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Aug. 23, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
57:59
Episode 193 Scott Adams: Talking to Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai (Running Against Elizabeth Warren)
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
Hey Gino, Kimmy, it's time for a coffee with Scott Adams.
And today we have a very special guest, so get in here and I'll introduce him in a moment.
As soon as we've got our thousand people, we'll do the simultaneous sip and then we'll get going with our amazing content for the day.
All right, everybody. You know the best coffee of the day is the simultaneous sip.
And I'm here with Dr.
Shiva Ayyadurai, who's running against Elizabeth Warren for Senate in Massachusetts, and he's going to join me for the simultaneous sip.
Is everybody ready? Grab your cup, grab your mug, grab your vessel full of delicious liquid, and join me for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, that's good stuff.
Dr. Shiva.
Should I call you Shiva or doctor?
Shiva's fine, Scott.
Alright, we're going to go with Shiva for this.
Many of the people watching this Periscope are already familiar with you, and I think they're most familiar because everybody heard of your awesome campaign slogan that got you in a little bit of trouble.
Can you remind people of your Elizabeth Warren campaign slogan?
Yeah, the slogan is just a very powerful slogan.
It's only the real Indian can Only the real Indian can defeat the fake Indian.
Now, I have some connection to that story in the sense that, like Elizabeth Warren, my family told me that I was Native American for my entire life, and that I did a DNA test in the past year to find out that I have no Native American whatsoever.
So she and I bonded a little bit on that.
Now, for those who don't know you so well, you were running as an independent, But do you lean more Republican, would you say?
Yeah, I mean, bottom line, Scott, is, you know, Iran is a Republican.
I'm a real Republican, real conservative, real Trump loyalist.
But the bottom line is, if you think about Massachusetts is where sort of the center of the deep state or the sewer of the deep state is, and if you think about a beacon coming out from that, at this center point, there is no difference between quote-unquote Republican and Democrat. there is no difference between quote-unquote Republican and Democrat.
The establishment is one.
I gave the quote-unquote Republicans a chance here, and I realized that wherever I went, Scott, the ground-level Republicans loved me.
I was getting standing ovations.
But the Massachusetts GOP is one in collusion with Elizabeth Warren.
So we dump them, and we're running as true Republicans, true independents, which is really the spirit in many ways of the people out there who've awoken up in the 2016 election.
One million people voted for President Trump.
Eighty percent of them were independent, Scott, in Massachusetts, and they're frankly anti-establishment.
It's not like they're part of the Massachusetts GOP establishment.
Now, give us a little bit of the numbers, keep it simple, for why you do have a path to victory.
Because people would assume if they're watching this, oh, Elizabeth Warren, they're talking about her for maybe running for president, obviously she's going to win.
What's your counter to the obviously she's going to win?
Yes, I think, Scott, you know, when you look at the math of it, and everyone should start looking at the math, because it shows that in a midterm election in Massachusetts, we have a very, very high probability, because there is so much uncertainty of winning, and this is why.
4.5 million registered voters in Massachusetts out of the potentially 5.2, so 4.5 million registered voters.
Okay. 1.5 million are Democrats.
Less than a half a million, but let's use half a million are Republicans, so that's two.
The remaining 2.5 million are independents or slash unenrolled.
So that's the registered voter number.
Wow. Okay?
So, yeah, and in an independent, and in a midterm election, about 2.3 people will vote.
Over half of that will be independents.
And given that 80% of independents voted for Trump, the Trump loyalists, in my view, are much more adept at understanding what's going on in politics.
They can see through the BS. So that's why the real Indian, fake Indian slogan, it hits them really strong because they just love it.
It just carries on with the Pocahontas theme.
It talks about the hypocrisy, the lack of integrity among not only Warren, but all of these But now, I've noticed that people also assume that people who have a sense of humor are also smarter.
So you've got that going for you.
Just the fact that that's funny.
It's funny and it's provocative, so people automatically give you a little credit.
But let's talk about your background.
I know you would be too modest to volunteer this, but could you just list your academic credentials?
Like the number of degrees you have and the number of fields.
Yeah. Well, you know, I have four degrees from MIT. My undergraduate is in electrical engineering and computer science, which is my bachelor's.
The company came back to MIT and did two more master's degrees.
One of them is in applied mechanics, or what's known as mechanical engineering.
And my other degree, believe it or not, is in art and visual design out of the MIT Media Laboratory.
I love graphic design, and I have a penchant for art.
I studied with the grand dom of graphic design, a woman called Muriel Cooper.
So I have a master's of science in that.
And then I went out and started another company called Echo Mail, which we grew to around 250 million in value in the AI field for email.
Came back to MIT in 2003 and did my PhD in a very new emerging field, exciting field, called biological engineering.
So biological engineering is to biology as chemical engineering is to chemistry, understanding the laws of biology and learning how to use that to advance humankind.
So I have four degrees from MIT. I'm also a full I'm a bright scholar.
I used to teach at MIT a number of courses as a lecturer.
