right now. And I remind you too often I have a degree in economics. I don't know if we're in trouble or not, and I'm not sure I would trust anybody's opinion on this because people have been so wrong about inflation and stagflation and national debt. We don't even know what national debt is. We don't even know what it is. Like just the most basic stuff about the economy, I don't think anybody knows. And the problem is that there are just so many variables, right?
So something could happen with a war, a shortage, some kind of bottleneck thing. Nobody—I don't think anybody saw the supply chain thing coming. Maybe they did. I don't know. But I guess my only takeaway on the runaway inflation, hyperinflation risk, is we don't really know. Maybe. Maybe.
All right. Britain, it looks like they're first in line to get these new antivirals, the therapeutics coming to us from Pfizer and Merck. So there would be pills that you take. They could reduce the risk of mild to moderately ill people, reduce their risk of serious hospitalization and death by 50 percent. To which I say, if you can reduce the winter surge by 50 percent—and again, other people saying we already have therapeutics. Yeah, we've already got Regeneron, et cetera.
Given all the ways that we've learned to treat COVID, given the fact that our most vulnerable are mostly vaccinated, given the fact that the people most likely to die, a lot of them already died, I feel like the argument for keeping any restrictions in place really just became irrational, didn't they? At least after the pills are available. So they're not available yet. Maybe the end of the year. But if we're in January and we've got these antivirals—I don't know if they can produce enough of them fast enough—but if we had them in January, what would be the argument for any ongoing restrictions?
Now the argument of course is to reduce deaths, but if you can reduce them by 50 percent, isn't that going to be enough? I mean, we keep doing things that reduce the risk by 50 percent. How many times do you have to cut it in half before you're okay? They've been irrational for a while.
Long-term effects unknown. Correct. Long-term effects of the antiviral drugs unknown. Long-term effects of getting COVID unknown.
Hey, I have a question for you. I'm just going to put this out there. So we keep hearing about all of the so-called long-haul COVID problems. So people get COVID, and let's say they have a bad case of it, but then for weeks or months they have symptoms. I'm just going to put this out there because the range of symptoms seem pretty broad.
Have you ever had a surgery? So I've had three surgeries, none of them super major, right? I had a couple of nasal things, etc., some polyps in my sinus. And so none of them were major surgeries, but each of them required anesthesia. How long does it take you to recover from anesthesia in surgery? And I don't mean that day. I mean how many months? Have you ever had a minor surgery? It takes months, doesn't it, to feel right even after your problem is completely solved? You know, whatever the actual cutting was about of the surgery, there's something like a fog that somebody says like a year.
Right now last year, or actually during the pandemic, I had some surgery that was delayed for months and months and months. Many of you know the story. Had some sinus polyps that needed to be removed, and so the surgery was delayed. And part of that delay put me on prednisone. So I got on prednisone for a period, and then I thought I was going to go from that. And the prednisone reduces the polyps in the meantime until you can get the surgery. Then the surgery got cancelled, delayed. So I got on prednisone again, a second dose within a year, which is sort of a lot because getting off prednisone is kind of a problem. And then I had it a third time. So I believe if I'm remembering right there were three separate extended periods of prednisone.
It took me months to be able to walk upstairs after I got off prednisone. Months. And I was in good shape, right? I mean I was a gym rat. And just the prednisone—it wasn't even the illness, and it wasn't even the surgery. But just getting off prednisone, if you have too much of it, it's months. Like I would get to the top of the stairs and I'd be like, "Ah." Now it's fine. I can run upstairs easily now.
Prednisone is a steroid, right? Don't you get prednisone when you get COVID? Isn't that a pretty normal prescription? Am I right about that? And if you get prednisone, do you get it long enough that you have the problem I had? Because I don't think they give it to you that long, right? Because I was on it for a few weeks I think each time. Yeah.
So here's my question. How many of what people are reporting to be long COVID, you know, months-long symptoms—how many of those symptoms are caused by the treatment or just recovering from a bad illness in general? If something just knocks you on your ass, whatever it is—it could be just a bad regular flu—don't you have lasting issues from that? Like a few weeks later you've still got some problems. I don't know. I'll just put that out there that a lot of the reported long-haul might be just the trauma of the experience itself.
All right. Let's go Brandon.
All right, I need a little help here. A little help. I would like to employ the global brain, calling on all viewers to be part of a single intelligence. I'm going to set you up, and then your global brain will be unleashed, right?
Have you noticed—and this is not my original observation—that "Let's Go Brandon" starts with L-G-B as in LGBTQ? Can we think of the T in the Q so that "Let's Go Brandon Total Quality" or something? I don't know. I just feel like there's some way to make a meme or a joke out of this, you know, with being respectful of course to the LGBTQ community. Don't want to insult them unnecessarily. But it's a weird coincidence, isn't it?
Oh, there it is. Somebody already has it. The show. There's already a T-shirt. LGBT. Let's Go Brandon. Team. Let's Go Brandon Teachers Quit. Totally Quit. All right, I'm looking at your take. Qualudes. Let's Go Brandon to Quantico. Too Quantico. Okay, I didn't quit. Let's Get Brandon to Quit. There we go. Let's Get Brandon to Quit. That's it. Oh, it's already a shirt. It's already a shirt. I'm seeing a video of it here on the Locals platform, so you can't see it here on YouTube, but over on the Locals platform they're posting pictures of it. Yeah. Let's Get Biden to Quit. Actually says "Let's Get Biden to Quit."
All right. Here's a segment I call "Citizens Doing the Work of Governments." You ready for this? Citizens doing the work of governments.
So what's our big problem? It's the supply chain, as you know. And I'm going to read you a tweet thread because I want to see where you see an example of a citizen solving—maybe we don't know if it's a solution yet, but certainly it looks like leadership from citizens as opposed to government.
Now the question is who's in charge of the supply chain problem? Biden? Buttigieg? Anybody? We don't know. But Ryan Peterson, private citizen and CEO of Flexport, who is in the business of logistics and stuff for shipping. All right, so here's somebody who's a CEO of a shipping logistics entity and so therefore has an understanding of the big picture, right?
So Ryan Peterson tweets the following, and I'm going to read the whole tweet if you don't mind, because normally I would summarize it, but I don't want to get anything wrong. And I think that this is important not only because you can see a citizen doing the work of government here basically, but you'll get the whole little picture. I'll just read it.
All right, so this was tweeted yesterday by Ryan Peterson, CEO of Flexport. He says, "Yesterday I rented a boat and took the leader of one of Flexport's partners in Long Beach on a three-hour tour of the port complex. Here's a thread about what I learned."
All right, so the first part is he went in person, right? He didn't read the internet. He went in person to talk to the people at the port.
All right, so I keep asking, can anybody explain what the problem is? And nobody can, right? Have you noticed that nobody can explain what the freaking problem is exactly? They think it's drivers and all kinds of stuff. Well, here's what he found out.
Okay, he goes to the port. He goes, the ports—I guess we went to two of them—the ports of LA and Long Beach are at a standstill. In a full three-hour loop through the port complex, passing every single terminal, we saw less than a dozen containers get unloaded. So in three hours they only saw fewer than 12 containers get unloaded. Okay, so did you think it was about trucks? All right, we'll keep going.
There are hundreds of cranes. I counted only seven that were even operating, and they seemed to be going pretty slowly. So it's not cranes. Got lots of cranes. Okay. It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers. And he'll say later that's mostly empty ones, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It's a true traffic jam.
Because it says right now if you have a chassis—so that would be the truck with nothing on it, with no empty container on it—you can go pick up containers at any port terminal. However, if you have an empty container on that chassis, they're not allowing you to return it except on highly restricted basis. Meaning the government. Here it is. Government problem.
If you can't get the empty off the chassis, you don't have a chassis to go back and pick up the next container. And if nobody goes to pick up the next container, the port remains jammed. Ask yourself, have you heard anything like this until now? All of the news you've read, all the people speculating—has anybody told you this? It's the first time I heard it. I'll go on.
With the yards so full, carriers slash terminals are being highly restrictive on where and when they will accept empties. So I guess you can bring the empty to the yard also. Containers are not fungible between carriers, meaning one carrier can't use somebody else's container. So the truckers have to drop their empty off at the right terminal. This is causing empty containers to pile up.
This one trucking partner alone has 450 containers sitting on chassis right now. 450 trucks they can't use that are perfectly good trucks, presumably with drivers, and they can't use them because they have empty containers on them and no place to put them because of government regulations. You see where this is going.
All right. This is a trucking company with six yards that represent 153 owner-operator drivers. So he has almost three containers sitting on chassis at his yard for every driver on the team. He can't take the containers off the chassis because he's not allowed by the city of Long Beach zoning code to store empty containers more than two high in his truck yard.
This was tweeted yesterday. Today the mayor of Long Beach just announced that they're going to allow them to pile the containers more than two high. So this government regulation that looks like it was at least in Long Beach—so we don't know about LA yet—but it looks like they'll pile them high. With the chassis all tied up storing empties, they can't be returned to the port. There are no chassis available. Blah blah.
And with all the containers piling up in the terminal yard, the longshoremen can't unload the ships, right? So they're literally just too many empties. They just can't unload the ships. And so the queue grows longer. Now over 70 ships containing 500,000 containers are waiting offshore. The line is going to get longer, not shorter. This is a negative feedback loop. You know, so the worse it gets, the worse it gets, I guess.
All right. How do we fix this? So now he talks about solutions. Now when I talk about the solutions and when Ryan Peterson talks about the solutions, here's the attitude you should take toward it. Not necessarily that this is the exact solution, but directionally. Okay? So if you can tell yourself this is a directional area to go, you won't get too wound up about the details of it.
He said what we can do that's fast—basically he says when you're designing an operation you must choose your bottleneck. So here's a design note. You have to choose your bottleneck. If the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't choose it, you aren't running an operation. It's running you.
So he's saying it's poorly designed by its nature. You should always choose the most capital-intensive part of the line to be your bottleneck. Now he doesn't explain that, but capital intensive presumably means it's easier to flex your capital. In other words, get more money than it is to get more people or more anything else. I'm guessing that's what it means.
In a port that's the ship-to-shore cranes. The cranes should never be unable to run because they're waiting for another part. So the most capital-intensive part is the cranes, and they're not running. So that means it's not a well-designed system. So the bottleneck right now is not the cranes. It's the yard space. So we've got to get rid of those empties.
All right. And he says that. And here's somebody who knows what they're talking about, right? So he knows systems, and he knows this industry. So listen to this advice. In operations, when a bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't design for it—so in other words it's not in the crane area because they designed for it, I guess—you must overwhelm the bottleneck. Overwhelm the bottleneck. In other words, you don't want to peck away at it. You need to basically just drop everything and throw everything at the bottleneck.
Okay, so how do you do that? He suggests an executive order—in other words Biden—effective immediately overriding the zoning rules in Long Beach and Los Angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high. Looks like we got that 24 hours later. I don't know if this is just because of Ryan's involvement, but I do know that the government heard about his tweet the day he tweeted. So I made sure that at least some productive people in the media and in the government were aware of this and are very aware of it and are looking into it, etc.
So I can confirm that productive parts of the government are looking into this, and maybe this is why it happened fast. I imagine that it doesn't happen that fast. So in my imagination probably they were already thinking about this, stacking up the containers, and it just happened. So that's good news.
Then Ryan says two: bring every container chassis owned by the National Guard and the military anywhere. So if the military and the National Guard have trucks that they can carry different chassis or that they can carry different containers on, to employ those. Create a new temporary container yard. So you need probably 500 acres, he thinks, and it could be government land or something near the ports. So you need a ton of land temporarily, ideally temporarily, somewhere near the ports.
How hard would it be to get 500 acres available on short notice? Well, if it's government land, maybe that's fast. They can say just use this government land. What if there's no government land? Here's what I suggest. If this is really something we need, if we really need this for the health of the country, this is basically a war-level problem. It's a war-level problem. People don't act the same when it's a little problem as they do when it's a big problem, right? People don't act the same in the pandemic as they do when they get a cold.
