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June 20, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:13:08
Episode 111 - Analogies are Destroying the Country
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's starting to look like the summer of love is not working out quite the way I hoped.
But you know what does work out exactly the way I hoped?
Coffee. Some of you call it coffee, but you weren't born where I was born.
Where I was born, it's coffee.
And we're going to have some.
It's going to be good. It's going to be the best coffee you've had in the last 10 minutes.
I promise you that.
Mmm. Simultaneous sip is the best sip ever.
So let's start with some good news.
There's a feel-good story most of you have missed because you're looking at all the bad stories today.
The feel-good story is that at the World Cup, apparently there are two countries that are famous for bringing their own garbage bags and cleaning up the stands after the match.
And apparently it's just a cultural preference for not leaving litter.
So one of them is Japan, and the other is Senegalese.
Am I saying that right? Senegalese?
So apparently their fans like to clean up the stands before they leave.
So yeah, Japan is one, and then...
Oh, Senegal. I'm sorry.
Senegal is the other.
And it was kind of awesome just to see them stay late to pick up garbage.
And think to yourself...
Yes, my mic is on, so if you can't hear me, it's probably at your end.
So, respect to Japan and Senegal for being good citizens and caring about the people that they interact with.
Alright, let's talk about the story of the day.
Children being ripped from their parents and kept in cages.
I like to start this discussion the same way every time.
There are no people in this discussion who want children separated from parents.
It would be a big mistake to imagine that there are two sides to that.
Nobody wants that.
There is, however, a difference of the long term and the short term.
There are some people who say, stop that happening right now, even if it makes things worse in the long run, because it might encourage more people to come.
And there are other people saying, yes, we don't like it, but in the short run, it is the best way to keep fewer people from coming in the long run.
Now, those two positions are unsolvable, because they're both imaginary.
You have to imagine what happens in the future, and you can't prove it.
So you have two sides which can't resolve and never will.
I don't see any way. There's no logic.
There's no nothing that makes this go away.
If you fixed it tomorrow, it wouldn't go away because it already happened.
So there is no fixing this.
So we just have to deal with the fact that the country just split in two.
More so than ever.
You saw... I'm sure by now you've seen a clip of Corey Lewandowski making the unfortunate noise when someone on CNN, another pundit, was describing a child with Down syndrome being removed from a parent.
That was not the best move any supporter of the president ever made.
In fact, it was just about the worst thing anybody ever did.
It would be hard for me to imagine anything worse than that.
It was literally just the worst thing he could have done.
Short of pulling out a weapon or something, I don't know how it could be worse than that.
If I can give you any advice, first lead with empathy, and then make your point.
If you don't lead with empathy, nobody's going to listen to the rest of it.
So we all care about the children.
It does look like a bad situation.
We'd all like it to be fixed.
Now, remember I told you that if North Korea started going in a good direction, it was going to cause a massive cognitive dissonance cluster bomb.
Now, I didn't see this specific topic coming, but you can see how perfectly it fit the times.
Because half the country was in some kind of mental distress because their worldview had been falsified.
The president had not done anything Hitler-ish, and indeed it looks like he was on his way to solving nuclear risk with North Korea.
That is a very dangerous place for a mind to be, and I predicted that people would go crazy in a way we hadn't seen since right after the election.
We're seeing that now.
This is absolutely a mass hysteria, which is separate from the real problem of children being separated.
So the base problem is all real, and we all care about that.
All right? But the amount of concentration on this one problem when the world is full of problems and the amount of emotion people are applying to it is so far out of proportion that it's pretty much what I expected but I didn't expect this particular trigger.
So people are going nuts because half of the country believes That the other half is okay with child abuse.
And of course, we don't live in that world.
We don't live in a world where half of the country is actually okay with child abuse.
That is absolutely just an illusion.
It's not an illusion that it's happening.
It's not an illusion that kids are being taken away.
But let me just list some of the illusions and the bad thinking that's going on.
People believe that they know how to think and make decisions.
But in fact, most people don't.
And I say this without any unkindness.
People who have not learned how to think don't know how.
You actually have to go to school to learn it in most cases.
Let me give you an example.
I studied economics and business in college, and the main thing you learn there, probably the main thing, is how to compare things.
That sounds obvious, right?
How do you compare things?
But most people can't do it.
Here's how most people think.
Hey, that thing is bad.
We have to stop doing that.
That's it. That's how an untrained person thinks.
Something's bad. It's bad.
Stop doing it. Let me give you an example.
Taxes are bad. Takes money from people who don't have enough money.
Let's stop doing it. Taxes are bad.
Don't do it. That's not really thinking.
Because the second part is, compare to what?
If you stop taxing, what happens to society, etc.
So if you haven't studied economics or anything else that would help you think, say the law, I would think maybe studying science or engineering, those would get you to the same place.
You would know how to compare things.
So what you're watching is a national debate run by people who did not study economics How to think.
Because journalists don't really, you know, live in that world.
They live in a world of emotion, and how do you make people feel?
So most of the people who are talking about this are not, in the same sentence, they're not saying this is bad, but it's worse than this other thing.
Because most people have not been trained to even know how to think.
So you're seeing a big separation between the people who say, yeah, this is terrible in the short run, but nobody has a better long-run solution.