So I've been in and out of academia, but I think the important thing, Scott, is MIT is really a high-tech, bow-tech school, but I also, in the middle of that, started seven different companies, which created a lot of jobs in Massachusetts.
So you did all of that, but you're running against a tough competitor because she was a lawyer.
Okay, I think we're done with her.
A lawyer lobbyist. A lawyer lobbyist.
So, well, you and I have a lot in common in terms of our academic credentials.
You did all of those things, and I write a cartoon strip about a cartoon character who also went to MIT. I don't know if you know this, but Dilbert has an MIT degree.
You know, I didn't know that, but all I know is Dilbert was one of those cartoons I read all the time.
It was one of my favorite cartoons.
And I think the way you brought out a lot of different contradictions, the humor is just phenomenal, man.
It's awesome. Well, so you should have let off with that, because that shows your intelligence right there.
Now, we have... Yeah, dog bear was modeled after my own inner thoughts.
So the things I can't say out loud.
Alright, so you have just a commanding intellectual and accomplishment advantage over your competitor, Elizabeth Warren.
But let's talk about some specific topics.
Oh, before I do that, can you give me a sense of the landscape of Of Congress and the Senate in particular right now, in terms of how many people do you know of who even understand technology and innovation at a working level, the way you do? And the entire Senate, because most of them are pretty old, how many of them have any kind of a scientific or technical background?
In the Senate right now, I believe there's one microbiologist, and I think in the House, maybe two engineers.
That's about it. Wow.
What we fundamentally, I mean, and you compare that to the founders of this country.
You're talking about, you know, Washington was a surveyor, a farmer.
Jefferson can do pretty much anything, right?
Right. And then you have people like Franklin.
And so it's in many ways a standard we've lowered to such a low level, and it's because of the entire career politician model, the lack of term limits.
So we've ended up with a bunch of, frankly, salespeople.
Scott, that's what I view these.
These are retail salespeople.
Wouldn't it be salespeople and lawyers?
Salespeople and lawyers.
And I actually like to use the word, you know, sorry to use the word scumbags, because I view it as a technical term, the scum that floats on the top of the septic tank that you put in a bag.
And I called Elizabeth Warren that at one of the rallies, but I can't find any nice terms to say that.
I think we're being so kind by calling them even salespeople, but they are a strata of people who are leeches on society at the worst level.
Right, but just...
Yeah, but just as a citizen looking at this situation, and I look at the immense opportunity that we have if we get technology and innovation right, and if Elizabeth Warren is the senator, she brings more of what they already have, which is another lawyer.
But somebody like you, whether it's you or someone with your skill set, there's no way we don't need more of you in the Senate.
Forget about policies, forget about personalities and everything else.
There's no way we don't need more of what you offer in terms of the technical and real-world experience.
But let's talk about a couple of topics that are close to you.
Immigration, education, and innovation.
Your dog is there. My cat is going to be responding.
Yeah, yeah. Hey Michelle, take care of the dogs please.
Go get them. We'd like to see the dogs later if they come over.
Yeah. Now you came to this country at seven years old, right?
I did. I came here as a seven-year-old kid from India.
And the India I grew up in, Scott, was fascinating.
We were considered untouchables.
So you won't find a lot of Indians like me in India.
So I grew up in Bombay, which is a very cosmopolitan city.
If New York City is a melting pot, Bombay is an industrial furnace.
But I also grew up in a small village in deep South India, where my grandmother worked We're good to go.
And I came here at seven.
We settled in Patterson, one of the poorest cities in the United States, then Clifton, then Parsippany, and then Livingston.
My parents kept moving to the better public school systems in the New Jersey system.
But when I was 14, Scott, I had an amazing opportunity because of getting back to the roots.
roots of America, which was a good public school system, great mentors, and a loving family.
I finished calculus by the ninth grade.
My high school didn't have anything else to offer me.
I ended up getting an opportunity to go to NYU.
This is in 78, Scotland.
Computer mainframes were coming, right?
And I had the opportunity to learn seven programming languages, graduated top of the class at NYU, and then went back to my high school, and I got a full-time job in Newark, of all places, where people think nothing comes out of.
Working at a small medical college, Where I was asked to convert the old-fashioned inter-office paper mail system, you know, the inbox, outbox, folders, that entire system carbon copy into the electronic version, 50,000 lines of code.
I did that and I called it email, a term never used before in the English language.
We're not talking about simple text messaging.
We're talking about that entire system.
And a few years later, I got the first U.S. copyright.
And, you know, you were commenting about politicians.
Politicians thought... Software was sheet music, Scott.
So the only way you could protect software in 1980 was through copyright.
In fact, when I invented email, you couldn't even protect it.
There was no laws. And it was only in 1994 could you patent software because people finally woke up and realized software is actually a digital machine.
So that early phase really exposed me to the public school education system, then coming to MIT to the process of going through a pretty large technology institute, a high-tech, vo-tech school's educational system.