So I believe this is a non-problem because if Joe Biden ever went on TV and said, "You know, we can solve this thing if we get 500 acres near the port," how long would it take a patriot, a farmer, a landowner somewhere—how long would it take at least one patriot to say, "I got 500 acres. Hell yeah, bring it over here. National problem. Whole country's in a jam. I got 500 acres. Absolutely. Just help me clean it up when you're done."
I feel like that's a very solvable problem in the context of a crisis. People would just step up, I think. Like I would like to think of that of my fellow Americans.
Ryan says also bring in barges and small container ships and start hauling containers out of Long Beach to other smaller ports that aren't backed up. Now this is not a comprehensive list. So as I said, think in terms of all the different ways that you can get rid of the empties. Don't get obsessed by these specific suggestions. But he does make the case that you could probably do it and you could probably do it fast if you had the will and the leadership.
I don't think it's a money problem. I don't think it's a knowing-what-to-do problem anymore. I think it's just a willpower, leadership, brute force kind of situation. So we could probably power through it.
And then he's got some other—he said he'd be happy to lead this effort for the federal state government. Well, there you go. You even have somebody who understands it and is already a CEO just volunteered to lead the effort. And you probably need somebody who has this level of understanding about the whole system to really do anything productive because any change to one part of the system is going to ripple through the rest of the system. So you need somebody who knows what kind of changes aren't going to break the system somewhere else.
So where's Pete Buttigieg, and why can't he make Ryan Peterson the port czar just until we get this over with? I don't know.
So I'm going to put this in the category of citizens doing what the government couldn't do. You remember the story I told earlier today about the dads just saying, "Okay, the school is failing. The government is failing. How about you and I put on these dad shirts and go fix the school?" And so they did because the government couldn't fix it. So the dads went and fixed it and succeeded.
So the government was so far pretty close to worthless on this whole supply chain issue. So a citizen says, "Well, maybe I'll solve it." I'm saying the same thing. Like literally right now what I'm doing is making sure that enough people have heard this idea. Why? Because the government isn't doing it. Like I am literally doing the government's job right now for free, and I'm happy to do it because I'm a patriot and the country has a crisis. Of course I want to help. So does Ryan Peterson. So does somebody with 500 acres somewhere. So does anybody who's got a truck and can put it empty on it.
But just for fun I'm going to take it to a new level, right? What follows is my whiteboard presentation of what to do with all the empties. Don't take this too seriously. All right, I'm going to present this in the spirit of just stretching your mind a little bit. All right, I'm not—I wouldn't say this is a practical idea, but it's fun.
It goes like this. Let's say you got a port. Here's your port. You want to get rid of all these containers. Now let's say that not too far away there's a mountain. I'm going to solve all the world's problems at once. You ready? Just all at once. You're going to take these containers and line them up on the mountain butt to butt until you have the equivalent of a tunnel. A tunnel. Now you'd have to open up the—once you stuck them together you'd have to weld an opening between them—but then imagine you do that. So you open them up and you've got this big-ass tunnel that goes up the hill or the mountain.
Have you ever heard of a heat chimney? Have you ever heard of that concept? A heat chimney is when the natural rising of warm air is put through a chimney. So basically if you built this all by itself it would start sucking in warm air because warm air rises, and it would suck it into this pole and it would exhale it in there. And if it was a big enough entity it would be pretty fast.
Now wait for it. Wait for it. Why would you do this? Because you're going to build a CO2 capture facility on the top. CO2 capture. All right, we know that we have technology—I don't think you can even see this. Can you? Let me fix that a little bit.
All right, so if you were to build a CO2 capture device that pulls air, that pulls the CO2 out of the air, what is the biggest part of the expense? The biggest part of the expense—I think you'd have to fact-check me on this—is energy. So the biggest part of the expense is these big fans that move the wind. So you have to move the air. You force it through the filters to get the CO2 out.
But what if you didn't need the fans? What if nature was your fan? What if the warm air was warm enough at the bottom that by the time it got to the top it was just like a hurricane? I'm not sure if the physics work to get enough airflow, but could you get enough airflow to build a cheap CO2 capture on the top of a hill? Boom. Solving climate change and the shipping container problem at the same time.
Now is this a practical plan? No. And it wouldn't happen fast. But I just like to put two ideas together now and then because it's good for your creativity. Sometimes it's useful to hear what's called the bad version of the idea. I've talked about this before. It's a Hollywood trick. If you don't have a good idea for a script—you know, what does the character do now?—if you don't have a good idea, throw out the bad one because the bad one will make somebody say, "Well, that won't work," but it does remind me of something that will.
So he says, "Do you realize we still need those empty containers?" We'll make more. We'll make more. Because I'm not talking about enough containers that would change the global container situation, and I'm not talking about really using containers for this because there's got to be an easier way to make a pipe than containers.
But here's the only question that I ask, is this: Could you create a situation with a heat chimney on a hill—because it's easier to build it on a hill because you don't need to support it. You know, laying something down on the ground is easier than building a structure a mile high, right? You just lay it there. Now would you be able to get enough airflow to power a CO2 scrubber? Engineers? Engineers? Anybody? Anybody? Do we have—I know a huge percentage of you are engineers—and I'm waiting for you to weigh in. Come on, tell me why it won't work.
Because you—okay, this is—no, I know it's not practical to fix the container problem, but the CO2 capture is useless. Okay. Spotted owl problem. Yes, solar would be cheaper. Maybe homeless houses. You know, I also thought about that, but imagine if you put 500 containers turned sideways in the field and just let the homeless people camp out in it. It'd be better than being outdoors, but I think we can do better than that for the homeless. Elon Musk's Boring tool. There you go.
So let me do that. So imagine instead of using containers—that's probably a better idea, isn't it? If you use the Boring Company, B-O-R-I-N-G. So instead of laying down the pipe, you just bore a tunnel. Yeah, I know. Maybe. Maybe.
All right, let's see what else we're going to talk about. That was just for fun. But you see this pattern of citizens doing the work of the government, don't you? What's that about? I've never—I think we've never seen that before. It has something to do with social media makes it possible, right? Because it just wouldn't be possible without it.
All right. Here's my other favorite story. I have a new favorite athlete. Enes—I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. E-N-E-S. Is it Inez or Enes? Enes Kanter. Apparently he made some comments about China. He made some comments about Tibet and China's treatment of Tibet, and China started pulling NBA broadcasts, which we think is in apparent retaliation.
So what does Enes Kanter do when he said something that has cost a lot of money to his employer the NBA and caused an international problem? Does Enes say, "Oops, sorry about that, and I guess I'll go away now"? Does Enes apologize to China and say, "Oh, I'm sorry about that. I guess I went a little too far"? He does not. He does not.
Here's what Enes does. He makes a new video. So instead of complaining about Tibet, he goes after the Uyghur situation. He makes a video hammering China about the Uyghur situation and lays out the whole brutality of it.
Here's what he says. Yeah, I'm calling you out—talking about Xi Jinping. He says, "I'm calling you out in front of the whole world. Close down the slave labor camps and free the Uyghur people. Stop the genocide now."
Well, there may be a lot of NBA players who are kneeling for the anthem, and I don't care about them at the moment. But Enes Kanter, I give you a standing ovation. Standing ovation.
And what is Enes Kanter doing? The government's job. He's doing the government's job. He's doing what Biden should be doing. Trump would be doing this, I think, wouldn't he?
So three examples in the news today of citizens doing the job of the government because the government wasn't doing it. There's something going on. Is it because people are noticing that we don't have a coherent government? Because it seemed like the citizen participation was also happening under Trump, but it looked like more of a collaborative thing than a desperation thing. At the moment it looks more like desperation. We don't have a government. We better do this ourselves. But under Trump it looked more like, "Oh, he actually listens to what people say." So if you have a good idea, maybe it'll get implemented. And sure enough, you know, I've told you the story of submitting a good idea and next thing you know it's an executive order.
Mr. Cab is asking if my hair is growing back. Interestingly it did grow back when I was on prednisone, not permanently, but even the bald spots started filling back in. That's scary, but it was temporary.
Do you know before federal attacks tariffs were imposed on ships? I don't know the relevance of that yet.
All right. So in a New York Times opinion piece, Paul Krugman says China has big problems coming. China has big problems coming. Big problems. That it feels like the wording of that sounds familiar, doesn't it? Have you heard that from anyone before? Is there anybody who's been saying in public that China has big problems coming?
So that's the headline: Big problems coming. Does it sound familiar? It should, because China has big problems coming. I think I've mentioned it before. I believe I mentioned it before. Yeah. And one of the big problems among the big problems are they apparently tried to hide their economic situation by building massive real estate projects that didn't get used. Nobody moved into them. Oh yes, I did say that. Yes, I did.
Have I told you how I track my influence? Now of course it's not scientific and not 100 percent reliable, but one of the ways I track it is by language. You know, if somebody uses the same term, you say, "I wonder if two people came up with that at the same time or one was influenced by the other." So you can never know. It could be that's just an obvious phrase, so you see it more than once. We'll see.
But Paul Krugman, who I know certainly people on the right political right don't think his predictions have been so good, but he says they got big trouble coming. And I think he's right. Have I told you the interplay between economics and psychology? That economics is—unless you have a physical constraint like the ports have a physical constraint—economics is mostly a psychology issue.
If you think things are going to be good next year, you invest. If you think the prices are going up because of inflation, maybe you buy something now. So basically your expectations and your psychology drive the entire economy. What happens to China's economy when everybody understands that it's not safe to do business there, that they got big problems? It's a problem. If this psychology breaks the economy, what would it take for China's psychology to break in a way that breaks the economy?
Well, it might take Paul Krugman, a Nobel winner for economics, to tell you that you're in deep, deep trouble. I mean he could be right or he could be wrong, but the more people with his credentials who tell China they're doomed, the more somebody's going to believe him, right? The more people talk about problems, somebody's saying I look like that character that was once on Babylon 5.
I assume you know that I was on Babylon 5, right? That's why you're saying that. There's an old sci-fi show called Babylon 5. I had a small part on that because I'd said some good things about the show, so they invited me on to be a character. I was not a good actor. Yes. And COVID is coming for China. So apparently China has an outbreak in several provinces. I don't see any way that China doesn't have a big problem coming because I just don't think you can keep it out, and I don't know that they can vaccinate fast enough. So I don't think COVID will be the thing that takes them down. I think it'll be something else.
Have you seen Raised by Wolves on HBO? No, but I just got interested in that yesterday. Remind me what that was about. I remember that the title of it, Raised by Wolves, was completely misleading. Has nothing to do with anything like that. What is it about?
Yeah, no, I was in Babylon 5 for one episode in which I played someone who—I played a guy who was looking for his dog. I want to say somebody actually posted it here. So the people on Locals can see it, but let me show you. See if you can see it here on YouTube. If you watched the show, that was me when I had hair in a scene with Mr. Garibaldi, who was playing security in the scene.
Now here's the funny part. You see the Minbari alien behind me over my shoulder? So that was my longtime girlfriend at the time, Pam. And Pam is Japanese-American, and so they made her as a Japanese-American Minbari. And she had like six hours of makeup or something to get that look. And her only role was to stand back there and carry my briefcase. And I had I think two lines or something that I blew, I believe.
Yeah, somebody said Garibaldi is a poor man's Bruce Willis. That's pretty funny. I think he passed away, if I'm not mistaken. I think that actor passed away. So I'll tell you just a little that actor's story. So the reason I was invited to be on the show as sort of a guest character was because I'd said it was my favorite show at the time. So they liked it. I said that in public, so they invited me to be on as a character.
Yeah, Jerry Doyle was the name of the actor. And I did my lines a few times and blew them even though it was like two lines. You know, if you're not an actor it's a lot of pressure to get that right. And I finally got the line right, but it happened to be exactly when the entire cast decided to prank me. So it ruined the scene. So I forget the details. I think they all—the rest of the cast, of which there were just lots of them, you know, because it was in a cafe scene where there'd be lots of extras and stuff—so they were waiting till some part of the scene, and then everybody just rushed us. Like it was just like this big crowd just rushed. And it was just a prank to play on the new guy.
But I think that was the first time I got the line right. They ruined the scene, but I eventually got it.
