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Sept. 2, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:04:00
Episode 205 Scott Adams: How President Trump Became the Main Theme of McCain’s Funeral
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's time. It's a little bit late this morning, I know, but I give you time to get your coffee and to get ready for Coffee with Scott Adams.
And when we get to a thousand viewers, we will enjoy a simultaneous sip.
Almost there.
Waiting, waiting. Here it comes.
And now, the simultaneous sip.
Yes, I am late.
I was working. Sorry.
It happens. So, I've been trying to upgrade my...
My system here so that I can do some split screen things and I've discovered once again the reason that my startup already makes an app called Interface where you can talk to an expert in real time.
Now, there were no experts on this particular topic, but as we grow our experts, I hope there will be.
So here's what I was trying to do.
I bought this wireless camera system where you can hook up your iPhones and other cameras, and then you can do split screens and Like a real production thing from an iPad.
And I thought to myself, hey, I'm reasonably clever with technology.
I've spent a lot of time with this stuff.
I will buy that kit.
It's called the Sling Studio.
And I will make it work with my cameras and my laptop.
And it comes with pretty much no documentation.
But, you know, you can go online and find things.
And the most basic thing I needed to do, using it with this OBS software, somebody said go with OBS. OBS is the thing I haven't been able to get working for about two years.
I've tried it on different computers, I've tried it with all kinds of different equipment, and I've never gotten it to work.
I can get it to do things, but the very next time you sit down, all the settings are lost and you have to start from scratch and reload software and unhook things and power things down and reboot.
So it doesn't look like it's a real system that can work, but I'm not done with it yet.
It's too laggy on your Mac, somebody said.
Here's the problem. So I try to go online to find out an answer to a very simple question, which is, how do I get the signal from this box I bought into my Macintosh?
That seems like the most obvious question.
Is it a cable?
Is it Bluetooth?
Is it the Wi-Fi that comes with it?
How do I connect them?
And of course I look at the picture and it just shows like a dotted line.
Like what the hell? What the hell is a dotted line telling me?
Now, if you dig deeper and deeper and you look at all these YouTube videos of people doing stuff, they're like 15 minute videos in which I have one question And I don't know if it's in that 15 minutes.
It's not just one of them, it's dozens of them.
So last night, I'm spending, I don't know, maybe two hours looking at one YouTube video after another, looking for somebody to tell me the answer to this one question which can't be searched.
If I had access to someone who used this system before, I would have picked up the interface by WenHub App, I would have looked for that keyword, Sling Studio, I would have hit a button, and in five minutes, somebody would have said, well, if you're using it with a Macintosh, you need to buy an external box that's essentially the video card for it.
Now, that's not on the picture.
And I can't find anybody in the video that talks about it.
And when I put that box on there, because it turns out I had one, when I connected it, it still doesn't work.
So now what? What do you do?
So I have several thousands of dollars worth of equipment and no real way to get from buying it to using it.
There's no documentation and the simplest questions of how does it hook up I can't even find.
So my larger topic here is that there's this entire world of things that are between things you can search for on Google and things you would have to hire somebody to be your engineer or your expert or your lawyer or your doctor.
It's just this vast need.
Anyway. I'm watching all of your comments coming in negative telling me move on, move on.
I was trying to make a larger point that it's not my problem per se that I'm worried about.
It's that there's an enormous knowledge gap and I've said before that this is the golden age and that the golden age would be defined by The Golden Age would be defined by most of our problems being psychological and mental.
And this is a good example. Because there's so much more I could do if I had access to an expert for just five minutes.
Just five minutes.
Okay. Let's talk about that sonic weapon in Cuba.
I saw a New York Times article, an update.
Saying that now they believe it really, maybe, possibly was some kind of a microwave weapon that injured the diplomats in the Cuban embassy.
And remember my initial take on that was that it was probably a mass hysteria.
And that there's no way the Cubans were secretly targeting Americans in an embassy.
It would be an act of war.
And there just wasn't any reason for it.
There's no particular reason.
So, yeah, and maybe 5G is the problem, yeah.
And I was also reading an article that 5G, it was actually a Dvorak article, that 5G might be kind of unhealthy.
Has anybody heard that before?
Apparently there's something about the spectrum or the vibration that 5G makes that could be unhealthy.
So you could make a weapon out of this stuff.
That part, I think, is certain.
But here's my updated theory on what happened to the diplomats.
If it's a weapon...
It's definitely not coming from the Cuban government.
If it's a weapon, it's definitely not coming from the Russian government either.
Because it would be an act of war.
And neither of them have any reason to do such a thing.
It just wouldn't make sense in any world that we can imagine.
But that doesn't mean there's not some crazy person who's doing it.