But long before I came to MIT, Scott, it was in Newark, New Jersey, in the public school Is, you know, where I got all my fundamentals.
I would say that I learned more in that public school system than I did at MIT. And I say that with all honesty.
Alright, so your immigration success story at the highest level, what do you think about The President's immigration preferences, in terms of a wall, in terms of, let's say, merit-based immigration.
Would you have gotten in on merit-based immigration?
Well, yeah. When my parents came, Scott, it was all merit-based.
My dad had to submit his resume, reference letters.
He was one of those guys.
My dad had I've become a chemical engineer in India through just sheer hard work.
So he was sort of one of the creme de la creme of India.
And so it was a huge process that he had to go through.
It was a complete merit-based system.
My dad came here first.
We actually waited in line.
We were separated, you know, for about a year.
And then my parents, my sister and I came.
And that was considered, you know, it was an honor to come to this country.
And you had to go through the process.
So, you know, we didn't see my dad for nearly a year.
And then we came. So, when...
I don't even understand what the issue is here.
You know, you try to get a visa to go to India or Russia or Saudi Arabia.
People should just try. It's a difficult process.
It's not easy.
So the fact that we even have to discuss illegal immigration, in some ways it's an oxymoron, you know, is ludicrous.
You know, I support the concept of a wall, a border wall.
You know, as a biologist, every human cell in the body has a membrane, right?
We protect what comes in and out.
Nature, in its infinite wisdom, has created walls around every cell.
When I was living out in Hollywood, I didn't see one Hollywood person who didn't have a wall around their house, right?
So the notion of having protection, merit-based immigration, everything the president is saying is just rational thinking.
And I find it nonsensical that we're even discussing this issue.
So let me ask you this.
I've made the provocative statement in the past that any big change of policy in the government is racist in outcome.
Not necessarily racist in intention, but if you were to change the tax policy almost any way, it's going to have a disproportionate effect on somebody.
If you change immigration in any way, it's going to disproportionately affect somebody and on and on.
But would you say that our immigration policies are fair, or do you think that they target the brown population unfairly?
No, I think the U.S. immigration policies are probably one of the fairest in the world, and I'll tell you why.
If you try to go to another country, you know, other countries where rule of law and maritime My parents came to America.
You know, it's all about who you pay off, who you know, all these kinds of things.
Those are the things that dominate.
The U.S. immigration policy, you know, if you actually look at the laws that were put in place, it's probably one of the fairest that's in there.
I'm talking about the establishment Republicans, particularly in Massachusetts, never want to even solve immigration, right?
One block uses immigration or illegal immigration for cheap votes, and the other one has been using them for low-cost labor to get a high profit on a lot of the P&L statements of these large companies.
And that issue's never addressed.
Both of these parties have never rolled up their sleeves and actually solved immigration.
They want to keep this issue alive because it's a voting What do you think of the White House's approach?
They're getting some attention by talking about the Molly Tibbetts situation, a citizen young girl who was killed by an illegal alien.
And then they've got a video out today where they batch up a bunch of parents talking about their dead children who were killed by illegals.
Does that strike you as fair or a little bit over the top?
Because I'm going to lead the witness by telling you the anecdotal persuasion Rubs me wrong.
If you can't make the case on the statistics on the large, talking about the individual just seems like too much persuasion and not enough data.
How do you feel about that?
Well, I think what's happened, Scott, I think the reason...
I think the point you're making is the notion of people using these small videos versus just looking at the broad set of actual data, right?
Is that the point? Yes.
So I think what's happened is...
When people have attempted to give data, right, present the data, the mainstream media, typically the large, you know, the CNNs, MSNBCs, have not even been wanting to present that data, right?
So if you started looking at, you know, how much value to the GDP is, I mean, these are numbers we can calculate, right?
By merit-based immigration, the value of that, how much tax revenue we're losing by illegal immigration.
These are numbers that will clearly prove the case that we need legal immigration.
Or merit-based immigration.
But I think those numbers are clearly out there.
But the way that the mainstream academic elite, the mainstream media have constructed this, they don't want to share facts.
So I think the shortcut...
These stories are anecdotal stories.
I was down at the border wall about a month ago with Joe Arpaio, and the angel moms were there.
These are women who've lost someone of their children from some illegal killing.
Now, they're very heartfelt stories, but I think to your point, Do we have larger numbers?
Because the key number would be are the illegal immigrants a higher level of crime than legal citizens?
Yeah, I think that's one number.
The other metric here, I mean, I have an interesting immigration policy, right?
I don't know what the numbers are.
Their numbers seem so...
Let's say there's 20 million illegal immigrants.
There's probably a subset of those illegal immigrants who have, you know, completely become part of the American somewhat economy, black economy, right?
Meaning the underground economy.
Imagine that a set of them are actually, they're not criminals.
They're actually working.
The concept of converting them into legal paying taxes.
I mean, they have to go to the bottom of the line and do that.
And then you take all the criminals and all those guys you have to identify and send them out and make sure we build the wall, etc.