Because if you just allow the kids to be set free or the families to be set free, this sends the message to, hey, it's a free pass into the United States.
Then everybody comes, and then your smallish problem becomes a bigger problem.
Now, if you don't know how to think, you don't worry about that long-term stuff, because that's the comparison you ignore.
You just go to the small, and you say, hey, children being taken from parents.
That's it. That's bad, right?
So, number one problem is people who don't know how to compare things, especially they don't know how to compare the short run to the long run.
The other problem is that when you don't know how to think, you substitute in something you think is thinking, and that's analogies.
How long have I been telling you that analogies are not thinking?
They're just things that remind us of other things.
What is the analogy that's ripping the country apart right now?
Well, you can thank people like General Hayden and mostly everybody at CNN. The analogy that's ripping the country apart is taking children from parents is like Nazi Germany and death camps.
So if you don't know how to think And the best you can do is find an analogy.
You're being guided by other people who have thought first or said something first, not really thinking, until you say, well, I guess that's thinking.
That's what thinking looks like.
If it feels like a death camp to me, then I guess that's the way it'll go.
I can predict that.
So this morning, just maybe an hour ago, Somebody on Twitter said to me, challenging me, because back during the campaign, I had said that if Trump did something that looked even a little bit like Hitler, I would change sides.
I would be anti-Trump the moment I saw something Hitler-ish occurring.
And people are saying, well, here it is, ripping children from parents, just like Hitler.
What do you say, Scott?
Are you changing sides?
To which I say, well, I don't change my mind based on bad analogies.
Let me give you the first problem that's wrong with the immigration equals death camps analogy.
A death camp, a concentration camp is designed and managed to kill people.
I think we're on the same page with that, right?
A death camp is designed to kill people.
That's what it's for. Compare that to the immigration facility, which is designed and managed to keep people safe and alive.
Is that the same situation?
As designing a system to kill people?
Or, I know this is a hard question for at least half the country, or is it the direct opposite?
Now, if you just say, how does it feel?
And you see a picture of a parent and a child being separated, you say to yourself, my God, that feels awful.
Do you know what else feels awful?
A death camp. They feel similar.
But you say to yourself, that specific element of separating the kids from the parents is so traumatic that that could only be thought of as child abuse.
Don't tell me that the ends justify the means, which, by the way, I'm going to talk about in a moment.
Don't tell me the ends justify the means.
That's some Nazi talk there.
If you do something that traumatizes a kid, specifically removing them from a parent...
You've done something terrible.
Do you know who else separates parents from kids?
The emergency room of the hospital.
Doesn't the hospital separate children from kids?
No, not as long.
And they have visiting rights.
But in the detention centers, they also have the right to call.
Apparently they get two phone calls a day or something.
Probably could work a lot better, the connection, communication between parents and kids.
But I would say if you're working on an analogy, if your system is designed to help people, that's more like a hospital, isn't it, than like a death camp?
I'm just checking the analogies.
If you've designed something to help people, but they don't all get a good result, that's a little closer to a hospital.
Then there's the issue of the kids screaming and crying, which activates our non-critical thinking.
Any adult who hears a child crying and in distress, that goes right to our most basic instincts, and we go whoop, and reason doesn't matter.
We will immediately sacrifice our lives and our welfare To help the kid crying.
But here's the thinking problem again.
You have to keep things in context.
Let me tell you other times I've heard children screaming like it was the end of their life.
I've heard it when somebody's smartphone is taken away from them.
I've heard it when a sibling was playing with one of their toys and wouldn't share.
Do you remember being dropped off at kindergarten?
I don't know if you can think back that long, but I don't have that many memories from my childhood, but I remember this one pretty specifically.
When kids were dropped off for the first day of kindergarten and the parents left, about something like, I don't know, a quarter or half of the kindergartens cried like it was the end of the world.
And why? Well, they were being separated from their parents and they didn't really understand if it was temporary, if it was permanent.
They didn't have a good sense of time.
What does it mean?
If you're in kindergarten, what does it mean that you can see your parents at the end of the day?
I mean, that might as well be 10 years from now.
So, the first context you have to put on this is that children are being put into distressful situations All the time, everywhere.
It's just part of their process.
Now, that is different from saying it's okay.
So I'm going to catch myself before I get taken out of context.
It's never okay to hurt a child for no reason.
It's never okay that children are put in distress.
It's never okay that they're separated from their parents.
But, in context, it is something society does on a regular basis all the time, because that's how you turn kids who can't handle life into adults who can.
You put them in situations they don't love, and they cry about it, but they get used to it.
Now, I'm not making an analogy between kindergarten and these detention facilities.
Because I'm not a bad thinker.
Analogies are not reasons.
I'm not saying that kindergarten's good, therefore detention is good.
I'm not saying that. If I did, I would be as irrational as the people who say detention centers are bad, the Holocaust is bad, therefore they're essentially the same thing.
All I'm making is one point, that in context, children cry bloody murder Fairly frequently.
There's a daycare center at the gym I go to, so people can drop off their kids for, I think, up to two hours.
You should hear some of the kids scream, because they're going to be in a really nice play facility for two hours, but not with their parents.
It's pretty loud.