But the bigger part of my prediction of mass hysteria is that however many people were actually affected by a real thing, whether that real thing was a weapon or some kind of bizarre disturbance in the force, whatever it was, I'm going to say that there are more people imagining it, that they had effects, than there are people who actually have it, whatever the cause is.
So that's my updated opinion on that.
Let's talk about the McCain funeral.
I tried so hard not to talk about the funeral while it's happening, to give the family some space.
I tried not to make it political.
I tried just to show respect as much for veterans in general and for the family as for McCain, who, of course, isn't around to be bothered.
But I just can't be silent anymore because watching this spectacle...
Here's how I imagine it shook out.
So we're told that McCain planned his own funeral ceremony.
So McCain decided who was invited.
He decided who was speakers.
I guess that sort of thing. But he probably did not look at the actual eulogies, I assume.
He probably did not look at the actual words that people would be speaking.
How could he really?
And the very thing that he wanted, we understand, could be wrong about this, but it looks like the thing he wanted was that President Trump be left out.
And that he not be made the star of McCain's funeral.
So McCain didn't want to be overshadowed, here again I'm speculating, by Trump because they weren't on good terms and why do you want the guy that you don't like being the shadow over your funeral?
It just feels like you want less of that.
And he did not get his final wish.
John McCain did not get his final wish because the people who spoke, I won't name names, but there was this implied contrast to President Trump as, you know, don't be like him, be more like McCain.
And I just, it bothers me That you can't plan your own funeral and get one fucking thing.
Sorry. Sometimes you just have to swear.
There are sometimes when not swearing doesn't work.
If you can't get...
You know, you've done this life of service.
You've been in the military.
You've been a POW. You've been a senator.
You've tried to serve your country.
You've tried to be this, you know, this honorable person, a good role model.
And when it's, you know, your own funeral, you only wanted one thing.
I mean, I'm sure you wanted other things, but there was one thing that you were pretty clear about.
Let's make it less about Trump.
And he didn't get that one thing.
So now, of course, the news industry is largely guilty for this.
It's not so much the speeches that people gave, but the way the news covers it made it essentially all about the president playing golf.
Yes, a dying wish should be honored.
And it doesn't look like the major networks decided to honor that, or what I imagine it was his wish anyway.
Why was Palin excluded?
You know, I'm not too interested in the Sarah Palin question.
Because, again, if you're dying, you get to pick who was close to you, who mattered.
And even though they had a work association, probably it wasn't that close after that.
Just guessing. So I don't think we should second guess why he did or not.
In fact, I would go further.
We should not second guess why he did or did not invite anyone.
It just shouldn't be our issue.
It was his show.
He got to invite anybody he wanted for any reason he wanted.
There is no more asking questions about that.
All right. There was a touching scene some of you saw in which President Bush I'm sorry.
as they were sitting in the funeral front row there.
And it was just sort of a cute moment.
But I felt like even that was about President Trump.
And maybe that's just me.
But it seems to me that, you know, the reason that they would show that little clip over and over again is to show, hey, look, even President Bush 43 was good friends with Michelle Obama, and, you know, why can't other presidents be like that?
So it felt like even the smallest moment, which really was about a candy, literally it was about a piece of candy, it feels like the way it was reported was almost to make it about President Trump.
Now maybe I'm reading too much into it, but that's that feeling that's over everything right now.
All right. Yeah, and that's a lot of funeraling.
I think we're funeraled out for the weekend anyway.
All right, I'm just looking at your comments.
So there wasn't much else happening of any importance in...
The next big thing will be the big tech companies testifying about whether or not they're biased against conservatives.
But here's a thought I had yesterday.
I want to do a little mental experiment.
Another experiment that you can try at home.
I'll tell you why I'm doing this in a moment.
But first, I want you to see if you can imagine two things at the same time.
So this is the test.
To see if you can visually imagine two things that are in different places.
Look at something in front of you.
Maybe it's the computer itself.
Just look at it and visually...
Well, you're looking at me right now.
So visually, just put your visual focus on the screen you're looking at where you see me.
At the same time, and without losing your visual consciousness of what you're looking at right now, imagine somewhere in Africa there's a giraffe.
And now imagine that giraffe in the jungle.
But don't stop imagining.
What you're looking at right now.
So I want you to simultaneously see if you can imagine, like have your visual senses on me at exactly the same time you're simultaneously thinking about a completely different image that's in Africa and it's a giraffe.
Can you do it?
Can you do it?
And if you can do it, Do you feel like you're holding both thoughts simultaneously or does it feel like you're rapidly switching between them?
Maybe so rapidly that you can't tell you're doing it, but which does it feel like?
And I'll tell you why I'm asking.
Probably there's no definitive answer to that.