On the other extreme, who live off the dole, right?
They also have gotten instantiated into living off an economy where they don't produce anything.
They're also leeches. Give them an opportunity, two years, where they go get a vote tech education.
Or you say, look, why don't you go to another country and you can experience what it doesn't feel like to be in America.
So you almost do an immigration exchange program.
And the notion is that we have a four trillion dollar budget and some of these people are actually working.
We should actually capture their tax revenue.
Again, put them on the path to immigration.
But the bottom line is Congress doesn't want to solve these problems.
These guys take six months vacation.
If you're at MIT or you're an engineer or you have a deadline as a cartoonist, you have deadlines.
These guys have no deadlines.
So there's no motivation for them to roll up their sleeves Let me ask you this.
Under everybody's plan, as I understand it, both Republicans and Democrats, if we had a real immigration comprehensive agreement, it would probably include some kind of work visas where people could come across and work for farms, etc. That's true, right?
Yeah, I mean, the work visa concept has been allowed, you know, like the Right.
So given that both sides agree with that, if you look at just the Molly Tibbetts case, and again, those of you watching me are going to say, oh, it wasn't your child who was killed, so you're being bad.
Trust me, everybody's on the same side about losing a child.
There's nobody who has a different opinion about that.
But would it be true that if we had immigration laws, that the person who was the murderer in this case would have been legal?
if the immigration laws had been functional, wouldn't this be exactly the kind of person who would have a workers you know workers visa and would be totally legal in this country?
Yeah, in the current immigration reform model that person would have come in like on the workers visa H1B, whatever they call that equivalent and they would have been legal in that model and they would have been prosecuted you know as a legal worker and in fact probably had less rights one could argue, right?
They would be treated in a much more constrained way.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
One of the things with the model...
When I look at that issue, obviously everyone saw what Elizabeth Warren said, right?
She recognized what had happened to the child, but then she quickly pivoted to talking about what she said quote-unquote real problems with the separation of families.
I guess the hubris of that statement and the nonsensical value of that statement, Scott, is what I think really hit people.
And I think my observation, which I just tweeted out earlier last night, was this.
The fact that she can pivot like that and make a comment like that with such ease really goes to the fact that in Massachusetts, the Republicans and the Democrats work so closely together that there's really no opposition to her.
And it's a very subtle point, but it's a very important point, the fact that she can overtly make a comment like that and feel absolutely comfortable saying that.
Right.
Now, I've introduced the idea of the 48-hour rule, which is when you say something that people go wild about, that you have 48 hours to correct or clarify because you may have just misspoken, you may have had a bad day.
Not talking about Elizabeth Warren, but in general, would you think that's a good idea, that we should accept a clarification?
Yeah, I mean, look, we all make mistakes, right?
We are not rational, robotic human beings.
There's probably an initial visceral response some people make in reaction, and then they think about it, and then they have a chance.
I like your 48-hour rule.
It's sort of like when you write an email, right?
If you're really angry, you write it...
Yeah, never text in anger or drunk.
All right.
So would your immigration preferences be very close to the president's then, would you say?
Yeah.
I mean, look, what I like about Donald Trump is he's a very practical person.
And if you look at the core concept, which is, hey, we should have rule of law.
This is sort of the foundational principles.
We should strengthen America.
America comes first, which means you want merit-based immigration.
And then you also have to address the practical needs because you could have worker shortages.
Right.
So that was a concept of the work visa.
It's a very practical approach, but its emphasis is let's enforce the laws that we have on the books.
So, yeah, I mean, I don't see any problem with what the president is trying to push forward.
OK.
And.
Would you agree with my general statement I made earlier, which is that any big change has an outcome that affects some ethnic group more than another, even if you don't mean it?
It's just because, you know, ethnic groups tend to bunch either in economic groups or parts of the country or by preference of somehow.
Wouldn't you generally say that everything affects The ethnic, let's say, has a different effect on different ethnicities, almost any big government program, no matter what it is, or big change?
Well, you know, before we came from India here, you know, my mom would say something interesting.
She said, in India, you can be discriminated nine different ways.
In America, around free.
But, you know, because in India, Male, female, a whole bunch of things, skin color.
But my mom said the advantage in America you had was you could actually work hard, and through hard work you could overcome that.
So whenever any policy is implemented, Scott, I think it's going to affect some cluster, right, if you just look at it statistically.
But I think the difference in America is that you're not beholden, by and large, to being in that cluster.
that you can move forward in some process to even overcome those things.
So I think that's what makes this country a great country because you have more options to escape from even one of those ethnic walls, if you want to say it that way.
I would call that something like strategic parity or strategic equality, meaning that the path that I could take to be successful might be something that doesn't work for, say, an African-American man or a woman.
but they have also their own paths that would not be available to me.
So, as long as everybody has some path to success, that's better than no path.
I think you make a really good point.
Each one of us, anyone listening out there, you, me, Scott, and everyone, we each have our very particular journey.
And if you were to map that journey out, it's basically a series of decisions we took.