Yes, and they did not hand me a hot gun. These pretzels are making me thirsty. What's that from? Oh yeah. The Minbari were the best aliens ever. If you haven't—by the way, I'll tell you my favorite scene. I'm blanking on the name of the showrunner who wrote—I think he wrote every episode, this one guy. And there was one bit of the writing that I just thought was brilliant.
There was a scene in this TV show in which the Minbari—you know, the head Minbari person—was almost killed in an attack. But it turned out it was Minbari who was trying to kill their own Minbari leader. And the person who stopped it decided not to tell the leader who it was that was behind the attack. And the reason was he didn't want the leader to think less of the people she was leading and therefore kept that information from her because he didn't want to ruin his leader by turning her against her own people. And I really—I just love that part of the scene.
I'm watching Dune right now. I'm three quarters through it. I can't watch a whole movie at once, but the original Dune was maybe one of the worst films ever made. I tried to watch that so many times, and you get—it's just so slow. But the new one, it looks like they fixed the bad parts. It's good. I'm enjoying it.
All right. Looks like it's time for us to say goodbye. And it's kind of a slow-ish news day. How was this episode? I can never tell. All right, some people liked it on Locals. Good. Just looking at your comments. Oh, okay. Well, on Locals people liked it. How about YouTube? Sophistry hour. You know, the sophistry people. I don't know. There's something wrong with everybody who uses that insult. I don't know if anybody has ever accused anybody of sophistry without themselves being defective in some way. Maybe. I don't know. I think usually it's a cognitive dissonance when people use that word because there's something that they didn't agree with that they have to imagine there's something wrong with the speaker. And sophistry is one of those words you could just throw in there because you don't have to defend it. Well, I don't have to defend it. It's just sophistry.
Soporific is the word. Oh, I lost you on the heat chimney stuff. I remember the heat chimney stuff wasn't serious, but I thought it would be interesting to learn a couple of concepts. If you learned about a heat chimney and you learned about CO2 scrubbers, that's all I wanted. You need to expand your news sources. I think I do, but the news sources—where would I expand it to? I have a horse weiner pointed at me.
All right, that's all for now, and I will talk to you tomorrow. And if the government doesn't fix things, we'll do it. We'll do it ourselves, damn it.
well today will be interesting want it yes it will because it turns out this is far too glaringly white isn't it too glaringly white we're going to use this in a minute but let's get it out of my way for now all right so congratulations to all of you for showing up at the best place in the entire metaverse yeah yeah this used to be the best place in the world but then facebook announced that it was going to create infinite new metaverse worlds in virtual reality and ar and now now we know it's the best thing in all of those worlds yes and if you'd like to take it up a level all you need is a copper mug or glass a tanker jealous or stein a canteen jugger flash a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasured pleasured unparalleled pleasure the dopamine of the day the thing that makes everything better except the shipping containers it's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now go ah antibodies well in no particular order my favorite story of the day i saw erica you all know erica right erica tweeted this apparently at a louisiana high school there was a violent week of fighting at the high school and a bunch of dads got together to basically help out at the school so this volunteer group of dads i'm looking at a meme of me as cornholio that's happening over in locals right now so the dads on duty they put their little shirts on they say dad's on duty and they go hang out with the kids and turns out the kids kind of like it which is weird i'm not sure the reporting is all accurate but it looks like the students appreciated having some adult dad-like figures and the funny part of the story is that the dads were just making dad jokes and the kids were laughing at the dad jokes but it just changed it sort of changed the vibe of the school and apparently made a big difference so kudos to dads on duty uh if you saw this story i feel like this is one of those weird periods in history right now if you saw the visual of the story that all the dads are african-american and uh they're all big guys too they're like they're just really big guys and i feel like i had to mention that even though it's not relevant to the story like we're in that weird time where the fact that uh all the dads involved seem to be black somehow that mattered but it doesn't matter like the story doesn't require it but somehow it adds flavor to the story or something so um oh i guess maybe maybe this is maybe this is the angle on that that makes it a little special is that it's just a great solution maybe we can see more of it i don't know uh actor peter scolari passed away age 66 from cancer i have a peter scalari story one of the weird things about my life is i just end up meeting a lot of people who who end up being in the news and years ago when i was doing a dilbert tv show we were casting for the the talent for the various dilbert parts and just the interesting thing i learned that involved peter scolari because he was one of the people who uh well i i can't use the word uh tried out for the part and that's the point of the story so apparently in hollywood there's there are three levels of uh actors at the bottom level the people who are new to the game um i see i see you all like fighting you naked i saw your comment um so the three level of celebrities i learned this when i was i was working there at the bottom level they have to audition for every role because they're not famous nobody knows them you just have to audition or you're not going to get the job at the next level up you still need to audition but you're a little bit famous or even you know a lot famous and they don't want to call it an audition so you do a fake audition but you call it a meeting and so peter scalari was already quite successful from you know bosom buddies and other stuff and so when when his name came up and we invited him in to i think he was trying for the role of the dilbert voice if i recall and uh you have to do this whole thing where you you pretend you're not actually um you're not actually doing an interview you just have a conversation and so you pretend that when he tries out he auditions that he's actually just having a conversation with him he's not actually auditioning so so it goes like this you know you'll be you know hey what do you think of this you know interested in this role you know you make conversations and stuff and and at some point the actor will say yeah you know and so let me look at this uh you know were you looking for something like you know he'll do a voice he'll do a take and you'll say yeah yeah that's pretty good uh well you know we're thinking about that maybe maybe a little more serious or something maybe give him a note but you wouldn't ask him to do it again he would have to volunteer to do it again so this whole weird etiquette of how to deal with you know different levels of celebrity you just can't ask him to audition he's just got a volunteer anyway he didn't get the job but i will tell you he was he was very talented the the the people who were successful professionals actors and actresses i'm not even sure if you use actors anymore they could do different takes on the same character and other people couldn't and it was fascinating to watch so somebody like a peter scolari could come in and give you you know one one kind of vibe and then you'd say well you know make this change and they could give you a whole different vibe for the for the voice and others just couldn't do it they could do 10 versions of the same voice so there is a difference between those who can act and those who can't and i will say peter's glory had it he had the gift and i got to see it live and it was a it was a treat um and by the way at the top level of the stardom you don't ask them to do anything you just offer them the part right if it's tom cruise you just offer them the part uh the best biden means that we saw coming out of the strange behavior where biden's hands were in front of him like beavis and butthead and cornholio i don't know how many you saw but the ones i liked were the the meme where somebody put ski poles in his hands put him on the ski ski slope the jet pack was good did you see the jet pack one lifting off of the jet pack the riding a tiny horse he had the reins in his hands he's on top of a miniature horse very good very good and of course cornhole leo was my favorite did i miss one um did i miss one the llama oh was there a homor oh or the ice cream cones that was actually my idea was he was holding two ice cream cones and somebody photoshopped that in there holding corn dogs i absolutely love this era where you can you can turn something into a video or visual mean in an hour oh yeah the rock'em sock'em robots that was a good one too all right those are all good um what else is happening so cnn is covering the alec baldwin story and has a big article about it and i guess we learned today that allegedly the prop person handed alec baldwin this gun and announced that it was quote a cold gun now a cold gun in the lingo of uh i guess the business is it means it's not loaded and then allegedly and this part is unclear it looks like alec baldwin might have aimed into somebody but i don't know that that's true i think that was debunked so we've got some sort of conflicting stories it's unclear if it was intentionally aimed at anybody even in joke or it just went off you know accidentally in some way yeah now here's the part you're i had to be in the comments here you know exactly where i'm going on this cnn does this story without ever mentioning that it shouldn't have made any difference what the prop person said are you with me anybody with the smallest ounce of common sense or gun training you know gun safety training you don't take somebody's word for it that a gun is unloaded is there anything more basic than that do you know who i don't believe if they tell me if they hand me a gun and tell me it's not loaded do you know who i don't trust everyone everyone there's no exception if the pope hands you a gun and says don't worry it's not loaded check it check it because you don't know the pope is telling you the truth don't take a chance so somehow they can write that story without mentioning the most basic gun safety facts that it shouldn't have mattered who made that mistake there were 10 ways for the accident not to happen and all of them involved just normal common sense so i don't think we can let anybody off the hook by saying oh he didn't know it was loaded that doesn't count sorry no credit for don't know it was loaded my favorite joke so far in the totally inappropriate category let me give you a test are we adult enough that we can handle the contradiction that i think most of us genuinely see this as a i hope as a real tragedy with real people who who really will have to suffer forever the survivors will have to suffer forever the loss of their loved one and of course the deaths themselves so it's a tragedy and as humans we need to point that out but are we not allowed to enjoy the jokes what do you think where do you stand on that my take is i can't help it i feel like it's beyond my control if something's funny i laugh at it and i don't know how many of you have the same feeling but the thing that makes these jokes make you laugh is that they're so deeply inappropriate am i right if they were not deeply inappropriate would they really be funny no so in many ways i'm giving you uh i'm giving you an out right so somebody accuses you of laughing at these jokes here's your out they're funny because they're inappropriate it's true right it's the inappropriateness the fact that it's a tragedy that's why you're laughing if it were not deeply inappropriate you wouldn't have two things in sort of atom balance which is what triggers the uh the reflex to laugh so i'm going to give you permission to enjoy this but maybe not right in front of the victims or their families okay i hope they're staying off the internet today um but wendy rogers who's an arizona state senator had the tweet of the day in my opinion now what i like about this tweet is it's coming from somebody who's not a professional humorist who somehow crafted a perfect joke okay so a non-professional wendy rogers somehow crafted a perfect tweet you want to hear it of course you do here's her tweet hillary clinton dick cheney and alec baldwin go hunting how does that play out come on that's pretty clever that's pretty funny now here's what i liked about it the the ending how does that play out is perfect just in terms of joke construction because and this is a basically where hypnosis and humor overlap what is beautiful about this punchline is the question how does that play out allows you to imagine your funniest version that's a hypnosis trick now i doubt she's studied hypnosis but leaving stuff out so that the audience can fill in the joke is really good form now i don't know if she's just really good at this wendy rogers or if she you know she just hit one out of the park lucky swing but this is a perfect joke i looked at this i read this like five times i was like god that there's not one wasted word in that sentence there's nothing you could change in that that would make that better anyway so we got some runaway inflation it looks like or do we does anybody understand how inflation works uh is anybody old enough here and i know some of you are do you remember stagflation remember in the the uh was it the jimmy carter years we had stagflation and then all the experts said whoa now we know what stagflation is and we know what conditions will cause it in the future and then those conditions happen again in the future and what happened no stagflation so we don't even know what caused it apparently well i mean i don't because we were pretty sure that it was going to happen again and then it just didn't now of course there are lots of variables in play so you have to have all the other things lined up to get the same result and we didn't now how good are we at predicting economic stuff not really good are we that doesn't mean it's not a problem what it does mean is i can't tell right and i remind you too often i have a degree in economics i don't know if we're in trouble or not and i'm not sure i would trust anybody's opinion on this because people have been so wrong about inflation and stagflation and national debt we don't even know what national debt is we don't even know what it is like just the most basic stuff about the economy i don't think anybody knows like you know and the problem is that there are just so many variables right so something could happen with a war a shortage some kind of bottleneck thing nobody i don't think anybody saw the supply chain thing coming maybe they did i don't know but um i guess my only takeaway on the runaway inflation hyperinflation risk is we don't really know maybe maybe all right britain it looks like they're first in line to get these new antivirals the therapeutics coming to us from pfizer and merck so there would be pills that you take they could reduce the risk of uh that mild to moderately ill people reduce their risk of disease by 50 percent i'm sorry the risk of you know serious hospitalization and death by 50 to which i say if you can reduce the winter surge by 50 and again other people