But the question is, do you multitask?
Are you seeing both of them at the same time?
And if you are, how many of those could you add to the scene?
Can you imagine five things at the same time?
Some of you did a split screen.
That's cheating. Some of you did a little mental trick where you split the screen of your imagination and put the giraffe here and me on the other side, which is very smart, by the way.
And I don't know how. It makes you wonder how primitive people would have done this.
Since we've all seen televisions with split screens, I will confess I did the same thing when I was doing the experiment myself, is that I imagined them on a canvas next to each other, so that they weren't really in different places.
I could see them sort of at the same time.
But here's where I'm going on this.
It seems to me that one of the biggest changes in humanity is coming, and it's It's integrating computer memory with human memory.
Now in a sense we've already done that because our devices have memory and we can offload things we don't want to remember like phone numbers and all kinds of stuff.
So in a sense we offload memory.
But it's a clunky process of talking into your phone or typing into it and if you want to recover something you've got to type it in and everything.
Whereas your actual brain Is retrieving things automatically, almost instantly and automatically.
So could you ever have a computer, maybe a chip or something that's just part of your brain, that is somehow working instantly to offload memories so your brain doesn't have to remember them?
And here's the hard part, to serve them back up again effortlessly.
Without you having to type something or ask for something.
Could you build that? Here's how I think you could do it.
Imagine, if you will, this chip or whatever is just part of you.
So wherever it is on your body, you've got some kind of computer.
And let's say it's connected to the cloud, so you have infinite storage.
So it's not infinite technically, but in terms of economics and the cost of storage going down, you have effectively infinite storage because it's in the cloud.
So you can have that thing watching and listening to everything that you do from that moment on, and it would be recorded in two places.
One is your organic mind, and the other is in the cloud because you've got a device that's experiencing the same thing at the same time as you are.
Now, that would take care of augmenting your natural memory, because your natural memory might remember 3% of any situation over time, whereas the fake one would get 100% of it.
But the hard part is, what would the recall method be?
What would be the actual interface between your organic mind and the cloud Connected through your technology that knows everything.
Here's what I suggest.
The early version of this will probably work through something like glasses or contact lenses or something, but it should look like this.
You know how some things remind you of other things?
So for example, I'll give you the worst.
This is just a terrible example, but it's the best I can do in short notice.
So let's say if I showed you this cable, Probably some of you, out of the 1,700 people watching this, probably some of you thought of a worm or a snake.
But if you did, that thought instantly went away because it wasn't really relevant.
It was just something that reminded you of that.
So it's not a snake, so it wasn't important if you were reminded of it.
But, you know, here it is.
But suppose, because your computer part of your brain in the future would be able to do image matching, so if it saw something that was similar to something else, Suppose it served it up onto your glasses as sort of a weak overlay to what you were looking at, but it didn't last long.
It just went poop, poop, gone.
So quickly that it didn't really affect your driving or your conversation, but the moment you looked at this, your glasses would serve up poop, snake, poop, and it would go away.
That would be a way that your computer brain could be somewhat effortlessly serving up associations.
Because your memory works on association.
You see something and it reminds you of something that was like it.
Now let's say that you're trying to remember something from the past.
And you're talking about, oh yes, I remember my 30th birthday celebration, blah blah blah.
If your technology can hear you talking, And it hears you saying, hey, we're talking about my 30th birthday or maybe even the other person talking about it.
Could it just go into your photographs and start flicking some photographs in front of your screen so that you can be reminded of the exact people who were there and the exact situation, what you were wearing and everything else?
I'm thinking that the most important change in our human evolution will be when we figure out that interface between the infinite knowledge of the cloud and how do you get that into your brain directly.
And I think that just flashing images on your glasses for a moment and then leaving them Might get you there.
And then on top of that, once you saw the image, if you cared about it, you could say, show me some more of those.
And then it would show them all.
Or send them to your phone or something.
All right. So you want to live forever, Scott.
Here's the thing I know for sure.
Somebody will live forever.
There's no doubt in my mind about that.
But their organic parts may either be permanently replenished or it makes more sense to me that we just get rid of them over time so that we become just part of the machine.
And I've said before that I'll probably be one of the first...
Is there a word for transhuman or something?
I personally will probably be one of the first people who make the leap from being organic into being a total recreation.
Of my personality.
Why do I say that? Well, these periscopes, for one.
Some AI in the future will be able to take all of my periscopes and build a perfect recreation of me talking and acting.
It can read all my books.
It will know everything I think about everything.
The only thing it won't have is some of my specific memories, but I can feed my digital images in there and it can search the internet and find out a lot about me.
So because I have for so many decades been sending a fire hose of information about me personally, my opinions, my looks, my style, into the internet where it is stored forever, some AI will be able to recreate me.