The difference is some countries, some systems, everyone cannot have their own journeys because they cannot make those decisions.
They have less choice.
And I think in this country the fact is that you have much more variability of choice, which means we can in fact say that each one of us can traverse a journey that could be very, very different than someone else, even though that we may feel confined to some ethnic group, etc.
So I think it really comes down to the variability of choice that America offers over other countries.
Let's talk about education.
What would you do differently education wise?
What are we doing wrong?
What would you do differently?
Yeah, it's a great question.
Look, you know, my great-grandfather, he was an indentured servant, very frugal man.
You know, indentured servants were the slaves before slaves who He went to Burma and he came back.
Very frugal guy.
But what he always said was he would spend as much money, whatever he had on education.
Education was always seen as a way out of ignorance and suffering.
And so if you, Every year,
private colleges keep increasing their tuition costs, and the loan companies simply allow a student, a predatory student loan, to take a loan.
And the loan, by the way, shouldn't even be called a student loan.
It never goes to the student.
It goes right to the university.
So what we've created for parents who, like my grandparents, wanted their kids to get One of the known companies,
by the way, who had record profits last year, billions of dollars in profits, But the more deeper phenomenon is what are these kids actually learning?
You know, I run a lot of companies.
We try to hire people.
The students that, unfortunately, are coming out now, they're not actually learning any skills.
Customer service skills, how to write a good email, for example.
Do they actually have skills?
They're getting degrees, but not skills.
So I think one of the key things that we need to do is go back at the public school education system and really, at the associate's degree level, really offer more VoTech education.
If we started opening up two or three VoTech schools in the inner cities, that's how you really solve racism.
You can make six-figure salaries, plumber, electrician, software engineer, programmer, med techs.
We don't have enough of those people.
I think a statistic just came out on the number of technical jobs we're generating right now, close to 2.9 million, and we're going to have to put 120,000 people annually to fill those jobs, and we don't have those technically trained people.
So I am a big proponent of high-tech, VoTech education, Scott.
That's number one. The second thing is I think we need to bust up the monopoly that these big universities have on education because there's really no market competition there.
The third piece is I think some of these large universities need to pay their fair share of taxes.
Harvard University's We're good to go.
I think we need to defund some of these large universities.
They shouldn't be getting private funding from us as taxpayers, using those private funds to create intellectual property that they then own and resell back to us.
But I think the bottom line is more Bo-Tech schools, we need to eliminate predatory student loans.
Today, a big student loan company can give a kid a loan, and the kid does not have the right to go bankrupt.
I'm not saying people should go bankrupt, but a student loan company, if they knew a kid was going to go bankrupt, they'd really say, "Hey, what course of study are you going to take?" Oh, I'm going to study the anthropology of Aardvarks, right?
Or bathroom studies, whatever that is, right?
They're going to make their assessment Not that people should not study art and liberal arts and Shakespeare.
They should. But is the investment in that kid going to yield something that the student can be able to function and be a valuable member of society?
So that's one of the biggest things I think we need to do in education.
We, you know, the science, if you look at, I think we're 35th in the world right now in science and engineering education.
So we have a set of elites who are getting very well educated in concentrated areas like Silicon Valley or Kendall Square in the MIT area.
But the vast majority of Americans, we're not getting the technical education.
Let me ask you this.
When we see that we're ranked 35th or whatever, I have a different take on that, but maybe you have more insight into the numbers.
My take is that the people who move the needle in terms of science and technology is such a small, small percentage of all of us.
In other words, I'm not smart enough to move the needle in technology, so the fact that I am good or bad at science or math is completely irrelevant, because I'm never going to work in that field, and if I did, I would never make a difference.
I wouldn't move the country forward.
So isn't it more important that we have A large number, as opposed to percentage, a large number of people who actually can do that.
People, you know, have your kind of skill who can make a difference.
But does it make any difference if the average student knows calculus?
It just seems like a waste of time to me.
Yeah, yeah. So when I say science, part of what I'm saying is Bo Tech School is plumbers, electricians.
There are many, many jobs which just require technical skills, Scott.
I'm even talking about good writers, right?
Good artisans.
When I say skills, I mean in a broad level of skills.
We're talking about people who actually have to put their effort into something where they're actually learning a particular skill.
If you look at the typical four-year college students coming A large percentage of them are actually not learning any tangible skills.
So I agree with you in terms of large population of people, but people actually are learning.
It could even be customer service skills, right?
We try to hire people where a young person coming out doesn't even know how to talk to a customer on the other side, Scott.
Right? You ask them to write a cogent email, it's not even written well.
So somewhere along the way here, the notion of just very tangible That's what I'm talking about.
Let me ask you a tech question.
So there aren't too many people I could ask a question about education and technology, but you're one of them.
So I've got one of these virtual reality computers here, and I can go into a whole different world.
And when I do that, there aren't that many pieces of software available.
There just aren't that much content.