So, if you put 100 kids in a facility, a few of them are gonna be screaming, and there's just no way around that.
But if you make a decision based on hearing the screams, you're not part of the thinking class.
You're part of the group that's been activated, you know, the part of your brain that says children are in distress, I'm going to go fix that.
I'm going to save it as quickly as possible.
Now, all right, so those are some of the mental problems.
We're bad at analogies.
We don't put things in context.
And here's the next one.
I heard this from a Catholic priest who was interviewed on CNN, I think.
And I forget which host, but the host put it to him, the long-term argument and said that the Trump administration says that if you don't do this in the short run, Things will be worse in the long run.
What do you say to that Catholic priest?
And the Catholic priest looked at him and was like, well, that's the old argument that the ends justify the means.
Now, I've talked to you before about that saying.
That saying, oh, you're saying the ends justify the means, is not thinking.
It's not even close to thinking.
It's almost the opposite of thinking.
Because you know what other situations, the ends justify the means?
All of the situations that we choose to do.
All of them. In every situation, Where we look at something and say, well, it looks like the benefits of this are greater than the costs.
So I guess I'll do the one where the benefits are greater than the costs.
Because it wouldn't make sense to do the one where the costs are greater than the benefits.
Because that's what thinking looks like.
Thinking looks like comparing costs and benefits.
And then you choose the one with the best mix.
The priest said...
This is a priest, somebody who's leading us in how we lead our life, said explicitly that you should not be looking at the costs versus the benefits.
You should only look at the cost.
And I'm thinking, well, that's maybe the worst advice I've ever heard in my life.
Of course, you want to pick the solution that is the best for the most children, as well as other considerations.
But, you know, unlike everybody else, we human beings are sort of spring-loaded To put children as a high priority, biologically, socially, and on every level.
And I buy into that as well.
If you're not taking care of the kids, you're denying your biological, social existence.
So everybody agrees on the priorities, at least in this society we do, and in this day and age.
But you still gotta pick the one, you have to pick the one, That has the most benefits at the lowest cost.
You're not absolved from that because you feel more than the person you're talking to.
You don't get to win your argument because you cried harder at the plight of the children who are genuinely in a bad situation in many cases.
Alright, so running through the errors in thinking.
Analogies are not thinking.
They're just things that remind you of other things.
If you're not comparing things, you're not thinking.
You have to compare it to alternatives.
You can't just say this one's bad, because that would allow you not to do anything.
You know, I don't want to exercise.
You know why? Because I get tired.
That's not thinking. The long-term benefit of exercise is worth getting tired.
That's thinking. Now, when children are involved, and especially when they're in any kind of danger, our critical facilities just go click and they're gone.
So it is perfectly understandable why you would get this reaction.
And then on top of it, you add The distress that people are feeling because they learned that their president they thought was Hitler may have solved North Korea and the economy's good and other things are going pretty well.
So they needed a release from that feeling of being so wrong personally.
And they've managed to take that emotion and transfer it into this issue, which makes them a little extra emotional about it.
Now the other thing I'm seeing is some kind of competition to show how much people care.
And I'm wondering if I'm wondering if this is some kind of evolutionary biological imperative or it's acting.
And I can't really tell.
So if you look at CNN, MSNBC now, you'll see...
I'm just going to go ahead and mock them.
You'll see MSNBC and CNN doing things like this.
Oh, God!
You Hitlers!
You Hillers! And I can't tell if they're acting.
Can you? Because it's entirely possible that it's not acting.
It's entirely possible that they've worked themselves into this state and it's genuine.
But you have to be skeptical because if somebody actually cared about the children, Wouldn't there be a hundred ways to help more children than this situation?
In other words, for the same amount of caring and resources, you know, money, time, and everything else, wouldn't there be lots of places all over the world where kids are in far worse situation?
In these detention centers, as bad as they are.
And again, I have to pause every now and then to lead with empathy.
You wouldn't want your own kid in one of these facilities.
You wouldn't want to be separated from your own kid.
There's no minimizing of that from me.
Bad situation.
Everybody's agreeing. Okay.
But the truth is, if what you cared about was children, there are a hundred ways to spend your time more productively in ways that help more children, just different ones.
Just different ones.
How hard would it be to volunteer to work at one of these facilities?
Let's say you were bilingual, and just go in with an iPad, and there's somebody with an iPad at the other place, and you just go in and say, all right, we won't go in the cage with the people who are being detained, but we'll stand on the outside and say, hey, little boy, little girl, what's the name of your parents?
And then you call it up on the iPad and say, well, I'll help you have a conversation here.
And by the way, Just to remind you, child, this is temporary and we'll get you a good solution eventually.
So it seems like there are a lot of immediate things people could be doing to make things safer and better for these kids, and we hope that all that gets done.
We hope that a bad situation improves, etc.
But if what you cared about was the children, You wouldn't be obsessed on this situation where if you were to rank, you know, the distress of children around the world, this would be somewhere in the lower third, I would think, if you're looking at the entire world, because there would be kids starving and, you know, people in physical danger and being trafficked and everything else.
They'd be toward the top. But, you know, toward the bottom, you know, these kids are at least in physical safety, etc.