And I don't think there's any doubt that that will happen.
So I personally probably will live forever in software form.
My personality will probably go on.
Will that version have hair?
No.
Probably not.
So I'm not saying that I would move my personality to the computer.
I'm saying that we could exist at the same time.
So you could recreate me while I'm still alive, and I could actually, you know, I could debug it.
So this is a better model.
Imagine if somebody builds it while I'm still alive and says, hey, spend some time with this and see if it acts like you.
And then I spend some time with it and I say, oh, it seems to have a lack of knowledge in this one area that I have some knowledge.
And then the programmer says, ah, I can fix that.
How much do you know about, let's say, photography?
And I'll say, well, on a scale of 1 to 10, I'm probably a 4.0.
And then it will just add that level of knowledge to my clone, and now it's pretty close to me.
You sure you want your trumpet sycophanty out there?
So the people who call me a sycophant or an apologist are part of the large class of what I call the mind-reading people.
The people who believe, quite literally, That they can read the minds of strangers.
Because if you call me a sycophant or an apologist, the other word that people like to use, they're making assumptions about what's in my mind.
Have you watched me for more than five minutes?
Because if you have, you probably have noticed that if I thought like other people, you wouldn't be watching me.
So right now there are 1,400 people watching me in this Periscope.
How many people are watching the other people on Periscope right now?
Fewer, right?
And part of it is because I don't think like other people.
And I don't mean that as a compliment to myself.
It's just an objective fact.
The reason that you watch anybody is because they're not like the other people.
So it is my distinctive thought that is the reason you even know to insult me.
You wouldn't even be able to insult me if I didn't think differently from you.
So if the people who know they think not like I do believe they can anticipate what I'm thinking in my inner thoughts, the part I'm not sharing with anybody, that's not good thinking.
You do not have the ability To understand the inner thoughts of people who are objectively and unambiguously not like you.
Could I have a good idea of what, let's say, a 12 year old girl in Africa is thinking?
Or would I have a good sense of how she thinks?
No. Because I'm not her.
I don't even spend time with people who would be enough like her that I could even have a reasonable guess what she's thinking about most things.
So likewise, when those of you who accuse me of having this or that motive, you should know that number one, you're wrong.
My motives are complicated, and I don't know if I've ever explained them to anybody.
But sycophant and apologist would not be anywhere close to whatever my internal mental process is.
So just know that if you think you can read the thoughts of strangers, you're almost always wrong.
And if you think you can read the thoughts of strangers who are objectively not like you...
And so if you are a, let's say you're an anti-Trumper, trying to understand the mind of somebody who is supporting him is almost impossible.
You know? Scott, that's BS. Almost gotcha.
Troll. If you come back again, I'll getcha.
Oh! There we go.
Gotcha.
So, you can make, it is reasonable to make assumptions about what other people are thinking.
And you have to do that just to navigate life.
But you should know those situations when you're likely to be good at it versus those situations when you're not likely to be good at it.
So, for example, if you're dealing with your best friend or a spouse or something, and it's a very familiar situation, it's like, ah, I've been here before, and you've talked with the other person about how they think about these situations, well, maybe in those very specific cases, That are well constrained, somebody you know, somebody you've already talked about how they feel about this thing.
In those cases, you could probably make reasonable assumptions.
You wouldn't be right every time, but you could make assumptions about how people are thinking.
But if you're looking at a famous person that has a completely different set of opinions and experience from you, they're a different demographic, everything else, And you think, oh yeah, I know what you're thinking.
And by the way, here's the other tell.
What you're thinking would make you an idiot.
I know what you're thinking.
I can see it in there.
And I can tell you're a horrible person on the inside.
If you're having those thoughts, you're almost certainly wrong.
Almost certainly. Because internally, people don't think there's anything wrong with the way they're thinking.
Some do, I suppose.
You know, sociopaths and stuff.
But most people are having positive thoughts on the inside.
They think they're acting for the greater good, at least in political sense.
And your outside assumptions that they're evil or whatever are very ridiculous.
I just explained the extremes on both sides.
Yeah, it's the extremes that get all the attention.
So as many people have pointed out, you know, the politics, if you were going to describe politics in the simplest possible way, it's like trying to capture the entire field of politics, not in terms of what the actual politicians are doing, but how the rest of us are talking about it.
The rest of us are talking about it this way.
We're looking at the worst people in the other group and we're trying to convince our group and the rest of the people in the group who are not like those worst people that they really are like those worst people.
So we're trying to tell the other side of what their brand is based on their worst people.
You see it with, you know, the right calls the left a bunch of socialists and Antifa and, you know, criminals or whatever else.