But when I see that I could be standing in the middle of, say, a famous battle, or I could actually be in You know, the meeting or the Constitutional Convention.
I could actually put myself there and watch it in real time.
Do you think we're close to a point where some kind of homeschooling with VR, or at least better video, is close?
Because up to now, all we've done is take a video of a guy standing in front of the class just like any other class, and it's terrible.
But it feels like nobody's really optimized the technology to make it the better option.
Are we anywhere near a revolution where going to school is just a waste of time and it's where all the bullies are, where you could just go into a room and immerse yourself into education?
Or maybe that's a bad idea because it lacks the social element.
But are we close to anything like that, do you think?
Is it worth it? Yeah, it's a great question, Scott.
You know, they used to call cave technology or immersive technologies.
What I've seen is a technology curve typically takes 30 years.
And I think VR is about to explode.
I'll give you a couple of examples.
Peter Huber, you know, is one of the big Hollywood producers, Mandalay Pictures.
About a year ago, I was speaking to Peter.
He goes, Shiva, this is going to be one of the biggest areas.
And he was explaining to me that he had just witnessed a technology company that he had invested in.
I heard these glasses and he goes and he apparently was walking across a cliff and he was shivering, almost about to cry.
The technology is here, Scott.
It's essentially here.
Another company, Oculus, which got bought by Facebook, another friend of mine, he essentially got all the rights.
He created a company to all the museums of the world, like the Louvre, all the great museums, where they literally have 3D They're already starting to do that broadly across all historic sites, museums, etc.
So the technologies are those VR glasses, the Oculus things are going to be, in my view, in probably every home, like a TV or a microwave in probably the next five years, five to ten years at max, and they're going to be part of the educational experience.
I think that the point that you're bringing up is the whole notion of public schools, industrialized schools, that really was a part of the industrialization process, right?
where you have to train soldiers in a very robotic way to go off to do a very particular set of tasks.
And I think what's happening now is the key trend that I see occurring in all fields, be it health, be it education.
You go down the list.
Jobs is a key word that we're going to see more and more of as the word personalization.
Personalization in medicine. Personalization in education.
Personalization in healthcare.
And I think what you just pointed out is that, and that's really ultimately quote-unquote school choice, right?
You want to train your kid to understand history?
Well, he can actually experience history in a very unique way.
Or he can read a book. Maybe he doesn't like, you know, the VR. So I think we're heading into this very cool renaissance, frankly, where we have the opportunity for parents to make different decisions than they did before.
And technology is going to be a very powerful part of it.
but I think the VR stuff is actually, a significant amount of the stuff is here.
It's really working through the kinks in terms of the deployment of the cost.
But there are many companies who are actually starting to own the content, a couple of examples, as I said, in terms of in very vertical areas.
So I think you have a great point.
Now do you see that the content that might come to the VR world would be owned by the private industry and people would just put together the lessons that made sense to them?
Or do you see the government getting in and messing that up too?
Yeah, well, you know, the Department of Education, mind you, should be busted up.
Part of the entire thing I think you're bringing up is centralization versus decentralization.
I think what's happening is you have two types of centralization taking place.
One, the government wanting to own things and private companies like Google, Facebook, etc.
And in many ways, they're starting to collude together.
I think what we're going to see is obviously those people for owning power and content The decentralized nature of these technologies,
the opportunity is in us as citizens is to push the decentralization, push it where individuals can do more, you know, more local stuff, essentially the idea of atomizing education back to the individual.
But obviously, for example, the company that I just mentioned was bought up by Facebook.
That company had exclusive contracts with a number of the museums.
So I can only guess that Facebook now, very much like what Bill Gates did where he started owning the digital rights to a ton of digital art, photographs, that Facebook likely owns that content, the digital content to many of the great museums in the world right now.
So you're going to have that struggle.
You're going to have the government trying to think that they know better about education than how parents want to do their local communities.
So that struggle I see is taking place.
But that's why I think the notion of advancing innovation with these kinds of technologies Let's use that to segue into innovation in general.
We've got a number of legacy things like education is a legacy thing.
It doesn't account for the way we live, the technology we have.
The same with healthcare.
I've complained that the government, let's say the Republican-leaning government, should be spending more time shining a light on the innovations that would lower healthcare costs.
Because I've seen a number of startups with pitching, etc., who have tremendously exciting ways to lower the cost of, let's say, tests, You know, blood tests, tests you used to send out, you know, telemedicine so you don't have to go into the office.
Do you think, you're probably closer to this than I am, but do you think that we're close to the place where we could package up enough of these startups and technologies to make something like a low-cost healthcare company?
Offering? How close are we to innovate?
Yeah, Scott, you're asking an awesome, timely question.
Tomorrow, we're hosting a town hall at my building in Cambridge.
Just a quick pitch.
701 Concord Avenue in Cambridge.
Everyone's invited. About several hundred family practitioners are showing up who are tired of Obamacare, which is a big insurance, big hospitals, and big pharma.
The point that you're bringing up is I think underline is why is the cost of healthcare so high and why aren't we talking about reducing the cost?