saying we already have therapeutics yeah we've already got regeneron et cetera given all the ways that we've learned to treat covet given the fact that our most vulnerable or mostly vaccinated given the fact that the people most likely to die a lot of them already died i feel like the argument for keeping any restrictions in place really just became irrational didn't they at least after the bills are available so they're not available yet maybe the end of the year but if we're in january and we've got these antivirals i don't know if they can produce enough of them fast enough but if we had them in january what would be the argument for any ongoing restrictions now the argument of course is to reduce deaths but if you can if you can reduce them by 50 percent isn't that going to be enough i mean we keep doing things that reduce the risk by 50 how many times do you have to cut it in half before you're you're okay they've been irrational since yeah they've been irrational for a while long-term effects unknown correct long-term effects of the anti-viral drugs unknown long-term effects of getting a covet unknown hey i have a question for you i'm just going to put this out there so we keep hearing about all of the so-called long-haul covid problems so people get the covid and let's say they have a bad case of it but then but then for weeks or months they have symptoms i'm just going to put this out there because the the range of symptoms seem pretty broad have you ever had a surgery so i've had three surgeries none of them super major right i had you know a couple of nasal things etc some polyps in my sinus and so none of them were major surgeries but each of them required anesthesia how long does it take you to recover from anesthesia in surgery and i don't mean that day i mean how many months have you ever had a minor surgery it takes months doesn't it to feel to feel right even after your problem is completely solved you know whatever the actual cutting was about of the surgery the there's something like a fog that somebody says like a year right now last year or actually during the pandemic i had some surgery that was uh delayed for months and months and months many of you know the story had some sinus polyps that needed to be removed and so the surgery was delayed and part of that delay put me on prednisone so i got in prednisone for you know a period and then i thought i was going to go from that and the prednisone reduces the polyps in the meantime until you can get the surgery then the surgery got cancelled delayed so i got on prednisone again a second dose within a year which is sort of a lot because getting off a prednisone is kind of a problem and then i had it a third time so i believe if i'm remembering right there were three separate extended periods of prednisone it took me months to be able to walk upstairs after i got off prednisone months and i was in good shape right i mean i was i was a gym rat and just the prednisone it wasn't even the illness and it wasn't it wasn't even the uh wasn't even the surgery but just getting off a prednisone if you have too much of it it's it's months like i would get to the top of the stairs and i'd be like ah now it's fine i can i can run upstairs you know easily now prednisone is a steroid right don't you get prednisone when you get cold isn't that a pretty normal uh pretty normal prescription am i right about that and and if you get prednisone do you get it long enough that you have the problem i had because i don't i don't think they give it to you that long right because i was on it for a few weeks i think each time yeah so here's my question how many of what we what people are reporting to be long covered you know months long symptoms how many of those symptoms are caused by the treatment or the or just recovering from a bad illness in general if something if something just knocks you on your ass whatever it is it could be just a bad regular flu don't you have lasting issues from that like a few weeks later a few weeks later you've still got some problems i don't know i'll just put that out there that a lot of the reported long haul might have might be just the trauma of the experience itself all right um let's go brandon all right i need i need a little help here a little help uh i would like to employ the global brain calling on all viewers to be part of a single intelligence i'm gonna set you up and then your global brain will be unleashed right have you noticed and this is not my original observation that let's go brandon starts with l g b as in lgbtq can we think of the t in the queue so that let's go brandon total quality or something i don't know i just feel like there's some way to make a meme or a joke out of this you know with being respectful of course to the lgbtq community don't want to insult them unnecessarily uh but it's a weird coincidence isn't it oh there it is somebody already has the the show there's already t-shirt lgbt let's go brandon team let's go brandon teachers quit totally quit all right i'm looking at your take quaaludes uh let's go brandon to quantico um too quantico okay i didn't quit uh let's get brandon too quick there we go let's get brandon to quit that's it oh it's already a shirt it's already a shirt i'm saying i'm seeing a video of it here on the locals platform so you can't see it here on on netflix but over on the locals platform they're they're posting pictures of it yeah let's get back let's get biden to quit actually says let's get biden to quit all right um here's a segment i call citizens doing the work of governments you ready for this citizens doing the work of governments so what's our big problem it's the supply chain as you know and i'm going to read you a tweet thread because i want to see where you see an example of a citizen solving maybe we don't know if it's a solution yet but certainly it looks like leadership from citizens as opposed to government now the question is who's in charge of the supply chain problem biden footage edge anybody we don't know but uh ryan peterson private citizen and ceo of flexport who is in the business of uh logistics and stuff for shipping all right so here's somebody who's a ceo of a shipping logistics um entity and so therefore has an understanding of you know the big picture right so ryan peterson um tweets the following and i'm going to read the whole tweet if you don't mind because normally i would you know summarize it but i don't want to get anything wrong and i think that this is important not only because you can see a citizen doing the work of government here basically but um you'll you'll get the whole you'll get the little picture i'll just read it all right so this was uh tweeted yesterday by ryan peterson ceo of flexport he says yesterday i rented a boat and took the leader of one of flexport's partners in long beach on a three-hour tour of the port complex here's a thread about what i learned all right so the first part is he went in person right he didn't he didn't read the internet he went in person to talk to the people at the port all right so i keep asking can anybody explain what the problem is and nobody can right have you noticed that nobody can explain what the freaking problem is exactly they think it's drivers and you know all kinds of stuff well here's what he found out okay he goes to the port he goes uh the ports i guess we went to two of them the ports of la and long beach are at a standstill in a full three-hour loop through the poor complex passing every single terminal we saw less than a dozen containers get unloaded so the in three hours they only saw fewer than 12 containers get unloaded okay so did you think it was about trucks all right we'll keep going there are hundreds of cranes i counted only seven that were even operating and they seemed to be going pretty slowly so it's not cranes got lots of cranes okay it seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals the terminals are simply overflowing with containers and he'll say later that's mostly empty ones which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either either from ships or land it's a true traffic jam because it says right now if you have a chassis so that would be the the truck with nothing on it with no empty container on it you can go pick up containers at any port terminal however if you have an empty container on that chassis they're not allowing you to return it except on highly restricted basis meaning the government here it is government problem if you can't get the empty off the chassis you don't have a chassis to go back and pick up the next container and if nobody goes to pick up the next container the port remains jammed ask yourself have you heard anything like this until now all of the news you've read all the people speculating has anybody told you this it's the first time i heard it i'll go on um with the yards so full carrier slash terminals are being highly restrictive and where and when they will accept empties so i guess you can bring the empty to the yard also containers are not fungible between carriers meaning you know one one carrier can't use somebody else's container so the truckers have to drop their empty off at the right terminal this is causing empty containers to pile up this one trucking partner alone has 450 containers sitting on chassis right now 450 trucks they can't use that are perfectly good trucks presumably with drivers and they can't use them because they have empty chassis on them and no place to put them because of government regulations you see where this is going um all right this is a trucking company with six yards that represent 153 owner operator drivers so he has almost three containers sitting on chassis at his yard for every driver on the team he can't take the containers off the chassis because he's not allowed by the city of long beach zoning code to store empty containers more than too high in his truck yard this was tweeted yesterday today today the mayor of long beach just announced that they're going to allow them to pile the containers more than too high so this this government regulation that looks like it was uh at least in long beach so we don't know about la yet but it looks like they'll pile them high with the chassis all tied up storing empties they can't be returned to the port there are no chassis available blah blah oh okay and with all the containers piling up in the terminal yard the longshoremen can't unload the ships right so they're literally just too many empties they just can't unload the ships and so the queue grows longer when now over 70 ships containing 500 000 containers are waiting offshore the line is going to get longer not shorter this is a negative feedback loop you know so the worse it gets the worse i guess uh all right how do we fix this so now he talks about solutions now when i talk about the solutions and when ryan peterson talks about the solutions here's the attitude you should take toward it not necessarily that this is the exact solution but directionally okay so if you can tell yourself this is a directional area to go you won't get too wound up about the details of it he said what we can do that's fast basically he says when you're designing an operation you must choose your bottleneck bottleneck so here's a design note you have to choose your bottleneck if the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't choose it you aren't running an operation it's running you so he's saying it's poorly designed by its nature you should always choose the most capital intensive part of the line to be your bottleneck now he doesn't explain that but capital intensive presumably means it's easier to flex your capital in other words get more money than it is to get more people or more anything else i'm guessing that's what it means in a port that's the ship to shore cranes the cranes should never be unable to run because they're waiting for another part oh okay so the most capital i have that wrong so the most capital intensive part is the cranes and they're not running so that means it's not a well-designed system so the bottleneck right now is not the cranes it's the yard space so we've got to get rid of those empties all right and he says that and here's somebody who knows what they're talking about right so he knows he knows systems and he knows this industry so listen to this advice in operations when a bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't design for it so in other words it's not in the crane area because they're designed for it i guess you must overwhelm the bottleneck overwhelm the bottleneck in other words you don't want to peck away at it you need to basically just drop everything and throw everything at the bottleneck okay so how do you do that he suggests an executive order in other words biden effective immediately overriding the zoning rules in long beach and los angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high looks like we got that 24 hours later i don't know if this is just because of ryan's involvement but i do know that the government heard about his tweet the day he tweeted so i made sure that uh at least some productive people in the media and in the government were aware of this and and are very aware of it and are you know looking into it etc so i can i can confirm that uh productive parts of the government are looking into this and maybe maybe this is why it happened fast i imagine that it doesn't happen that fast so my in my imagination probably they were already thinking about this stacking up the containers and it just happened so that's good news then ryan says two bring every container chassis owned by the national guard and the military anywhere oh so if the military and the national guard have trucks that they can carry different chassis or that they can carry different containers on uh to employ those create a new temporary container yard so you need probably 500 acres he thinks and it could be government land or something near the ports so you need a a ton of land temporarily ideally temporarily somewhere near the ports how hard would it be to give 500 acres available on short short notice well if it's government land maybe that's fast they can say just use this government land what if there's no government land here's what i suggest if if this is really something we need if we really really need this for the you know the health of the country this is basically a war level problem it's a war level problem people don't act the same when it's a little problem as they do when it's a big problem right people don't act the same in the pandemic as they do when they get a cold so i believe this is a non-problem because if joe biden ever went on tv and said you know we can solve this thing if we get 500 acres near the port how long would it take a patriot a farmer a landowner somewhere how long would it take at least one patriot to say i got 500 acres hell yeah bring it over here national problem whole countries in a jam i got 500 acres absolutely just you know help me clean it up when you're done i i feel like that's a very solvable problem in the context of a crisis people would just step up i think like i would like to think of that of my fellow americans uh ryan says also bring in barges and small container ships and start hauling containers out of long beach to other smaller ports that aren't backed up now uh this is not a comprehensive list so as i said think in terms of all the different ways that you can get rid of the empties you know don't don't get obsessed by these specific suggestions but he does make the case that you could probably do it and you could probably do it fast if you had the will and the leadership i don't think it's a money problem i don't think it's knowing what to do problem anymore i think it's just a will power leadership brute force kind of situation so we could probably power through it um and then he's got some other uh he said he'd be