And the left is calling the right a bunch of racists and KKK because there are some of them in that group.
There are some of the other people in the other group.
Somebody said, would emotions go to the cloud?
They could. There's nothing that would stop that from happening.
You could code emotions effectively.
So, sorry, I saw a comment coming in, so I changed topics here a little bit.
So, stop mind reading.
Obamacare is socialism...
Let me put a stake in the ground.
Here's my stake in the ground.
Anybody who accuses the left of socialism is not part of the intelligent conversation.
I want to say it again so you can get really mad.
I'll watch my numbers drop to zero now.
If you're accusing the Democrats of of being socialists and you think you've said something, you haven't.
You're not part of the intelligent conversation.
You're not. It's really just the rights version of the left calling the right racists.
When the left says, all you Republicans are racist, well, it's not true and it's not useful and it's not even smart.
When the right calls the left socialists, it's not smart, it's not true, and it's not helpful.
So every time I see somebody, whether it's on here or anywhere else on the internet, say, those socialists, or Alexandra was a socialist, as if just the word itself won you the argument.
Now, here's the part we all agree with.
Full socialism Hasn't worked and, you know, probably can't work.
So trying to equate the, you know, the little bit of sharing socialism, you know, shared burden that some people think would be a good idea, and I'm not saying it is a good idea, but trying to equate that with socialism, like the full-on socialism, is just not good thinking.
It's not good thinking, it's not useful, it's not persuasive, except to your own team who are being bamboozled by your overuse of the word.
So there are a number of things which the country does which are socialist in nature a little bit.
The reality is that our best world probably is the government does some things for us and we try to limit what that is so it doesn't get out of control.
I saw a fascinating thing, by the way.
I saw a fascinating website by...
Oh, I wonder if I could call it up here.
I don't want to make you wait while I'm looking for something.
But there's somebody running for Congress.
A libertarian. I think I can find quite quickly.
Martin Cowan. Cowan for Congress.
And I'm going to give a little shout-out to his website.
I'll tell you why. It has to do with health care.
So Martin Cowen for Congress, Georgia 13th.
And I'm not endorsing him.
I'm not non-endorsing him.
I'm just saying that he's got a website.
He's running for Congress.
He's a libertarian.
And he's got a number of topics on his website that one of them, healthcare in particular, was super interesting.
Now his argument is that the government and its rules essentially...
Have made it impossible to lower health care costs, and he has a bunch of...
Well, how come it doesn't show here?
That's interesting. Show more.
There it is. Okay. Okay.
I'm going to read, this is Martin Cowan's suggestions.
He's a libertarian.
He's running for Congress in Georgia at the 13th.
And he's listed some specific suggestions for lowering health care costs.
And apparently this would, according to him, would lower health care costs a lot.
Like, a lot.
But here's the problem.
I don't understand any of it.
And that will be my point.
So as I read through this, I want you to see if you say to yourself, oh yeah, I totally understand that.
That's a good point. Or do you say to yourself, I don't understand any of this.
Now, I'm not making fun of Martin, because for all I know, these are great suggestions.
They're written in a way which suggests that they're serious, and that they might actually be something we should look into.
So none of this is...
None of this is a criticism of the person who wrote it.
It's a criticism of our ability to understand the complexity of it.
Here it is. Unequivocally state the problem in federal legislation.
The problem with American health care is that the system is a coercive government monopoly.
Okay. Well, maybe that's good for framing, but that doesn't get you anywhere right away.
Here's the next one. Repeal all certificate of need laws nationwide.
Now, I didn't know there was such a thing as a certificate of need law.
So, I don't know.
Is that a good idea? Maybe.
Here's another one. Stop all government funding of MD residencies.
What? So apparently the residency for doctors, people who are in residency, have government funding?
And why is that good?
Does it limit the number of doctors?
Is it anti-competitive?
I don't really know the point.
I'm not saying there's no point, and I'm not saying this isn't smart.
I'm saying it's smarter than I am because I don't understand it.
Reduce the jurisprudence of the FDA, if not completely, including drugs.
At least for medical devices including phone apps.
This one I understand a little bit.
The FDA has control over not just drugs, and most of us would want that to continue, but for medical devices that don't even touch your body.
You know, they have almost no contact with your body or it's a sensor that touches you.
So this is from Martin Cowan's webpage.
He's running for Congress in Georgia, 13th.
Here's another one. Allow fully qualified foreign doctors, MDs, to be fully licensed to practice in the US without further ado.
Allow open immigration for all foreign doctors on condition that they agree to practice medicine for at least five years upon entry.
Now on the surface, I don't know, is that a good idea?
I don't know. But it's interesting.
I can't tell if it's a good idea.
Repeal all healthcare subsidies through the VA, Medicare, and Medicaid.