Now the other thing I'm seeing is we're seeing the medical community who are just as susceptible to the emotional override of their critical thinking.
So just because people are also trained in sciences, they're healthcare professionals, that doesn't make them rational.
All the time. It does make them more trained and more rational than most people most of the time.
But it doesn't make them rational in a situation where children are at risk.
That's everybody's big trigger.
Children, your brain just flips a bit.
So one of the things I'm seeing is the experts are weighing in and saying that there's a real lifelong risk to children being separated from parents.
But when they say that, they tend to talk about two things that muddy the waters.
One is, hey, there's this study about kids that were permanently separated from adults at a young age, and what happened to the child who was permanently separated?
Well, bad things.
Turns out there's a whole range of things which are more likely to happen that are bad for the child who was permanently separated.
How many studies are there about children who are temporarily, let's say just a few days, separated from parents?
I'm guessing zero.
Because if there were studies like that, we'd have studies of British boarding houses, you know, British boarding school.
We'd have studies of children who were sent to camp even though they didn't want to go.
We'd have studies of how much trauma you get for going to kindergarten versus homeschooling.
We have lots of things that would have been studied to find out how much trauma there is being separated just temporarily when you know you're going to be put back together.
Now, in the case of the really small children, they actually maybe don't understand that they will be reunited in a few days.
But those very small children also don't understand that when they're dropped off at daycare, that they will be reunited that night.
So the real little ones are being subjected to PTSD almost every day.
They're being separated from their parents on a regular basis and don't know when it ends.
And they don't understand it.
Somebody's saying tone deaf.
No, you must be signing in late.
The starting tone here is that we all have great empathy for these children.
Nobody wants to see them separated from their parents.
It is very bad.
No parent would ever want that for their own kid.
We're all on the same page.
Where the difference comes is what to do about it.
That's all we're talking about.
Now, the other thing I'm finding out online is people saying, the president can just fix this with a stroke of the pen.
And I feel like I'm the only person in the world who is saying, yes, he can fix the short-term problem, which is children being separated, simply by letting them go and just let them enter the country.
Open border.
That's absolutely true.
The president could solve that problem just like that.
But it's not the thinking To say he therefore should.
That's not thinking.
There's no rational thought in he can solve it instantly, therefore he should.
Just sign something, end it like that.
That's not thinking, because that's half of the situation.
The other half is, what happens if you do that?
Well, what happens if you do that is you get into the situation that caused them to do what they're doing now.
It just goes back to the other problem.
The other problem is that it encourages more illegal immigration, more families dragging their kids across great dangerous situations, more rape, more everything.
Somebody saying, you're lying.
So that's the trade-off.
So here are your mental, your thinking errors, and watch how often you see them.
Thinking error number one is universal.
This one isn't one side or the other.
Both sides are triggered by children in distress.
There is no other thing more triggering.
We are less concerned with our own safety.
We are less concerned with the safety of other adults.
Maybe animals are the only thing that we care as much about as children.
So the first problem with thinking is that nobody's doing it.
Because it's just not an option.
When something that emotionally triggering happens, we all just go into this weird non-thinking zone.
But, if we could think, The first thing we do is put some context on it and say, wait a minute, we separate parents from children on a regular basis for all kinds of reasons.
Hospitals, schools, daycare, babysitters.
And in many of those cases, the kids are young and they don't understand where mommy is going and they cry like it's the end of the world.
And it probably is stressful.
So the context is, taking parents and kids separate for a short period is a normal thing.
At the same time, we'd all like less of it.
Somebody says, you're self-deceiving, Scott.
You can leave a reason.
Nothing will stop you from including a reason in the comments.
So if I got a fact wrong, or if I'm thinking wrong, just mention it.
There's a good chance I'll change my mind if you have a good reason.
Alright, so that's the first problem.
Second problem, or there's no context, I guess it's two problems.
We're all triggered beyond the ability to use our sense of reason because we're overwhelmed by children in trouble, and should be, right?
There's no problem with that. That's a very human, you know, admirable feeling.
We respect that feeling.
But it allows us, it forbids us from seeing the context, which is children cry for a lot of things, and they don't know when they'll see mommy next, even when mommy goes to work.
The next thing is we use analogies that are just ridiculous because it's sort of the simple way of what we think is thinking, but it's just things that remind you of other things.
So are these detention centers which are designed from scratch to keep kids safe and healthy and to get them into a better place?
Is that like a death camp?
Or is that closer to a hospital?
Which is designed to get kids into a better place.
It's designed to help them. Now, the answer is that neither of them are thinking.
It's not thinking to say that a detention center is a hospital.
Just think of all the differences.
But it's also not thinking to compare the detention center to the Holocaust.
It's not thinking to compare it to dropping kids off at kindergarten.
It's not thinking to say it's like putting them in summer camp.
None of those are thinking.
They're just things that remind us of other things.
All right. Now, That said, because there's a long run and short run problem, and people are not good at comparing the long run and short run, people prefer just dealing with the short run, you're seeing an unsolvable problem.
And you'll see the conversation looks like this.
Somebody will say, for example, Children are being ripped from their parents.
It's a tragedy. What are you going to do about it?
And then the Trump supporter, let's say, says, well, yes, I agree with you.