happy to lead this effort for the federal state government well there you go you even you haven't you even have somebody who understands it and is already a ceo just volunteered to lead the effort you know and you probably need somebody who has this level of understanding about the whole system to really do anything productive because you know any change to one part of the system is going to ripple through the rest of the system so you need somebody who knows what kind of changes aren't going to break the system somewhere else so where's uh pete butterjudge and why can't he make ryan peterson the port czar just until we get this over with i don't know so i'm going to put this in the category of citizens doing what the government couldn't do you remember the story i told earlier today about the dads just saying okay the school is failing the government is failing how about you and i put on these dad shirts and go fix the school and so they did because the government couldn't fix it so the dads went and fixed it and succeeded so the government was so far pretty close to worthless on this whole supply chain issue so a citizen says well maybe i'll solve it i'm saying the same thing like literally right now what i'm doing is making sure that enough people have heard this idea why because the government isn't doing it like i am literally doing the government's job right now for free and i'm happy to do it because i'm a patriot and the country has a crisis of course i want to help so does ryan peterson so does somebody with 500 acres somewhere so does anybody who's got a truck and can put it empty on it but just for fun i'm going to take it to a new level right what follows is my whiteboard presentation of what to do with all the empties don't take this too seriously all right i'm going to present this in the spirit of just stretching your mind a little bit all right i'm not i wouldn't say this is a practical idea but it's fun it goes like this let's say you got a port here's your port you want to get rid of all these containers now let's say that not too far away there's a mountain right i'm going to solve all the world's problems at once you ready just all at once you're going to take these containers and you know line them up on the mountain butt to bop until you have the equivalent of a tunnel a tunnel now you'd have to open up the you know once you stuck them together you'd have to you know weld an opening between them but then imagine you do that so you open them up and you've got this big ass tunnel that goes up the hill or the mountain have you ever heard of a heat chimney have you ever heard of that concept heat chimney a heat chimney a heat chimney is when uh the natural rising of warm air is uh put through a chimney so basically if you built this all by itself it would start sucking in warm air because warm air rises and it would suck it into this pole and it would exhale it in there and if it was a big enough entity it would be pretty fast now wait for it wait for it why would you do this because you're going to build a co2 capture facility on the top co 2 capture all right we know that we have technology i don't think you can even see this can you do let me fix that a little bit all right so uh if you were to build a co2 capture device that pulls air that pulls the co2 out of the air what is the biggest part of the expense the biggest part of the expense i think you'd have to fact check me on this is energy so the biggest part of the expense is these big big fans that move the wind so you have to move the air you force it through the filters to get the co2 out but what if you didn't need the fans what if nature was your fan what if the warm air was warm enough at the bottom that by the time it got to the top it was just like a hurricane i'm not sure if the physics work to get enough air flow but could you get enough airflow to build a cheap co2 capture on the top of a hill boom solving climate change and the shipping container problem at the same time now is this a practical plan no and it wouldn't happen fast but i just like to put two eyes do this together now and then because it's good for your creativity um sometimes sometimes it's useful to hear what's called the bad version of the idea i've talked about this before it's a hollywood trick if you don't have a good idea for uh let's say a script you know what what does the character do now if you don't have a good idea throw out the bad one because the bad one will make somebody say well that won't work but it does remind me of something that will so he says do you realize we still need those empty containers we'll make more we'll make more because you know i'm not talking about uh we're not talking about enough containers that would change the global container situation and i'm not talking about really using containers for this because there's got to be an easier way to make a pipe than containers but here's the only the only question that i ask is this could you create a situation with a heat chimney on a on a hill because it's easier to build it on a hill because you don't need to support it you know laying something down on the ground is easier than building a structure a mile high right you just lay it there now would you be able to get enough air flow to power a co2 scrubber engineers engineers anybody anybody do we have i i know a huge percentage of your engineers and i'm waiting for you to weigh in come on tell me why it won't work because you uh okay this is no i know it's not practical to fix the container problem but um yeah but the co2 capture is useless okay uh spotted owl problem yes solar would be cheaper maybe homeless houses you know i also thought about that but you know imagine if you put 500 containers turn sideways in the field and just let the homeless people camp out in it it'd be better than being outdoors but i think we can do better than that for the homeless elon musk's boring tool there you go um yeah so let me let me do that so imagine instead of using containers that's probably a better idea isn't it if you use the the boring company b-o-r-i-n-g so instead of uh laying down the pipe you just more bore a tunnel yeah i know maybe maybe maybe so um all right let's see what else we're going to talk about that was just for fun but you see this pattern of citizens doing the work of the government don't you what's that about i've never i think we've never seen that before it has something to do with social media makes it possible right because it just wouldn't be possible without it all right here's my other favorite story i have a new favorite athlete inez i don't know if i'm pronouncing it right e-n-e-s is it inez or ennis eunes cantor apparently he made some comments about uh china um he made some comments about tibet and china's treatment of tibet and china started pulling nba broadcasts uh which we think is in apparent retaliation so what does ennis cantor do when he said something that has cost a lot of money to his employer the nba and caused an international problem does does ns say oops sorry about that and i guess i'll go away now does ns apologize to china and say oh i'm sorry about that i guess i went a little too far he does not he does not here's what ns does he makes a new video so instead of complaining about tibet he goes after the uyghur situation he makes a video a hammering china about the uyghur situation and lays out the whole brutality of it um here's what uh he says uh yeah i'm calling you out talking about xi jinping he says i'm calling you out in front of the whole world close down the slave labor camps and free the uyghur people stop the genocide now well there may be a lot of nba players who are kneeling for the anthem and i don't care about them at the moment but and as cantor i give you standing ovation standing ovation and what is ns cantor doing the government's job he's doing the government's job he's doing what biden should be doing trump would be doing this i think wouldn't he so three examples in the news today of citizens doing the job of the government because the government wasn't doing it there's something going on is it is it because people are noticing that we don't have a coherent government because you know it seemed like the citizen participation was also happening under trump but it looked like more of a it looked more like more of a collaborative thing than a desperation thing at the moment it looks more like desperation we don't have a government we better do this ourselves but under trump it looked more like oh he actually listens to what people say so if you have a good idea maybe it'll get implemented and sure enough you know i've told you the story of uh submitting a good idea and next thing you know it's an executive order so uh mr cab is asking if my hair is growing back uh interestingly it did grow back when i was on prednisone uh not permanently but even the the bald spots started filling back in that's scary but it was temporary um do you know before federal attacks tariffs were imposed on ships i don't know if the relevance of that yet all right so in a new york times opinion piece paul krugman says uh china has big problems coming china has big problems coming big problems that it feels like the wording of that sounds familiar doesn't it have you heard that from anyone before is there anybody who's been saying in public that china has big problems coming so that's the headline big problem is coming does it sound familiar it should because uh china has big problems coming i think i've mentioned it before i believe i mentioned it before yeah and uh one of the big problems among the big problems are they apparently they tried to hide their economic situation by building massive uh real estate projects that didn't get used you know nobody nobody moved into them oh yes i did say that yes i did have i told you how i track my influence now is of course it's not scientific and not 100 reliable but one of the ways i track it is by um language you know if somebody uses the same term you say i wonder if two people came up with that at the same time or one was influenced by the other so you can never know it could be that's just an obvious phrase so you see it more than once we'll see but paul krugman who i know certainly people on the right political right don't think his uh predictions have been so good but he says they got big trouble big trouble coming and i think he's right you know have i told you the interplay between economics and psychology that economics is unless you have a physical constraint like the the ports have a physical constraint economics is mostly a psychology issue if you think things are going to be good next year you invest if you think the prices are going up because of inflation maybe you buy something now so basically your expectations and your psychology drive the entire economy what happens to china's economy when everybody understands that it's not safe to do business there that they got big problems it's a problem if if this psychology breaks the economy rigs what would it take for china's psychology to break in a way that breaks the economy well it might take paul krugman a no you know nobel winner for economics to tell you that you're in deep deep trouble i mean he could be right or he could be wrong but the more people with his credentials who tell china they're doomed the more somebody's going to believe him right the more people talk about problems somebody's saying i look like that character that was once on babylon 5.
i assume you know that i was on babylon 5 right that's why you're saying that i there's an old sci-fi show called babylon 5.
i had a a small part on that because i'd said some good things about the show so they invited me on to be a character i was not a good actor yes and covet is coming for china so apparently china has an outbreak in several provinces i don't see any way that china doesn't have a a big big problem coming because i just don't think you can keep it out and i don't know that they can vaccinate fast enough so i don't think kovan will be the thing that takes him down i think it'll be something else have you seen raised by wolves on hbo um no but i just got interested in that yesterday remind me what that was about i remember that the title of it raised by wolves was completely misleading has nothing to do with anything like that what is it about yeah no i was in babylon 5 for one episode in which i played uh someone who i played a guy who was looking for his dog i want to say somebody actually posted it here um so the people on locals can see it but let me show you see if you can see it here on youtube if you watched the show that was me when i had hair in a scene with uh mr garibaldi who was playing security in the scene now here here's the uh funny part you see the the minbari alien behind me over my shoulder so that was my longtime girlfriend at the time uh pam and pam is uh you know japanese-american and so uh you know they made her as a japanese-american minbari and uh she had like six hours of makeup or something to get that look and her only role was to stand back there and carry my briefcase and i had i think two lines or something that i blew i believe yeah somebody said garibaldi is a poor man's bruce willis that's pretty funny i think he passed away if i'm not mistaken i think i think that actor passed away so i'll tell you just a little that actor's story so so the reason i was invited to be on the show as sort of a guest character was because i'd said it was my favorite show at the time so they they liked it i said that in public so they invited me to be on as a character yeah jerry doyle was the name of the actor and uh i did my lines a few times and and blew them even though it was like two lines i you know if you're not an actor it's a lot of pressure to get that right and i finally got the line right but it happened to be exactly when the entire cast decided to prank me so it ruined the scene so i forget the details i think they all the rest of the cast of which there were just lots of them you know because it was a in a cafe scene where there'd be lots of extras and stuff so they they were waiting to some part of the scene and then everybody just like rushed rushed us like it was just like this big crowd just and it was just a prank you know to play on the new guy uh but i think that was the first time i got the line right they ruined the scene but i eventually got it um yes and they did not they did not hand me a hot gun these pretzels are making me thirsty what's that from oh yeah the minbari were the best aliens ever if you haven't by the way i'll tell you my favorite scene um i'm blanking on the name of the show runner who wrote i think you wrote every episode as one guy and there was one bit of the writing that i just thought was brilliant there was a scene in this um tv show in which the minbari you know the head head minbari person was uh almost killed in a in an attack but it turned out it was minbari who was trying to kill their own minbari leader and the the person who stopped it decided not to tell the leader who it was that was behind the attack and the reason was he didn't want the leader to be thank you joe straczynski was the showrunner wrote all these he didn't want the leader to think less of the people she was leading and therefore kept that information from her because he didn't want to ruin his leader by turning her against you know her own people and i really i just love that part of the scene i'm watching dune right now i'm three quarters through it i can't i can't watch a whole movie at once but uh i the the original dune was maybe one of the worst films ever made i tried to watch that so many times and you get it's just so slow but the new one it looks like they fixed the bad parts it's it's good i'm enjoying it all right um looks like it's time for us to say goodbye and it's kind of a slow-ish news day how was this episode i can never tell all right some people liked it on locals good um just looking at your comments oh okay well on locals people liked it how about youtube sophistry hour you know the the sophistry people i don't know this is something wrong with everybody who uses that insult i don't know if anybody has ever accused anybody of sophistry without themselves being defective in some way maybe i don't know i think usually it's a cognitive dissonance when people use that word because there's something that they didn't agree with that they have to imagine there's something wrong with the speaker and sophistry is one of those words you could just throw in there because you don't have to defend it well i don't have to defend it it's just sophistry um soporific is the word uh oh i lost you on the heat chimney stuff i remember the heat chimney stuff wasn't serious but i thought it would be interesting to learn learn a couple of concepts if you learned about a heat chimney and you learned about co2 scrubbers that's all i wanted you need to expand your news sources i think i do but the new sources where would i expand it to i have a horse weiner pointed at me uh all right that's all for now and i will talk to you tomorrow and if the government doesn't fix things we'll do it we'll do it ourselves damn it