And it comes down to this fundamental issue.
One is the innovation piece, which is going to allow us to get better healthcare at a far lower cost.
Right now it's like a 50 cents hamburger is selling for half a million dollars.
And if you look at the entire healthcare supply chain, What many Americans don't know,
and it took me a while to unravel this, is by the time that drug goes from that manufacturer to us, there is a layer of middlemen that very few people even know about called GPOs, group purchasing organizations.
These are the people behind the curtain, behind the curtain.
They write very, very elusive contracts which allow kickbacks to take place.
Those kickbacks take, for example, a $2 generic and crank it up to $32,000.
So there's two things.
One is the innovation.
The other is the fact that there are these very gross middlemen who are allowed to essentially practice legalized corruption.
We're going to talk about that tomorrow.
They're able to control the entire supply chain.
It's incredible stuff.
People don't even know about these guys.
And they crank up the price of health care, these guys, by a half a trillion dollars.
They should be made illegal because it's called GPO kickbacks.
So that's one piece, which is the existing corruption in the system, which Obamacare supported.
The second piece of that is unleashing innovation.
And innovation in medicine is going to come down to personalization.
I was just at a big CEO's conference out in Arizona.
And the biggest trend is that everyone recognizes that my body, your body, everyone's body is different.
We each have Medicine has got to get personalized.
Everything we have created up until now in medicine is fundamentally out of the wartime model.
What I mean by that is the entire healthcare model today came out of putting a soldier back on the field.
In the 1800s, Florence Nightingale, who by the way was not just a nurse, she was a member of the Royal Society of Statistics, She was looking at the Crimean War, and she did one of these beautiful graphics.
I'll send you a picture of it at some point, Scott.
I'll text it to you.
But she basically was the one who found out that soldiers were dying, not because of getting shot, but because when they went into the hospital and the 1800s people went there to die, she created the modern healthcare system to put the soldier back on the field.
So everything we do in healthcare came out, modern healthcare But there's this other aspect of healthcare which comes down to what foods you eat,
how you take care of yourself, diagnostics you do on an ongoing basis, how do you optimize your supplement intake, foods, etc.
Let me jump in there.
And to do what you're talking about, the personalized medicine, how much privacy does the individual have to give up, if any?
Well, the fascinating We're in the era of blockchains.
Blockchain, there's a number of new innovative healthcare companies coming out where you can protect someone's privacy Which allow you to do that one of the companies that I just started cytosolve Is a company that came out of my work at MIT where we can actually mathematically model the human cell on the computer not the cell So very much like how we build an airplane today.
We don't throw a monkey in. We don't, you know, build an airplane.
Everything is built on a computer.
So this breakthrough technology allows us to model Alzheimer's.
We model pancreatic cancer.
We discovered a combination therapy for pancreatic cancer, got FDA allowance in a record 11 months.
So, you make a very good point that the Republicans exist in Congress to focus on lowering the cost of healthcare, and my view is, the real healthcare model looks like this.
You get crisis insurance, you know, 50 bucks, 100 bucks, where we directly as citizens can deal with Lloyds of London, right?
The reinsurance companies where we handle our crisis.
And the rest of it, in my view, should be direct pay where possible, where you choose the best technologies, you find the best cost, you find your best practitioner.
That's where healthcare needs to move to, where we put healthcare back in the So, there are very few people on the planet who have the breadth of experience from medical, technology, legal, you know, political.
How close would you be, just hypothetically, if I said to you, drop everything you're doing, And draw up a white paper that describes how we could use what we already have and know to get to a low-cost health insurance option.
Maybe it's only for people who can't afford regular health insurance.
But even, let's say, as a trial.
So it's not everybody, it's just some group that wants to be in it.
Could you describe, could you write a white paper right now, if that were your mission, That would bring healthcare costs by, you know, 50% or something.
Is that doable with what we already have?
Yeah.
In fact, in about two weeks, we're going to be putting that white paper up on our website, Scott.
When I...
I swear I didn't know that.
I didn't know that. No, no, you read my mind.
Because see, when I looked at the healthcare model, you know, I went into this as a systems guy, a scientist, you know, looking at...
It took me... This was February of last year's when I announced.
It took me until the beginning of this year to figure out what was going on.
And the big thing that I couldn't figure out is why do health insurance companies...
Keep raising premiums, right?
Why don't they want to lower the cost?
And then finally a friend of mine, you know, who's a direct pay doctor down in Texas, he said, Shiva, don't you get it?
They're selling, he's the one who told me the hamburger analogy, he said they're selling a 50 cents hamburger for $500,000.
The insurance companies have no incentive to lower the cost of healthcare.
The reason you and I get healthcare is we say, oh my god, what happens if I get in a The issue is you shouldn't have to pay that much.
They've inflated the cost of pharmaceutical drugs.
They've inflated the cost of hospital stays.
The whole thing is a massive inflation because there is no market controls on it.