This is terrible. Children should not be ripped from their parents.
We certainly want less of that.
But if we do this in the short run, it could get us to a point where there's less of it.
But if we don't do it now, you know, the long run will be even worse.
So your suggestion, Dale, will create more of what you don't want.
Do you realize that?
Okay, how many times have you seen that conversation?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Right? Look for it.
Look for how many times you see Dale says, blah, blah, blah, this is a horror.
And the person responding says, it is a horror.
You are completely right, Dale.
Let's get less of that horror, and we're trying to do that the best way we can.
And then Dale just sort of stops talking and disappears.
Because Dale cannot acknowledge that the long-run situation is real.
Dale says stuff like, and I've seen this on social media, because I've been challenging people to give me the third message The third option.
I've said there are only two options.
You either let people free in the country.
There are only two options in the short run.
In the long run, there's all kinds of options.
In the short run, only two options.
You do something that puts kids in cages.
And I'm adopting that language, by the way.
And I see no reason that you should not use the same language.
Because there was a time when you could have tried to resist using that children in cages analogy.
But at this point, just embrace it.
They are cages.
They're big cages.
But they're cages. And there are children in them.
It's children in cages.
So, let's call it what it is.
It's children in cages.
But the alternative is more children being trafficked.
Or abused by the adults if they're in the same place and they're not related, etc.
So, if you're taking the side against children in cages, which is a reasonable thing to do, nobody wants children in cages, you have taken the side of more trafficking in the short run.
In the long run, we could probably solve all of it, right?
You could build a wall.
You could build more facilities to keep the families intact.
You could add some DNA testing.
You could speed things up.
You could add some judges. So in the long run, all kinds of good things you can do.
In the short run, just two choices.
And I think you need to be honest about which one you're taking.
I'm choosing to not be on the side of child trafficking.
That puts me on the side of something terrible, children in cages.
But unlike most participants in this conversation, I'm not going to live in the imaginary world where there's a third option that, for some reason, I just saw Dershowitz comment.
So something Dershowitz said has been sticking in my mind.
He said that when General Hayden compared the detention centers with the children to concentration camps, that it was a form of Holocaust denial.
And when he first said it, I thought to myself, What do you mean that's a form of Holocaust denial?
I don't get that.
But of course, because it's Ellen Frickin Dershowitz and everything he says is smarter than everything I think, I apply what I call the Dershowitz rule.
The Dershowitz rule is if Dershowitz says something I don't agree with, instead of doing what I reflexively do with everybody else, which is think of the reason they must be wrong, I say to myself, oh crap, he's probably right.
Let me spend a little time thinking about his point.
And so I did.
And I kind of get it.
So here's the Dershowitz point, that comparing the detention centers to the Holocaust is a form, sort of a weak form of Holocaust denial.
Because, remember, the people who deny the Holocaust say stuff like, well, they were just trying to take care of them.
You see it now? The people who deny the Holocaust say, no, no, these were just facilities where they put people to take care of them.
It wasn't to kill them.
And you're making that analogy to the detention centers, which people are saying, oh, these are just to take care of the children.
So I can kind of see it in an argumentative way.
I don't think it's helpful to make that point, but I can certainly see his point.
It minimizes the emotional impact of the Holocaust by comparing it to something that's so far from it that it's a ridiculous analogy.
Okay. Now, let me talk about one other thing that the Trump supporters are getting so wrong that it's astonishing.
So you're seeing the anti-Trump folks make this argument.
They say that the president must be doing this to use the children as pawns to get what he wants in immigration.
Well, no. He's using it as a deterrent.
In other words, the president is doing things that are bad for families and the children because he's using it as a deterrent to reduce more people from wanting to come in.
Now, When you word it that way, nobody can agree with it because they say, oh my God, I don't want to be on the side that's using children as pawns.
And that's when the Catholic priests can say, well, the ends don't justify the means.
And here's the better way to frame that.
All law enforcement, especially when it's being tightened, anything that creates a new law or a new penalty or increases a penalty, anything that adds to law enforcement is designed as a deterrent.
Is there any exception to that?
All laws Are, in part, deterrence.
Some of the reason for laws and penalties are to remove people from the street temporarily.
Maybe some would say to rehabilitate them.
Maybe some would say for revenge.
But deterring the crime has got to be the number one reason.
It's got to be the number one reason That people have laws.
So the president tightened the penalty for immigration, and then the question people are saying is, did you do this?
You know, are you using these children to deter a crime?
The answer is that all of the immigration laws, including this one, are to deter more immigration.
There's no exception. Of course.
But if you say, are you punishing children to deter a crime, I wouldn't agree or disagree with that.
I would say, no, you're looking at one variable.
All law enforcement on any topic, immigration or any other topic, if you tighten the penalties, it is, as partly, a deterrent, of course.
So yes it is, because that's the normal way the world works.
Now in this case, because children are brought into it by their parents, are the children's victims of this?
Absolutely. Yeah, the children are totally victims of all of this.
Trump has just handed the House to the Democrats.
Well, let's talk about it politically.
So I've talked about it logically.
Let's talk about it politically.
Politically, this is disastrous, probably, for Republicans.
Probably. But let me put some caveats on this.