well today will be interesting
want it
yes it will because it turns out
this is far too glaringly white isn't it
too glaringly white we're going to use
this in a minute
but let's get it out of my way for now
all right
so
congratulations to all of you for
showing up at the best place in the
entire
metaverse
yeah yeah this used to be the best place
in the world
but then facebook announced that it was
going to create infinite new
metaverse worlds in virtual reality and
ar and now
now we know it's the best thing in all
of those worlds yes and if you'd like to
take it up a level all you need is a
copper mug or glass a tanker jealous or
stein
a canteen jugger flash a vessel of any
kind fill it with your favorite liquid i
like coffee
and join me now
for the unparalleled pleasured
pleasured
unparalleled pleasure the dopamine of
the day
the thing that makes everything better
except the shipping containers it's
called the simultaneous sip and it
happens now go
ah
antibodies
well in no particular order
my favorite story of the day
i saw erica
you all know erica right
erica
tweeted this apparently
at a louisiana high school
there was a violent week of fighting at
the high school
and a bunch of dads
got together
to basically help out at the school so
this
volunteer group of dads
i'm looking at a meme of me as cornholio
that's happening over in locals right
now
so the dads on duty they put their
little shirts on they say dad's on duty
and they go hang out with the kids and
turns out the kids kind of like it which
is weird i'm not sure the reporting is
all accurate but it looks like
the students appreciated having some
adult
dad-like figures and the funny part of
the story is that the dads were just
making dad jokes
and the kids were laughing at the dad
jokes but it just changed it sort of
changed the vibe
of the school and apparently made a big
difference
so
kudos to dads on duty
uh if you saw this story
i feel like
this is one of those weird periods in
history right
now
if you saw the visual of the story
that all the dads are african-american
and
uh they're all big guys too they're like
they're just really big guys
and
i feel like i had to mention that even
though it's not relevant to the story
like we're in that weird time where
the fact that uh all the dads involved
seem to be black
somehow that mattered but it doesn't
matter like the story doesn't require it
but somehow it
adds flavor to the story or something
so um oh i guess maybe maybe this is
maybe this is the angle on that that
makes it a little special
is that it's just a great solution
maybe we can see more of it
i don't know
uh actor peter scolari passed away age
66 from cancer
i have a peter scalari
story
one of the weird things about my life
is i just end up meeting a lot of people
who
who end up being in the news
and years ago when i was doing a dilbert
tv show
we were casting for the the talent for
the various dilbert parts
and
just the interesting thing i learned
that involved peter scolari because he
was one of the people who uh
well i i can't use the word uh
tried out for the part and that's the
point of the story so apparently in
hollywood there's there are three levels
of uh actors
at the bottom level the people who are
new to the game
um
i see i see you all like fighting you
naked
i saw your comment
um
so the three level of celebrities i
learned this when i was i was working
there at the bottom level they have to
audition for every role
because they're not famous nobody knows
them you just have to audition or you're
not going to get the job
at the next level up
you still need to audition
but you're a little bit famous or even
you know a lot famous
and they don't want to call it an
audition
so you do a fake audition
but you call it a meeting
and so
peter scalari was already quite
successful from you know bosom buddies
and other stuff
and
so when when his name came up and we
invited him in to i think he was
trying for the role of the dilbert voice
if i recall
and
uh you have to do this whole thing where
you you pretend you're not
actually um
you're not actually doing an interview
you just have a conversation
and so you pretend that when he tries
out
he auditions that he's actually just
having a conversation with him he's not
actually auditioning
so so it goes like this you know you'll
be you know hey what do you think of
this you know interested in this role
you know you make conversations and
stuff and and at some point the actor
will say yeah you know and so let me
look at this uh
you know were you looking for something
like you know he'll do a voice he'll do
a take and you'll say yeah yeah that's
pretty good uh
well you know we're thinking about that
maybe maybe a little
more serious or something maybe give him
a note but you wouldn't ask him to do it
again
he would have to volunteer to do it
again
so this whole weird etiquette of how to
deal with you know different levels of
celebrity you just can't ask him to
audition he's just got a volunteer
anyway he didn't get the job
but i will tell you he was he was very
talented
the the the people who were successful
professionals actors and actresses i'm
not even sure if you use actors anymore
they could do different takes on the
same character
and other people couldn't
and it was fascinating to watch so
somebody like a peter scolari
could come in and give you you know one
one kind of vibe
and then you'd say well you know make
this change and they could give you a
whole different vibe
for the for the voice and others just
couldn't do it they could do 10 versions
of the same voice
so there is a difference between those
who can act and those who can't and
i will say peter's glory had it he had
the gift
and i got to see it live and it was a it
was a treat
um
and by the way at the top level of the
stardom you don't ask them to do
anything you just offer them the part
right if it's tom cruise you just offer
them the part
uh the best biden means that we saw
coming out of the strange behavior where
biden's hands were in front of him like
beavis and butthead and cornholio i
don't know how many you saw but the ones
i liked were the
the meme where somebody put ski poles in
his hands put him on the ski ski slope
the jet pack was good did you see the
jet pack one
lifting off of the jet pack
the riding a tiny horse
he had the reins in his hands he's on
top of a miniature horse
very good
very good
and of course cornhole leo was my
favorite did i miss one
um
did i miss one the llama oh was there a
homor oh or the ice cream cones that was
actually my idea was he was holding two
ice cream cones and somebody
photoshopped that in there
holding corn dogs
i absolutely love
this era where you can you can turn
something into a video or visual mean in
an hour
oh yeah the rock'em sock'em robots that
was a good one too
all right those are all good
um
what else is happening
so cnn is covering the alec baldwin
story and has a big article about it and
i guess we learned today
that allegedly the prop person handed
alec baldwin this gun
and announced that it was quote a cold
gun
now a cold gun in the lingo of uh i
guess the business
is it means it's not loaded
and then allegedly and this part is
unclear it looks like
alec baldwin might have aimed into
somebody but i don't know that that's
true i think that was debunked
so
we've got some sort of conflicting
stories
it's unclear if it was intentionally
aimed at anybody even in joke
or it just went off
you know accidentally in some way
yeah now here's the part you're i had to
be in the comments here you know exactly
where i'm going on this cnn does this
story
without ever mentioning
that it shouldn't have made any
difference
what the prop person said
are you with me
anybody with the smallest ounce
of common sense or gun training you know
gun safety training
you don't take somebody's word for it
that a gun is unloaded
is there anything more basic than that
do you know who i don't believe if they
tell me if they hand me a gun and tell
me it's not loaded
do you know who i don't
trust everyone
everyone
there's no exception
if the pope
hands you a gun and says don't worry
it's not loaded
check it
check it
because you don't know the pope is
telling you the truth
don't take a chance
so somehow they can write that story
without mentioning the most basic gun
safety facts
that it shouldn't have mattered
who made that mistake
there were 10 ways for the accident not
to happen and all of them involved just
normal common sense
so i don't think we can
let anybody off the hook by saying oh he
didn't know it was loaded
that doesn't count sorry no credit for
don't know it was loaded
my favorite joke so far
in the totally inappropriate category
let me give you a test
are we adult enough
that we can handle the contradiction
that i think most of us genuinely see
this as
a i hope
as a real tragedy with real people who
who really will have to suffer forever
the survivors
will have to suffer forever the loss of
their loved one
and of course the deaths themselves so
it's a tragedy
and as humans we need to point that out
but
are we not allowed
to enjoy the jokes
what do you think
where do you stand on that
my take is i can't help it
i feel like it's beyond my control
if something's funny
i laugh at it
and i don't know how many of you have
the same feeling but
the thing that makes these jokes
make you laugh
is that they're so deeply inappropriate
am i right
if they were not deeply inappropriate
would they really be funny no
so in many ways
i'm giving you uh i'm giving you an out
right so somebody accuses you of
laughing at these jokes here's your out
they're funny because they're
inappropriate
it's true right it's the
inappropriateness the fact that
it's a tragedy
that's why you're laughing
if it were not deeply inappropriate you
wouldn't have two things in
sort of atom balance which is what
triggers the uh the reflex to laugh
so i'm going to give you permission to
enjoy this but maybe not right in front
of the victims or their families okay
i hope they're staying off the internet
today
um but wendy rogers who's an arizona
state senator had the tweet of the day
in my opinion
now what i like about this tweet is it's
coming from somebody who's not a
professional humorist
who somehow crafted
a perfect joke
okay so a non-professional
wendy rogers somehow crafted a perfect
tweet
you want to hear it
of course you do
here's her tweet
hillary clinton dick cheney and alec
baldwin go hunting
how does that play out
come on that's pretty clever
that's pretty funny
now here's what i liked about it
the the ending how does that play out
is perfect
just in terms of joke
construction because
and this is a
basically where hypnosis and humor
overlap
what is beautiful about this punchline
is the question how does that play out
allows you to imagine your funniest
version
that's a hypnosis trick now i doubt
she's studied hypnosis
but leaving stuff out so that the
audience can fill in the joke is really
good form now i don't know if she's just
really good at this
wendy rogers or if she you know
she just hit one out of the park lucky
swing but this is a perfect joke
i looked at this i read this like five
times i was like
god that there's not one wasted word in
that sentence there's nothing you could
change in that that would make that
better
anyway
so we got some runaway inflation it
looks like
or do we
does anybody understand how inflation
works
uh is anybody old enough here and i know
some of you are do you remember
stagflation
remember in the the uh
was it the jimmy carter years we had
stagflation
and
then all the experts said whoa now we
know what stagflation is
and we know what conditions will cause
it in the future
and then those conditions happen again
in the future and what happened
no stagflation
so we don't even know what caused it
apparently well i mean i don't
because we were pretty sure that
it was going to happen again and then it
just didn't
now of course there are lots of
variables in play so you have to have
all the other things lined up to get the
same result and we didn't
now
how good are we at predicting
economic stuff
not really good are we
that doesn't mean it's not a problem
what it does mean is i can't tell
right and i remind you too often i have
a degree in economics i don't know if
we're in trouble or not
and i'm not sure i would trust anybody's
opinion on this because people have been
so wrong about inflation and stagflation
and national debt we don't even know
what national debt is
we don't even know what it is like just
the most basic stuff about the economy i
don't think anybody knows
like you know and the problem is that
there are just so many variables right
so something could happen with a war a
shortage
some kind of bottleneck thing nobody i
don't think anybody saw the supply chain
thing coming maybe they did i don't know
but
um
i guess my only takeaway on the runaway
inflation hyperinflation risk
is we don't really know
maybe
maybe
all right britain it looks like they're
first in line to get these new
antivirals the therapeutics
coming to us from pfizer and merck
so there would be pills that you take
they could reduce the risk of
uh that mild to moderately ill people
reduce their risk of disease by 50
percent i'm sorry the risk of you know
serious hospitalization and death
by 50
to which i say
if you can reduce
the winter surge by 50
and again other people saying we already
have
therapeutics yeah we've already got
regeneron et cetera
given all the ways that we've learned to
treat covet
given the fact that our most vulnerable
or mostly vaccinated
given the fact that the people most
likely to die a lot of them already died
i feel like
the argument for keeping any
restrictions in place
really just became irrational didn't
they at least after the bills are
available so they're not available yet
maybe the end of the year
but if we're in january and we've got
these antivirals i don't know if they
can produce enough of them fast enough
but if we had them in january
what would be the argument for any
ongoing
restrictions now the argument of course
is to reduce deaths but if you can if
you can reduce them by 50 percent
isn't that going to be enough
i mean we keep doing things that reduce
the risk by 50
how many times do you have to cut it in
half before you're you're okay
they've been irrational since yeah
they've been irrational for a while
long-term effects unknown
correct
long-term effects of the anti-viral
drugs unknown
long-term effects of getting a covet
unknown hey i have a question for you
i'm just going to put this out there
so we keep hearing about all of the
so-called long-haul
covid problems so people get the covid
and let's say they have a bad case of it
but then