I have no idea if that's a good idea or even really what it means.
Abolish MEC, which stands for Minimum Essential Coverage, regulations nationwide.
I have no idea if that's a good idea.
End all price controls nationwide.
I have no idea if that's a good idea.
Allow purchase of prescription drugs from anywhere worldwide.
I don't even understand why we can't do that.
Is it legal? Is it for safety?
I have no idea. Repeal the tax deductibility of employer-provided health insurance.
Well, that's probably something you could do if you do all the other changes as well.
But I don't know.
What's the plus and minus of that?
Repeal all laws requiring mandatory vaccinations worldwide.
Okay, I'm not on board with that one, but I'd listen to his argument.
Repeal liability immunity laws protecting pharmaceutical companies from product liability and abolish the federal vaccine court.
No idea. I have no idea if that's a good idea or a bad idea.
But I'm pro-vaccine.
Until proven otherwise.
I mean, I could be talked out of it, but at the moment I'm pro-vaccine.
Completely separate welfare health care from private health care, health insurance under a pure libertarian system, blah, blah, blah.
I have no idea if that's a good idea.
So here's the problem with all of these suggestions, is that you and I really can't evaluate them because we don't know what we don't know.
So I could maybe understand what the argument is, but I wouldn't understand and I wouldn't have any way of knowing what would an expert who disagreed with him say about it.
Every time you see one side of a debate, You're not seeing anything if it's a complicated situation.
It's the same with climate change.
If you see either side, the skeptics or the pro-climate warming is a big problem and humans cause this side, whichever side you see, if you see them in isolation, it's useless.
We believe it's useful because we fool ourselves into thinking we understand it.
But we don't.
We do not understand it because you're not hearing the other side, or even if there isn't one.
You're not even hearing if there isn't another side.
That alone is a big problem.
Look at the facts and make up your mind.
I have a chapter in my new book talking about how ridiculous that is.
So somebody said, essentially do the research yourself.
Look at the facts and make up your mind.
That's not a thing. That's a pure illusion.
It is pure illusion to think that non-experts can analyze an expert field that even the experts can only master parts of and then come to an opinion based on your own research.
Now, I'm not saying you wouldn't get the right answer.
Because some of these are yes-no, and some people are going to come up with yes, and some are going to come up with no.
So some of the people are going to get the right answer.
And if later somehow it was proven that there was a right answer, those people would say, see, I did my own research.
I got the right answer.
Why can't everybody do that?
Well, the obvious answer is that there were a lot of people who did their own research and came to an opposite conclusion.
Thus, doing your own research on these complicated topics is just random.
You're doing nothing but finding a position you're comfortable with and then probably talking yourself into it.
But it is not rational for the complicated topics to say do your own research.
You can't get there. There's an ABC poll about black support for Trump at 3%.
I didn't see that, but there is definitely something going on with the polls about black support for President Trump.
There's something going on.
So if you're seeing the 3% and the 30% or whatever, they're not both right.
They could both be wrong.
But they're definitely not both right.
And I think at this point, Black America has completely screwed itself.
By siding with people outside the country.
I'm laughing because it's so horrible, not because it's funny.
I have a bad habit of laughing at things that are just beyond terrible.
And what's beyond terrible is that this president has made it as clear as you could possibly make it that if you're American, you're on his team, and if you're not American, you're on the other team.
And... It seems to me that Black America has had, I think they've lost it at this point probably, but a huge opportunity to work with the administration to get some things that the Democratic administration has no reason to give them.
You know, the Democrats have the vote.
Oh, and by the way, Let me say something else that will probably get me in trouble.
Let's see if I can get myself in trouble a little bit.
I have a hypothesis, and it goes like this.
That prior to Obama running for office, there was a lot more crossing boundaries in terms of ethnicity.
Meaning that There were more black people willing to vote for a white candidate and vice versa.
In other words, people were thinking, okay, I just want to vote for the qualified person.
But when Obama got, what was it, 95% of the black vote?
What is the actual number?
Somebody do the fact-checking on me.
What percentage of the black vote did Obama get?
Was it 95% or somewhere in that neighborhood?
I think that, 96% somebody say, I wonder if that destroyed democracy.
Because if, let me just ask you this, so I won't be talking for myself here, I'll put this in terms of a question to you.
If you were white and you saw that 96% of black voters voted the same way, how did that make you feel?
Did it make you feel like you needed to vote for the white candidate next time, no matter how bad he was?
Did it make you feel that the old version of voting for who was the best candidate, who would do the best job for the whole melting pot, did it make you feel that that model just broke?
Because with 96% going for the person who looks like them, I think that changed other people who said, um, it's okay now just to vote for your ethnicity?