Remember that it was only one week ago we were talking about North Korea?
I don't know if the anti-Trumpers can maintain this level of outrage.
Things that we used to think were going to be the end-all, be-all just become less important a week later.
So we'll see.
So let's see if...
Let's see if this is still as emotional in two weeks.
Because our first impression is, my God, this will never be less of an issue than it is right now.
That's how it feels at the moment.
But we've been surprised before.
And I think that if there are some steps taken to reduce the discomfort of all people involved, That that might go a long way toward reducing the emotion on this.
But it's a pretty...
Yeah, we've already forgotten about Stormy Daniels.
Problem will be fixed by Friday, somebody says.
I don't know about that.
See, it seems to me that if the administration...
Well, let me make a suggestion.
So here's my suggestion politically.
So I don't have suggestions.
I'm not the brightest guy in the world, so I can't tell you how to solve immigration, etc.
But the problem that the Trump administration has is that they have photos, videos, and audio on the side that is killing them.
So you can't beat the visual of children in distress.
You can't beat the sound of them crying.
Those are gold-plated, nuclear, visual, emotional images.
And they're just helpless. Because what the Trump administration has in return, their counterattack to these visuals and the audio, the visceral stuff, is concepts.
A concept of like, well, if we don't do this, things might be worse in the future.
You're not a country unless you have a border.
These are just concepts.
Concepts lose to pictures and sound every time.
The reason that we're focused on this issue instead of the billion kids that are starving everywhere else in the world is we don't have a picture.
Don't have a picture.
One of the most underreported and biggest reasons that ISIS was finally trounced in Syria is we stopped allowing people to take pictures.
So someday it will come out what happened in Syria that got rid of all the ISIS and it is not going to be pretty.
But we couldn't have gotten there without getting rid of the photos.
The evidence had to be eliminated.
And don't make any analogy to the detention center.
The point is that the visual is always bigger than the conceptual.
Now, if the administration wanted to have a visual response, what would it look like?
What would be the visual response to the visual agony?
Well, I think it would be too artificial to show a happy child in a cage.
That's no place you want to go, right?
It's like, hey, look at this kid.
He's smiling and he's in a cage.
How bad could it be? Don't do that.
Bad, bad idea. Here's a better idea.
If you could show a volunteer or member of staff with the video conferencing or with the iPad talking to a child who's distressed and connecting them with their parents.
And watching the parent and child talking.
Now, some of them might be, you know, crying and distressed, and those would be bad visuals, so you wouldn't want to do that.
But there probably are plenty of them, I would think the majority, which are just sort of used to their situation after a day or so, who are just happy to see mom.
It's like, hey mom! How are you doing?
And then you show the worker saying, and you understand that we're doing everything we can.
We'll get you back together in a little bit.
Now, if you had that visual, that would be a direct response That would first of all be honest.
I'm not suggesting anything being filmed that is dishonest.
There clearly are people in these separate facilities who are getting to talk to their parents.
I'm told it's twice a day, but I'm very skeptical that they have the facilities for all of those people to connect with all their family twice a day, and yet we've never seen a picture of it.
There's something that's not adding up, right?
Because they obviously would have shown pictures of the kid on the telephone or the kid looking at the video of his parents.
The fact that you haven't seen it, I think, is telling you it doesn't exist.
So I'm calling the Trump administration a liar on this point.
And it's been reported by very credible people that these facilities for the kids and the parents to connect exist and that they have regular access to it.
I'm going to call bullshit on that.
Because if it existed, and if it was a normal part of the process, you'd have a picture of it.
Maybe they'd have to blur out the kid's face, but you'd certainly have a picture of it.
Somebody says they saw it?
What did you see? One picture of a kid on a phone?
Yeah, so here's my thought.
If you're looking at a short-term solution, send in some volunteers with some iPads that know the address of the other facilities and just help the kids have an Have a parental connection, even if it's just the volunteer.
You know, there's an adult in the room who's saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, your parents are fine.
Here's a picture of them. Here they are talking to you.
We'll get you together in a couple days.
Sorry about this bad situation.
We're just trying to keep you safe.
All right. So you could take a situation which is bad and you can make it less bad fairly quickly with low technology, assuming they have Wi-Fi in their facilities.
I assume they do. All right.
Uh... How do I feel about them trying to imprison children in downtown Houston?
Said somebody in all caps.
Now you say that like I would be in favor of imprisoning children for no reason.
So check your thinking.
Check your thinking on that.
Um... Their parents are in Mexico.
Well, for the kids whose parents are in Mexico, that's a different situation.
Those are not the ones who have been ripped from their parents.
They're the ones who mutually decided to separate.
So what tools of persuasion could the president use to win on immigration?
Well, have you seen yet a chart Showing the short-term versus long-term situation.
In other words, have you seen the chart that showed this was the number of kids who were put in danger under the old policy versus the new policy?
How about a children in danger chart?
One of them, one path, puts more children in danger on the chart in the long run.
And this path keeps a number of children in these stressful situations that nobody likes in the short run.
But we're also working on making that situation better because the attention on it is productive.
And by the way, if we can all just step up a level Doesn't everybody agree that having this much attention on the situation with the children will lead to probably a better situation?
So on some level, the system is doing exactly what it should do.