but then for weeks or months they have
symptoms
i'm just going to put this out there
because the the range of symptoms seem
pretty broad
have you ever had a
surgery
so i've had
three surgeries none of them super major
right i had
you know a couple of nasal things etc
some polyps in my sinus
and so none of them were major surgeries
but each of them required
anesthesia how long does it take you to
recover from anesthesia in surgery and i
don't mean that day
i mean how many months
have you ever had a minor surgery
it takes months doesn't it to feel to
feel right even after your problem is
completely solved you know whatever the
actual cutting was about of the surgery
the there's something like a fog that
somebody says like a year
right
now last year or actually during the
pandemic i had some surgery that was uh
delayed for months and months
and months many of you know the story
had some sinus polyps that needed to be
removed
and so the surgery was delayed and part
of that delay put me on prednisone
so i got in prednisone for
you know a period
and then i thought i was going to go
from that and the prednisone reduces the
polyps in the meantime until you can get
the surgery
then the surgery got cancelled delayed
so
i got on prednisone again a second dose
within a year which is sort of a lot
because getting off a prednisone is kind
of a problem
and then i had it a third time
so i believe if i'm remembering right
there were three separate
extended periods of prednisone
it took me
months
to be able to walk upstairs after i got
off prednisone
months
and i was in good shape
right i mean i was i was a gym rat
and just the prednisone it wasn't even
the illness and it wasn't it wasn't even
the uh
wasn't even the surgery
but just getting off a prednisone
if you have too much of it
it's it's months
like i would get to the top of the
stairs and i'd be like ah
now it's fine i can i can run upstairs
you know easily
now
prednisone is a steroid right
don't you get prednisone when you get
cold
isn't that a pretty normal
uh pretty normal prescription am i right
about that
and
and if you get prednisone do you get it
long enough that you have the problem i
had
because i don't i don't think they give
it to you that long right
because i was on it for a few weeks i
think each time
yeah so here's my question
how many of what we what people are
reporting to be long covered you know
months long symptoms how many of those
symptoms are caused by the treatment
or the or just recovering from a bad
illness in general
if something if something just knocks
you on your ass
whatever it is it could be just a bad
regular flu
don't you have
lasting
issues from that like a few weeks later
a few weeks later you've still got some
problems i don't know i'll just put that
out there that a lot of the reported
long haul might have
might be just the trauma of the
experience itself
all right um
let's go brandon
all right i need i need a little help
here
a little help uh i would like to employ
the global brain
calling on all viewers
to be part of a single intelligence
i'm gonna set you up and then your
global brain will be unleashed
right
have you noticed and this is not my
original observation that let's go
brandon starts with l g b
as in lgbtq
can we think of the t in the queue
so that let's go brandon
total quality
or something
i don't know i just feel like there's
some way to make a meme or a joke out of
this you know with
being respectful of course to the lgbtq
community
don't want to insult them unnecessarily
uh but it's a weird coincidence isn't it
oh there it is somebody already has the
the show there's already t-shirt lgbt
let's go brandon team
let's go brandon teachers quit
totally quit
all right i'm looking at your take
quaaludes
uh
let's go brandon to quantico
um
too quantico okay
i didn't quit
uh
let's get brandon too quick there we go
let's get brandon to quit
that's it
oh it's already a shirt it's already a
shirt i'm saying i'm seeing a video of
it
here on the locals platform so you can't
see it here on
on netflix but over on the locals
platform they're they're posting
pictures of it
yeah let's get back
let's get biden to quit
actually says let's get biden to quit
all
right um
here's a segment i call
citizens doing the work of governments
you ready for this
citizens doing the work of governments
so what's our big problem it's the
supply chain as you know
and i'm going to read you a tweet thread
because i want to see where you see an
example
of a citizen solving maybe we don't know
if it's a solution yet but certainly it
looks like leadership from citizens as
opposed to government now the question
is who's in charge of the supply chain
problem
biden
footage edge anybody we don't know
but uh ryan peterson
private citizen and ceo of flexport who
is in the business of uh logistics and
stuff
for shipping
all right so here's somebody who's a ceo
of a shipping logistics um entity
and so therefore has an understanding of
you know the big picture right
so ryan peterson
um tweets
the following and i'm going to read the
whole tweet if you don't mind
because
normally i would you know summarize it
but i don't want to get anything wrong
and i think that this is important not
only because
you can see a citizen doing the work of
government here basically but
um
you'll you'll get the whole you'll get
the little picture i'll just read it all
right so this was uh tweeted yesterday
by ryan peterson ceo of flexport he says
yesterday i rented a boat and took the
leader of one of flexport's partners in
long beach on a three-hour
tour of the port complex here's a thread
about what i learned all right so the
first part is he went in person
right he didn't he didn't read the
internet he went in person to talk to
the people
at the port all right so
i keep asking can anybody explain what
the problem is and nobody can right
have you noticed that nobody can explain
what the freaking problem is exactly
they think it's drivers and you know all
kinds of stuff well here's what he found
out
okay he goes to the port he goes uh the
ports i guess we went to two of them the
ports of la and long beach are at a
standstill in a full three-hour loop
through the poor complex
passing every single terminal we saw
less than
a dozen containers get unloaded
so the in three hours they only saw
fewer than 12 containers get
unloaded okay
so did you think it was about trucks
all right we'll keep going
there are hundreds of cranes
i counted only seven that were even
operating
and they seemed to be going pretty
slowly
so it's not cranes
got lots of cranes
okay
it seems that everyone now agrees
that the bottleneck is yard space at the
container terminals
the terminals are simply overflowing
with containers
and he'll say later that's mostly empty
ones
which means they no longer have space to
take in new containers either either
from ships or land it's a true traffic
jam because it says right now if you
have a chassis so that would be the the
truck with nothing on it
with no empty container on it you can go
pick up containers at any port terminal
however
if you have an empty container on that
chassis
they're not allowing you to return it
except on highly restricted basis
meaning the government
here it is
government problem if you can't get the
empty off the chassis you don't have a
chassis to go back and pick up the next
container
and if nobody goes to pick up the next
container
the port remains jammed
ask yourself have you heard anything
like this until now
all of the news you've read
all the people speculating has anybody
told you this
it's the first time i heard it i'll go
on
um
with the yards so full carrier slash
terminals are being highly restrictive
and where and when they will accept
empties
so i guess you can bring the empty to
the yard also containers are not
fungible between carriers meaning you
know one one carrier can't use somebody
else's container
so the truckers have to drop their empty
off at the right terminal
this is causing empty containers to pile
up
this one trucking partner alone has 450
containers
sitting on chassis right now
450 trucks
they can't use
that are perfectly good trucks
presumably with drivers
and they can't use them
because they have empty chassis on them
and no place to put them
because of government regulations
you see where this is going
um
all right
this is a trucking company with six
yards that represent 153 owner operator
drivers
so he has almost three containers
sitting on chassis at his yard
for every driver on the team
he can't take the containers off the
chassis because he's not allowed
by the city of long beach zoning code to
store empty containers more than too
high in his truck yard this was tweeted
yesterday
today
today
the mayor of long beach
just announced that they're going to
allow them to pile the containers more
than too high
so this this government regulation that
looks like
it was uh
at least in long beach so we don't know
about la yet
but it looks like they'll pile them high
with the chassis all tied up storing
empties they can't be returned to the
port there are no chassis available blah
blah
oh okay and with all the containers
piling up in the terminal yard the
longshoremen can't unload the ships
right so they're literally just too many
empties they just can't unload the ships
and so the queue grows longer when now
over 70 ships
containing 500 000 containers are
waiting offshore
the line is going to get longer not
shorter
this is a negative feedback loop you
know so the worse it gets the worse i
guess uh all right how do we fix this so
now he talks about solutions now when i
talk about the solutions
and when ryan peterson talks about the
solutions here's the attitude you should
take toward it
not necessarily that this is the exact
solution
but directionally okay so if you can
tell yourself this is a directional area
to go you won't get too wound up about
the details of it
he said
what we can do that's fast basically he
says when you're designing an operation
you must choose your bottleneck
bottleneck so here's a design note you
have to choose your bottleneck if the
bottleneck appears somewhere that you
didn't choose it
you aren't running an operation it's
running you so he's saying it's poorly
designed by its nature
you should always choose the most
capital intensive part of the line to be
your bottleneck
now he doesn't explain that but
capital intensive presumably means it's
easier to flex your capital
in other words get more money
than it is to get more people or more
anything else i'm guessing that's what
it means
in a port that's the ship to shore
cranes
the cranes should never be unable to run
because they're waiting for another part
oh okay
so the most capital i have that wrong so
the most capital intensive part is the
cranes
and they're not running so that means
it's not a well-designed system
so the bottleneck right now is not the
cranes it's the yard space
so we've got to get rid of those empties
all right
and he says that and here's somebody who
knows what they're talking about right
so he knows he knows systems and he
knows this industry so listen to this
advice
in operations when a bottleneck appears
somewhere that you didn't design for it
so in other words it's not in the crane
area because
they're designed for it i guess
you must overwhelm the bottleneck
overwhelm the bottleneck in other words
you don't want to peck away at it
you need to basically just drop
everything
and throw everything at the bottleneck
okay so how do you do that
he suggests an executive order in other
words
biden
effective immediately overriding the
zoning rules in long beach and los
angeles to allow truck yards to store
empty containers up to six high looks
like we got that 24 hours later i don't
know if this is just because of
ryan's involvement but i do know that
the government heard about his tweet
the day he tweeted so i made sure that
uh at least
some productive people in the media and
in the government were aware of this and
and are very aware of it and are you
know looking into it etc
so i can i can confirm that uh
productive parts of the government are
looking into this
and maybe maybe this is why it happened
fast i imagine that it doesn't happen
that fast so my in my imagination
probably they were already thinking
about this
stacking up the containers and it just
happened
so that's good news
then
ryan says two bring every container
chassis owned by the national
guard and the military anywhere oh so if
the military and the national guard have
trucks
that they can
carry different chassis or that they can
carry different containers on uh to
employ those
create a new temporary container yard
so you need probably 500 acres he thinks
and it could be government land or
something near the ports
so you need a a ton of land
temporarily
ideally temporarily
somewhere near the ports
how hard would it be to give 500 acres
available on short short notice well if
it's government land maybe that's fast
they can say
just use this government land what if
there's no government land
here's what i suggest if if this is
really something we need
if we really really need this for the
you know the health of the country
this is
basically a war
level problem
it's a war level problem people don't
act the same
when it's a little problem
as they do when it's a big problem right
people don't act the same in the
pandemic
as they do when they get a cold so i
believe this is a non-problem because if
joe biden ever went on tv and said you
know we can solve this thing if we get
500 acres
near the port
how long would it take
a patriot
a farmer a landowner somewhere how long
would it take at least one patriot to
say i got 500 acres
hell yeah
bring it over here
national problem
whole countries in a jam
i got 500 acres absolutely
just you know help me clean it up when
you're done
i i feel like that's a very solvable
problem in the context of a crisis
people would just step up i think
like i would like to think of that of my
fellow americans
uh ryan says also bring in barges and
small container ships and start hauling
containers out of long beach
to other smaller ports that aren't
backed up
now
uh this is not a comprehensive list so
as i said
think in terms of
all the different ways that you can get
rid of the empties
you know don't don't get obsessed by
these specific suggestions
but he does make the case that you could
probably do it
and you could probably do it fast if you
had the will and the leadership
i don't think it's a money problem i
don't think it's knowing what to do
problem anymore i think it's just a will
power
leadership brute force kind of situation
so we could probably power through it
um
and then he's got some other uh
he said he'd be happy to lead this
effort for the federal state government
well there you go
you even you haven't you even have
somebody who understands it and is
already a ceo
just volunteered to lead the effort
you know and you probably need somebody
who has this level of understanding
about the whole system
to really do anything productive because
you know any change to one part of the
system is going to ripple through the
rest of the system so you need somebody
who knows what kind of changes aren't
going to break the system somewhere else
so where's uh pete butterjudge
and why can't he make ryan peterson the
port
czar
just until we get this over with
i don't know
so i'm going to put this in the category
of
citizens doing what the government
couldn't do you remember the story i
told earlier today about the dads
just saying okay the school is failing
the government is failing
how about you and i put on these dad
shirts and go fix the school and so they
did because the government couldn't fix
it so the dads went and fixed it and
succeeded
so the government was so far pretty
close to worthless on this whole supply
chain issue so a citizen says well
maybe i'll solve it
i'm saying the same thing
like literally right now what i'm doing
is
making sure that enough people have
heard this idea why
because the government isn't doing it