So you'll see this white paper come out literally in two weeks, Scott, but part of that white paper is we don't produce enough doctors.
You know, when my grandmother in that village healed people, it was a one-to-one relationship.
In the last 20 years, we've lost nearly 250,000 primary care physicians.
Think about that.
So why is that?
A doctor comes out of four years of undergraduate, four years of medical school, and another four years of specialization.
They have 12 years of debt.
My view is eliminate that four-year need to go to undergraduate.
You should be able to go right from high school.
It should be a vocational technical job.
Many of their countries do it right to medical school.
So right away, you reduce the burden on that student, that medical student.
My sister went to Harvard Medical School, right?
She goes, Shiva, I can't work as a family care practitioner.
The regulations that Obamacare introduced are ridiculous.
So you have practitioners, good, well-meaning people going to medicine, can't practice a one- Right,
so...
For technical reasons, I want to keep this under an hour, which means that we want to wrap up in a couple minutes here.
Let me just switch topics, and by the way, I could talk about the healthcare stuff all day, and when you have that white paper, ping me, because I want to give that some attention.
What do you think about the big tech companies and And, let's say, shadow banning or...
Where do you see that?
What's your take on the big tech companies and shadow banning?
Yeah, I think it's a great question.
Look, I've been a fighter for free speech.
People can go online. You can see all the stuff we've done.
We fought Gawker Media, which is all about untruthful speech.
But here's the bottom line.
When the founders of this country set up America, they had the First Amendment and the Second Amendment, which go hand in hand, depending on the sort.
But the way that they defended the First Amendment, which we've forgotten about and we frankly diminished them, was a postal service.
It's going to sound a little archaic, but I want to bring this point up.
When the country was set up, we didn't have telephones, right?
The way you communicated was through the letter mail.
And Franklin and the founders and their wisdom created this amazing thing called a postal service where for pennies, one citizen could send another person a communication, and here was a key thing of it.
It could not be tampered with.
This is critical. In fact, the Postal Service has the Office of the Inspector General, which monitors postal employees, make sure that they don't tamper.
If they do, or anyone opens your mail, it's a 20-year sentence in prison.
So let's just step back and just think about that amazing infrastructure that was set up.
Now, consider what happened in 1997.
And I know this well because as a guy who created the first email system, You didn't need the internet, per se, for email.
After 93, when the web came, that's when we had companies like Hotmail, Gmail, you know, all the social media companies start coming, and we as consumers started adopting into our daily lives email, messaging, etc.
But here's the big thing that we forgot.
Those companies gave us quote-unquote free email.
And in that process, we transacted our freedom for free email, because if you read the privacy We're good to go.
Public social media services, which people I believe would pay $25, $50 a year, but it would be protected by the laws that govern postal mail.
They laughed at me. They thought this was a crazy idea.
They said, look, we're not involved in this email and electronic stuff.
Fast forward 2011, Scott.
The Postal Service is going out of business.
I write a scathing article in Fast Company and saying, look, you guys could be making a lot of money and protecting U.S. citizens.
The Inspector General of the Post Office reached out to me and I wrote two reports, white papers.
They paid me a lot of money to help them figure out how they could make money.
They haven't done anything. They're the collusion.
You take someone's Apple ID, your Facebook ID, and your Gmail ID, and you put them in a table or a little database, and you basically know what anyone's doing at In my view, the solution to that is a 21st century version of the Postal Service because the laws exist.
The Postal Service still could be the framework, the platform, which offers a public utility electronic service, email, social media, etc.
We pay a little bit, 50 bucks a year, but that social media and that electronic communications is governed by the laws of All right, Shiva, I'm going to go for the wrap-up here so we can keep it under an hour.
That's one of the most interesting ideas I've ever heard, by the way.
You know, I'm not in a position to evaluate good or bad, but that is a really interesting idea, and I haven't heard it.
There's no other way out of it, Scott.
I've looked at this problem.
We can try to enforce regulations, but we already have an existing infrastructure that needs to be taken.
We need to take the dust off it and make it 21st, 22nd century.
Yeah, so I would love to have your voice in the Senate.
Thank you. So I'm going to be totally biased.
I want more of what you offer in our government.
But I'm going to thank you now.
And what's the name of your website?
If anybody wants to, can you give us a little bit?
Yeah, so if people want to support us, go to shivaforsenate.com with the numeral four.
And we want to make our election, our win very participatory, Scott, because I don't want people to be on the sidelines.
So everyone can go get one of these magnetic signs.
We call it a road warrior.
You can get two of them.
It says Shiva.
It's got the great meme.
And it says only the real Indian can defeat the fake Indian.
So if you want to help, and you can, we've got less than 75 days in the selection.
And everyone's busy. We all are working people.
Go get a Road Warrior sign.
Stick it on your car and drive around with it and weaponize your car.
Thank you, Scott.
Thank you so much, Shiva. And I'm going to sign off now.
And just stay here. I'm going to say goodbye to the audience.
Goodbye, everyone. I hope you like this.
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