The media, the checks and balances, in the sense of checks and balances, We are actually moving in the right direction, even though it feels like exactly the opposite.
This much attention on the problem almost certainly will bring with it resources and ideas and solutions.
And if the media wants to guarantee that, they should keep on it.
Just keep on it. But the answer to your question, what should the administration do to inoculate itself?
Well, it needs visuals, and it needs visuals of the short-term problem versus the long-term.
So you can see on a graph that can be reproduced That look, what we're doing is bad for X number of kids and parents, and we're doing this to avoid this situation, which is a bigger ball of parents and kids in distress.
And then pictures of children actually communicating with adults, which again, I'm going to call bullshit.
I don't believe that these facilities have adequate, regular communication between children and adults.
I do not believe that's true.
I believe that is just a lie.
There may be facilities to do it, but it must be so inadequate, otherwise we'd see pictures of it happening all over the place.
So let's fix that.
We could fix that by this afternoon.
That's one of those problems that, you know, you could walk to the Apple store.
It wouldn't be hard to get funding because the public is all charged up.
You know, do a GoFundMe.
Give some volunteers who are willing to go in there once a day, twice a day.
All right. And then the DNA testing.
I had a question. Can anybody tell me how long it takes to do...
Can anybody tell me how long it takes to do a DNA test?
Fact check me please.
How long does it take to do?
Well, six weeks if you are using 23 and me.
But with current technologies, I see Mark is saying 48 hours, and I'm guessing that that is a knowledgeable.
Yeah. If the equipment is brought into the facility, you get rid of a lot of the time lag, right?
On CSI, it's five minutes, yeah.
Overnight, 48 hours.
All right, so I'm seeing people...
48 hours seems like...
That's probably the answer, but I'll look for a more authoritative answer.
So there's somebody on here who keeps asking me why I'm siding with Netanyahu, and I'm not exactly sure where that's coming from, at least on this topic.
My view on Israel is that Israel exists.
I know that's a radical thought, but Israel does exist.
There's really no situation where I could be in favor of an existing country doing something that's against its own interests.
So Israel is very good at existing and pursuing its own interests.
And it wouldn't matter what country it was, if they exist and they're pursuing their own interests and would like to leave other people alone if it were possible, it's an imperfect situation.
Does Palestine exist?
Yes, and the Palestinians should do whatever they can to protect themselves and their situation.
Absolutely. Yeah, I support any country that is taking legitimate steps to protect their self-interests.
Now, that's different from trying to take over another country.
Generally speaking, that's a bad idea, and that's not in anybody's best interest.
The Horowitz Testimony.
Well, the Horowitz testimony seems to have laid bare the following things.
That the Russia investigation was always a witch hunt.
Whether or not it was is less relevant to the point I'm making, which is it's hard to look at that information and come to a different conclusion.
So people will assume that it was a witch hunt.
And all the signs are pointing that way.
So it does look like Hillary got good treatment that the government, members of the government, were in fact trying to get rid of a legally elected president.
But amazingly, imagine the magnitude of this story.
Suppose, Suppose we had not heard any of the Mexico stuff, and we're just coming into the story now, and we found out that the IG had reported that the guy who was in charge of the Russiagate and the Hillary emails was a guy who had said several times that he was planning to change the election results,
essentially. Imagine if you just came into the story, you'd say, my God, that's the biggest scandal in the world.
I can't imagine a bigger scandal.
But we didn't airdrop into the story.
We got here through this long, protracted, imaginary battle that had to do with Russia influencing the election, which they tried to do, but not in the sense of Trump colluding in any way.
And now the folks who are so anti-Trump can't really embrace the fact that they were on the side of traitors.
I mean, think about it.
Imagine that you had invested your entire personality Imagine that you had invested your entire self-worth and your impression of yourself and everything on this whole Russia thing, and then you just find it evaporating.
Do you then go all the way from...
Look at the size of that travel.
It would be one thing to say, hey, I thought Russia was real, but it turns out it was just confirmation bias.
That would be a long distance to travel, and most people couldn't do it from, yeah, Russia's real, and Trump colluded, all the way to, okay, it didn't happen.
That's a long journey, but that's not what we're talking about.
We're talking about going all the way from Russia and Trump colluded past it didn't happen all the way to the FBI was behind it.
Do you know how many mines are designed to take that distance of a trip?
None. It is as close as you can get to an impossible mental journey.
All the way from Trump and Russia colluding, past it didn't happen, all the way to it was a setup.
No brain can go that far.
So what you're watching is people trying to recraft a world in which they were right all along.
And the way they're doing it is with this children in cages stuff that they're trying to turn into a larger Hitler narrative so that their Hitler narrative was right all along.
And do you know why that's important?
Connect the dots. Why is it important, desperately important, for the anti-Trumpers to be right about Hitler?
You know, in this case, write that Trump was just another Hitler.
Why is that desperately important now?
Like, life and death, you know, they would get PTSD if it weren't true.
It's because...
It's because...
It's the only way they're going to be able to excuse the people on their side.
Because the people on their side did try to get rid of him.
And these people, the anti-Trumpers, would have supported that under the condition that he really was Hitler.
Do you see how these two stories are the same story?