When did that become okay?
Well, if it's okay, it's okay.
I think a lot of people...
My guess is that Obama made Trump possible.
I believe that there were probably a lot of people...
Who just said, I'm just going to vote for the one who looks like me.
I wonder about the unintended backlash of that.
Now, I was, if you didn't already know this, I was pro-Obama.
I was happy that he got elected, and I've said that he did a solid job as president.
I know that's a very unpopular thing to say here.
And I was glad that he got elected in large part Because I thought that it was just time.
You know, the way everybody else thought the same thing.
It's just time. You need to get somebody in there who's not just a generic white guy.
Because the country needs to move forward, get past this, etc.
But I think it might have had the opposite effect.
It might have actually pulled people apart.
Which certainly wasn't what I had in mind.
I thought it would do the opposite.
I thought it would bring people together.
But the other thing it did, and this is another unintended consequence, is that the government can't do that much for people.
And it can't do that much for black people.
Even if your president is black, even if Congress was black, there's sort of a natural limit of how much you can do.
And so that was a setup for the situation that the black population would think that Obama didn't do enough.
So you get this weird situation where there's nearly a solid block of voters for the group that has no interest And no advantage in helping the group that voted for them.
Because they have their vote.
I've said this before, right?
That if you know you're going to get the black vote, and Democrats do, if you know you got their vote, why would you do anything for them?
Politics doesn't work that way.
You have to do something for people to...
To get them to vote. Now the Democrats, you could argue, got there the honest way through LBJ and civil rights and stuff, so the Democrats have earned the black vote.
I think that would be a fair perspective.
But what have they done lately?
You know, is it enough?
I would say that the black community, at least people I've talked to, would tell you, well, we really were expecting more.
But if you expected more and you vote again, 96%, and I think that will happen, for the side that didn't give you anything lately, are they going to give you something?
It wouldn't be rational.
If Hillary had been elected, would it be rational for her to do something that addressed the black community specifically?
Probably not, because why does she need to?
She could work on other things that were more fruitful.
And now take the other side.
How about President Trump?
Does he have an incentive to do something that would be unambiguously good for the black community?
Well, some people say he doesn't because he's, you know, he's pandering to his base.
But here's the thing.
Is the base going to leave President Trump because he did something like prison reform that was good for everybody?
It just happens to affect African-American citizens more?
No. No, prison reform is probably just a good thing if it integrates people back into society and makes them productive.
What about any work with the inner cities?
What about anything that helps urban areas?
Does anybody think that's a bad idea?
No. No, because, you know, the country's better if we help those areas.
So the president has a pretty good incentive to do things that would be good for the black community, but the black community is not willing to work with him in big enough numbers to make that really successful.
Obviously there are plenty of black supporters of this president in absolute numbers, but in terms of percentages it's still way low.
Are you naive, Scott?
Every red state has a huge profit for prison.
I'm not sure how that exactly is counter to what I'm saying, because I've never heard anybody who based their vote on what was good for the private prison industry.
I don't think people base votes on that.
And there is a prison reform bill that Jared Kushner's folks are trying to get through that would help retrain people and let them out early with credits for retraining and stuff.
And that seems to be counter to what would be good for the private prison situation.
Maybe not. Maybe the private prisons would be performing the extra services, so I don't know how that works.
How does Trump solve the problem?
I don't know.
I've got a feeling that...
I think the media has rendered this unsolvable.
The only way that opinions are going to change is if CNN, MSNBC, and the big tech companies decide to change those opinions.
As I've said before, we don't live in a world where people form opinions independently.
We're social creatures.
We're influenced by lots of things.
And our opinions are mostly assigned to us by the media that we choose to watch.
So the people who are watching left-leaning media adopt left-leaning opinions eventually, even if they didn't start that way.
So if you're asking what can the president do to fix relations with African Americans, I'm coming around to the conclusion that the answer is nothing.
Because the only person, the only group that could fix that would be the media, and the media has an extraordinarily strong interest in keeping it broken.
So if you were black...
And you knew that you don't have a chance of fixing things because the media isn't going to allow that to happen.
I wouldn't be very happy about it.
But it's your own media.
It's your preferred source of media that is keeping the situation bad.
Here's a little thought experiment.
Suppose, let's say, the media...
That is typically anti-Trump, decided to run some stories saying positive things about black unemployment, and let's say not counting Fox News, right?
Let's say that the CNNs, MSNBCs in the world start running stories about black unemployment being great, about the vocational training stuff that the administration's doing, about that helping the African-American community, Let's say they do stories about the blight removal projects, which are not directly the administration, but they're things that are good for the black community in particular.
Let's say they just started focusing on some of the good things, unlike prison reform.