like i am literally doing the
government's job right now
for free
and i'm happy to do it because i'm a
patriot
and the country has a crisis
of course i want to help
so does ryan peterson so does somebody
with 500 acres somewhere
so does
anybody who's got a truck and can put it
empty on it
but
just for fun
i'm going to take it to a new level
right
what follows is my whiteboard
presentation
of what to do with all the empties
don't take this too seriously
all right i'm going to present this in
the
spirit of
just stretching your mind a little bit
all right
i'm not
i wouldn't say this is a practical idea
but it's fun
it goes like this
let's say you got a port
here's your port
you want to get rid of all these
containers
now let's say that not too far away
there's a mountain
right
i'm going to solve all the world's
problems at once you ready
just all at once
you're going to take these containers
and you know
line them up on the mountain
butt to bop
until
you have the equivalent
of a tunnel
a tunnel
now you'd have to
open up the you know once you stuck them
together you'd have to you know weld
an opening between them but then imagine
you do that
so you open them up
and you've got this big ass tunnel
that goes up the hill or the mountain
have you ever heard of a heat chimney
have you ever heard of that concept
heat chimney
a heat chimney
a heat chimney
is when uh the natural rising of warm
air
is uh put through a chimney so basically
if you built this
all by itself it would start sucking in
warm air
because warm air rises and it would suck
it into this pole and it would exhale it
in there
and if it was a big enough
entity it would be pretty fast
now
wait for it wait for it
why would you do this
because you're going to build a co2
capture facility
on the top
co
2 capture
all right we know that we have
technology
i don't think you can even see this can
you
do
let me fix that a little bit
all right
so
uh if you were to build a co2 capture
device that pulls air that pulls the co2
out of the air
what is the biggest part of the expense
the biggest part of the expense i think
you'd have to fact check me on this
is energy
so the biggest part of the expense is
these big
big fans
that move the wind so you have to move
the air you force it through the filters
to get the co2 out
but what if you didn't need the fans
what if nature was your fan
what if
the warm air was warm enough at the
bottom
that by the time it got to the top it
was just like a hurricane
i'm not sure if the physics work to get
enough air flow but
could you get enough airflow
to build a cheap co2 capture on the top
of a hill
boom solving climate change
and the shipping container problem at
the same time
now
is this a practical plan
no
and it wouldn't happen fast
but
i just like to put two eyes do this
together now and then because it's good
for your creativity
um sometimes
sometimes
it's useful to hear what's called the
bad version of the idea i've talked
about this before it's a hollywood trick
if you don't have a good idea for
uh let's say a script
you know what what does the character do
now if you don't have a good idea throw
out the bad one
because the bad one will make somebody
say well that won't work
but it does remind me of something that
will
so he says do you realize we still need
those empty containers
we'll make more
we'll make more
because you know
i'm not talking about uh we're not
talking about enough containers that
would change the global
container situation
and i'm not talking about really using
containers for this because there's got
to be an easier way to make a pipe
than containers
but
here's the only the only question that i
ask is this could you create a situation
with a
heat chimney on a on a hill because it's
easier to build it on a hill because you
don't need to support it
you know laying something down on the
ground is easier than building a
structure a mile high right you just lay
it there
now would you be able to get enough air
flow
to power a co2 scrubber
engineers engineers
anybody anybody
do we have
i i know a huge percentage of your
engineers
and i'm waiting for you to weigh in
come on tell me why it won't work
because you
uh
okay this is no i know it's not
practical to fix the container problem
but um
yeah but the co2 capture is useless
okay
uh
spotted owl problem yes
solar would be cheaper
maybe
homeless houses you know i also thought
about that but
you know imagine if you put 500
containers turn sideways in the field
and just let the homeless people camp
out in it it'd be better than being
outdoors
but i think we can do better than that
for the homeless
elon musk's boring tool
there you go
um yeah so let me let me do that so
imagine instead of using containers
that's probably a better idea isn't it
if you use the the boring company
b-o-r-i-n-g
so instead of uh laying down the pipe
you just more bore a tunnel
yeah i know maybe
maybe
maybe so
um
all right let's see what else we're
going to talk about that was just for
fun
but
you see this pattern of citizens doing
the work of the government don't you
what's that about
i've never i think we've never seen that
before it has something to do with
social media makes it possible right
because it just wouldn't be possible
without it
all right here's my other favorite story
i have a new favorite athlete
inez
i don't know if i'm pronouncing it right
e-n-e-s is it inez or ennis
eunes cantor
apparently he made some comments about
uh
china
um
he made some comments about tibet
and china's treatment of tibet and china
started pulling nba broadcasts uh
which we think is in apparent
retaliation
so what does ennis cantor do
when he said something that has cost a
lot of money to his employer the nba
and caused an international
problem
does
does
ns say oops sorry about that
and i guess i'll go away now
does ns apologize to china and say oh
i'm sorry about that i guess i went a
little too far
he does not
he does not
here's what ns does
he makes a new video so instead of
complaining about tibet
he goes after the uyghur situation
he makes a video
a hammering china about the uyghur
situation and lays out the whole
brutality of it
um
here's what uh he says uh yeah i'm
calling you out talking about
xi jinping he says i'm calling you out
in front of the whole world close down
the slave labor camps and free the
uyghur people stop the genocide now
well
there may be a lot of nba players who
are kneeling for the anthem
and i don't care about them at the
moment
but
and as cantor i give you standing
ovation
standing ovation
[Applause]
[Applause]
and what is ns cantor doing
the government's
job he's doing the government's job
he's doing what biden should be doing
trump would be doing this
i think
wouldn't he
so
three examples in the news today
of citizens doing the job of the
government because the government wasn't
doing it
there's something going on
is it
is it because people are noticing that
we don't have a coherent government
because you know it seemed like the
citizen participation was also
happening under trump but it looked like
more of a it looked more like more of a
collaborative thing
than a desperation thing
at the moment it looks more like
desperation we don't have a government
we better do this ourselves
but under trump it looked more like oh
he actually listens to what people say
so if you have a good idea maybe it'll
get implemented and sure enough you know
i've told you the story of
uh submitting a good idea and next thing
you know it's an executive order
so
uh
mr cab is asking if my hair is growing
back
uh interestingly it did grow back when i
was on prednisone
uh not permanently but even the the bald
spots started filling back in
that's scary
but it was temporary
um
do you know before federal attacks
tariffs were imposed on ships i don't
know if the relevance of that yet
all right
so in a new york times opinion piece
paul krugman
says uh china has big problems coming
china has big problems coming
big problems that
it feels like the wording of that sounds
familiar doesn't it
have you heard that from anyone before
is there anybody who's been saying in
public
that china has big problems coming
so that's the headline
big problem is coming
does it sound familiar
it should
because uh china has big problems coming
i think i've mentioned it before
i believe i mentioned it before
yeah
and uh one of the big problems
among the big problems are they
apparently they tried to hide their
economic situation by building massive
uh real estate
projects that
didn't get used you know nobody nobody
moved into them
oh yes i did say that yes i did
have i told you how i
track my influence
now is of course it's not scientific and
not 100 reliable but one of the ways i
track it is by um language
you know if somebody uses the same term
you say i wonder if two people came up
with that at the same time or one was
influenced by the other
so you can never know it could be that's
just
an obvious phrase so you see it more
than once
we'll see
but paul krugman who i know certainly
people on the
right political right don't think his uh
predictions have been so good
but he says they got big trouble
big trouble coming
and i think he's right
you know have i told you the interplay
between economics and psychology
that economics is
unless you have a physical constraint
like the the ports have a physical
constraint
economics is mostly a psychology issue
if you think things are going to be good
next year you invest
if you think the prices are going up
because of inflation maybe you buy
something now so basically your
expectations and your psychology drive
the entire economy
what happens to china's economy when
everybody understands that it's not safe
to do business there
that they got big problems
it's a problem if if this psychology
breaks the economy rigs
what would it take for china's
psychology to break in a way that breaks
the economy
well
it might take paul krugman a no you know
nobel
winner for economics to tell you that
you're in deep deep trouble i mean he
could be right or he could be wrong but
the more people with his credentials who
tell china they're doomed
the more somebody's going to believe him
right
the more people talk about problems
somebody's saying i look like that
character that was once on babylon 5. i
assume you know that i was on babylon 5
right that's why you're saying that
i
there's an old sci-fi show called
babylon 5. i had a
a small part on that
because i'd said some good things about
the show so they invited me on to be a
character i was not a good actor
yes and covet is coming for china so
apparently china has an outbreak in
several provinces
i don't see any way
that china doesn't have a
a big big problem coming
because i just don't think you can keep
it out and i don't know that they can
vaccinate fast enough
so i don't think kovan will be the thing
that takes him down
i think it'll be something else
have you seen raised by wolves on hbo
um
no
but i just got interested in that
yesterday remind me what that was about
i remember that the title of it raised
by wolves was completely misleading has
nothing to do with anything like that
what is it about
yeah no i was in babylon 5 for one
episode
in which i played uh someone who i
played a guy who was looking for his dog
i want to say
somebody actually posted it here
um so the people on locals can see it
but let me show you
see if you can see it here on youtube
if you watched the show
that was me when i had hair
in a scene with uh mr garibaldi who was
playing security in the scene
now here here's the uh funny part you
see the
the minbari alien behind me over my
shoulder
so that was my longtime girlfriend at
the time
uh pam and pam is uh you know
japanese-american
and
so uh
you know they made her as a
japanese-american minbari
and uh she had like six hours of makeup
or something to get that look and her
only role was to stand back there and
carry my briefcase
and i had i think two lines or something
that i blew
i believe yeah somebody said garibaldi
is a poor man's bruce willis
that's pretty funny
i think he passed away if i'm not
mistaken i think
i think that actor passed away
so i'll tell you just a little that
actor's story
so
so the reason i was invited to be on the
show as sort of a guest character was
because i'd said it was my favorite show
at the time so they they liked it i said
that in public so they invited me to be
on as a character yeah jerry doyle was
the name of the actor
and uh i did my lines a few times and
and blew them even though it was like
two lines i you know
if you're not an actor it's a lot of
pressure to get that right
and
i finally got the line right
but it happened to be exactly when the
entire cast decided to prank me so it
ruined the scene
so
i forget the details i think they all
the rest of the cast of which there were
just lots of them you know because it
was a in a cafe scene where there'd be
lots of extras and stuff
so they they were waiting to
some part of the scene and then
everybody just like rushed
rushed us
like it was just like this big crowd
just
and it was just a prank you know to play
on the new guy
uh but i think that was the first time i
got the line right they ruined the scene
but i eventually got it
um
yes and they did not they did not hand
me a hot gun
these pretzels are making me thirsty
what's that from
oh yeah the minbari were the best aliens
ever
if you haven't by the way i'll tell you
my favorite scene
um i'm blanking on the name of the show
runner who wrote i think you wrote every
episode as one guy
and there was one bit of the writing
that i just thought was brilliant there
was a scene in this
um tv show in which the minbari
you know the head
head minbari person
was uh almost killed in a
in an attack
but it turned out it was
minbari
who was trying to kill their own minbari
leader
and
the the person who stopped it
decided not to tell
the leader
who it was that was behind the attack
and the reason was he didn't want the
leader
to be
thank you joe straczynski was the
showrunner wrote all these he didn't
want the leader
to think less
of the
people she was leading
and therefore kept that information from
her because he didn't want to ruin his
leader by
turning her against you know her own
people
and i really i just love that part of
the
scene i'm watching dune right now i'm
three quarters through it i can't i
can't watch a whole movie at once
but uh i
the the original dune
was maybe one of the worst films ever
made i tried to watch that so many times
and you get it's just so slow
but the new one it looks like they fixed
the bad parts
it's it's good i'm enjoying it
all right
um
looks like it's time
for us to say goodbye
and
it's kind of a slow-ish news day
how was this episode
i can never tell
all right some people liked it on locals
good
um
just looking at your comments oh okay
well on locals people liked it
how about youtube
sophistry hour
you know the the sophistry people i
don't know
this is something wrong with everybody
who uses that insult
i don't know if anybody has ever accused
anybody of sophistry without themselves
being defective in some way
maybe i don't know
i think usually it's a cognitive
dissonance when people use that word
because there's something that they
didn't agree with
that they have to imagine there's
something wrong with the speaker and
sophistry is one of those words you
could just throw in there because you
don't have to defend it well i don't
have to defend it it's just sophistry
um
soporific is the word
uh
oh i lost you on the heat chimney stuff
i remember the heat chimney stuff wasn't
serious
but i thought it would be interesting to
learn learn a couple of concepts if you
learned about a heat chimney
and you learned about co2 scrubbers
that's all i wanted
you need to expand your news sources i
think i do
but the new sources where would i expand
it to
i have a horse weiner pointed at me
uh
all right
that's all for now and i will talk to
you tomorrow and if the government
doesn't fix things we'll do it
we'll do it ourselves damn it