They're part of a continuum.
Because If Trump is not Hitler, if none of it's true, and all he is is the guy who got a good result with the economy in North Korea and ISIS, if that's what's true, then they sided with traitors.
Now, accidentally, because they thought it was true.
Now, the traitors, in this case, allegedly, Strzok, so I'll throw in my allegedly there in case I need that.
If it's true that Strzok and some of his buddies were actual traitors, meaning they actually were trying to overthrow the election, if that's true, And the person they were trying to overthrow was actually Hiller.
They're heroes.
Who's mad about the person who tries to kill Hiller?
Nobody. But what if he was never Hiller?
How do you live with yourself if you just tried to destroy the country because you believe CNN? Imagine how dumb you'd feel if you had been brainwashed by CNN and MSNBC and the like.
Imagine how you'd feel if you'd been brainwashed into overthrowing your own country and none of it was real.
That's what just happened.
Or it looks like that's what's happening.
You know, we could still be surprised with some of this FBI investigation and Mueller and all that.
We could still be surprised. But it doesn't look like we're going to be surprised at this point.
So, how do the people who wanted to destroy the country, because they had bought into, they were so gullible, they bought into this whole baloney story about Russia, how can they live with themselves?
That they almost destroyed civilization.
And by the way, when I say almost destroyed civilization, I mean they came very close to bringing down the government of the United States, which would have had a pretty big ripple effect.
Civilization would probably survive, but it would be one of the worst things that ever happened to the country, to the world.
And that's the bind that their minds are in.
They've been so gullible and so taken by their own people and so wrong that they either have to admit they're the dumbest, most gullible people who ever lived, or there's only one way out.
Only one way out.
Or... Trump really was Hitler.
And now, children in cages.
It's true. It's true.
Children in cages. Exactly the same as the Holocaust.
So their minds have to go there.
They don't have any other escape.
So if you're thinking to yourself, huh, how can we talk these people out of a view that maybe you think is unproductive?
The answer is you can't.
I don't believe there's a way to do it because they've painted themselves in a mental corner in which there are only two possibilities.
They are gullible morons of a scale you've almost never seen before.
I mean, we're talking about gullibility On a level, it would be hard to think of another example that was this bad.
But to believe that a guy who ended up reducing nuclear war risks and improving the economy and doing the good things that are obviously happening, to imagine that they were so wrong when they thought he was Hitler, you can't get out of that trap.
Those brains are broken right now.
And you can thank your media for that.
Somebody says we must help the gullible morons.
I don't know of a way to do it, frankly.
Don't know of a way to do it.
Time will help.
Our immediate problem is to get past the fake news and the outrage that's happening.
But when it comes down to children being injured, nobody's brains are working correctly.
And we don't really have the option of using reason or logic or Context.
None of those tools have any meaning once you've said children in cages.
That's the end of thinking.
Thinking ends with that sentence.
Children in cages. No more thinking.
Everybody turn off the thinking.
You just got to stop the children in cages.
You got to stop that situation.
All right. Time will help the emotions subside, because no matter how bad something is, we get used to it.
We don't want to get used to it, but we do.
So no matter how bad the situation is, we'll get used to it.
At the same time, steps will happen, I'm sure.
Not fast enough, but steps will happen to make it less of a burden on the children.
So I think over time, it will lessen in our minds.
Children in cages has strong elements of truth.
Well, it's completely true.
They are children.
They are in cages.
It doesn't help anybody to say they're not in cages.
Don't use a word thinking.
It's like, well, it's not a cage.
It's more of a high-end detainment center.
It's a cage. Okay.
What cages? When they first get picked up, they're in actual literal cages.
Later they're in a shelter, but they can't leave.
So it's a structure that they're in that they can't get out of.
So that's about as close to a cage as you can get.
Do you think Trump should back down?
That's a good question. Should Trump back down?
Depends what he wants.
If he's aiming for the long term, he probably should do what he can to make the situation better in the short term, but probably not.
I'm not sure what backing down means in this context, because he's offered, as have a number of people, have offered solutions.
So he said that he would take a number of different solutions, and as long as those solutions exist, And the Congress can adopt them, I don't think he will back down.
So my guess is that he won't, and I'm not sure that he should, because he is on the side of the best long-term solution for children.
And if he were to go to the short-term solution and make it worse in the long term, he wouldn't be the president that his supporters elected.
Did Trump say infest?
Oh yeah. Let's talk about infest.
So in Trump's tweet, he said that the immigrants were infesting such as MS-13.
Now, my reading comprehension sees infest in that sense as hyperbole, which he's talking about the bad actors, the child traffickers, the MS-13 and stuff.
But of course...
But of course, that is taken as a secret racist whistle.
Infest. I think it was that if you're looking for points where I think the president made a mistake, I would say that would be one.
The word infest doesn't help him with his base, doesn't help him with the people who disagree, doesn't help him in the world.
So I would say that word infest, even though he meant it to refer to MS-13 the same way he talked about animals, That was an own goal.
So if you're looking for me to support the word infest, I won't because that was just a persuasion wording mistake and a pretty big one.
So as mistakes go, I'll add that to my list of things that were persuasion mistakes.
That didn't help anybody. All right.
I'm going to end now.
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