Suppose they did that.
What would happen? Well, the first thing that would happen is that the administration would say, holy cow, this really helps us to be doing more of this stuff.
When we do more of this stuff, we get all of the press coverage we want, and that keeps us in power, and that's good.
So... In my view of the world, the press determines what the public is worked up about, for the most part, and the press has decided to keep the public worked up about racism because it works.
Now, here's a question that only just now occurred to me.
If your If you were on the left and your biggest issue was the courts, and specifically your biggest issue was, let's say, reproductive rights.
Let's say you're an anti-Trumper, but really it's the courts and it's the reproductive rights in particular, those are the things, and maybe gay rights, those are the things you really, really care about.
Would you want this administration to fix racial relations?
Here's the problem.
It wouldn't work in your favor if your main interests were those other things, the courts.
Because if the president did well by the various groups who are not voting for him, if let's say he did something great for the Hispanic community, for the black community, and it was obvious and it was clear and everybody agreed, yeah, that's pretty good, they might vote for him.
And then your courts are not going to give you the courts that you want if you're on the left.
So the left has a problem, which is fixing racism would be literally the worst thing they could do.
Think about that. In order for the people on the left, the white people on the left, let me make this even more provocative.
In order for the white people on the left to get what they want most, because the white people on the left are not personally being discriminated against, but they might personally need an abortion.
So my guess is that the white people on the left care about the courts a lot.
They care about racism too.
I think that's genuine.
But they probably care more about the courts.
And if that's the case, they don't want racism fixed under this administration because they want this administration to enter there as quickly as possible.
And the racism claim is the strongest play.
So... The black voters have been pushed into a horrible corner in which their situation has been created in which neither side has any reason to help them.
Because if the president did something genuinely good that was just unambiguously good for the black community, he would probably only do something that was good for low-income people.
Maybe it just helped the black community more.
Would the press give him credit for that?
I don't think there's any chance.
So the press has removed this administration's incentive to really fix the problem or to even address it in an aggressive way.
It just wouldn't work. Anything they do is going to be characterized as, well, just more racism.
And the left has no reason to help the black community because they already have their vote.
And it's better off to keep this racial animus going because it might help them get the courts that they want eventually.
So that is a terrible, terrible place to be if you are in the black community.
Now one of the things I like about working on the Blight Authority...
Is that we can do our thing independent of Democrats and Republicans.
So, you know, I'm neither a Democrat nor a Republican, so if I can make a difference in the black community, it just sort of has to be extra government, you know.
We'd love for the government to be helpful at some point, whether it's this government or a future government.
You know, that would be great.
But as soon as you get into the politics of it, the politics makes it hard to help.
You almost have to do it as private citizens.
Somebody's saying, Scott, why am I so invested in racism?
A number of reasons.
If you've watched me long enough, you know that I'm invested in a number of things.
But the things that rich people should be most interested in fixing, and I'm in the group of rich people, billionaires, etc., I think rich people have a special obligation.
Because of their luck, their position, their sense of being part of society, their tribal instinct, if you will.
To help other people once you have everything you have.
So my starting point is that I have everything I need.
I would never need to work again.
I would never need to do a periscope again.
I have everything I need for the rest of my life.
And I think that people in my position who have any kind of talent and they're still young enough to be useful and they've got resources should take on the hardest problems.
And the richest people should take on the hardest of the hard problems.
So if you look at Bill Gates, do you see the things that Bill Gates is taking on?
Bill Gates is taking on enormous problems, problems so big that governments can't even handle them.
Big stuff. Racism, and in particular the economic problems that come from racism, are probably the biggest problem that I might be able to have some kind of impact on.
I'm probably not the guy who's going to solve malaria in Africa, but the Gates Foundation can, and I think they're on their way.
So there is a natural evolution as you become successful and you take care of your own needs to extend what you can do to your family first, which I've done, and then to other people, and then you expand that.
So the reason that racism is a special interest to me, and helping the black community in particular, is because they're in the deepest hole.
So the people who are the hardest problem in the deepest hole and in particular what I just described is almost a psychological barrier to doing something useful because the psychology of the Democrats and the psychology of the Republicans and the psychology and the business model of the news makes it impossible.
But maybe individuals can break through that.
Somebody says stop dicking.
I don't really know what that means.
If you do not get into the trenches, you do not understand.
Well, how would you know how much of a trench I've been in?
How do you know who I've talked to?
It's a good general statement, but don't assume that about me.
Scott, do you think the country will break up by race?
*sniff* Depends on the media.
The media is walking a fine line right now.
so they could push it into something dangerous, but at this point, I don't see it happening.
All right, I think I've said enough.
Okay.
I'm going to go do some other work now.
Thanks for joining me.
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