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Oct. 22, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
57:28
Episode 269 Scott Adams: Saudi Excuses, Blue Checks, Opioids
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Hey everybody!
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams. This is coffee.
This is also coffee.
Do you have your coffee?
I just bought some of mine on Amazon.
Apparently some Trump supporters who have made a Trump brand of coffee.
I haven't tasted it yet.
I'm still on my old coffee.
But I thought I'd buy a bag and support this entrepreneur.
Hey, it's time for the simultaneous sip.
Yes, it is.
Do you have your mug?
Your cup? Your vessel?
Your stein? Your glass?
Is it full of a beverage?
Your favorite beverage?
I like coffee.
Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, that's good.
Somebody said, talk about the caravan.
You know, there's not that much to say about the caravan.
That hasn't already been said.
The caravan creates...
This horrific visual imagery.
And you know, visual imagery is among the strongest persuasion.
So it's happening at the very worst time for the Democrats, because the midterms are approaching.
But on top of the visual element, the other strongest kind of persuasion is fear.
And the look of the crowds, there's so many of them.
Most of them are men. They're heading toward the border.
It just triggers sort of a basic fear response just because of the numbers of people and the chaos of it all.
So I don't think things could be luckier.
In a weird way for the Republicans coming up to the midterms, but there isn't much else to say.
I'm pretty sure the President will send down the military to stop them.
And I'm sure they'll be successful because, you know, there are a lot of people, but they're not going to get past the military.
Let's talk about some other stuff.
You might know that apparently it's been discovered That the Saudis story about a fight broke out and, you know, it was just a big mistake, is somewhat injured by the fact that the team of Saudis that went to the embassy for Khashoggi, one of them was a body double who left the embassy wearing Khashoggi's clothes.
Now, if you're going to make up a An alibi or an excuse.
I expect you to do a little bit better job than that.
So far, Saudi Arabia is just absolutely embarrassing our president by not giving him any cover whatsoever.
This is how I see the situation.
I think that realistically, other countries Maybe every country doesn't really care about one Saudi citizen being killed by Saudi Arabia for whatever reasons they had.
On an individual basis, like on a human level, of course we care.
We'd care about anybody who's, you know, being killed.
So as a human, we care.
But in terms of politics, I don't see anybody who thinks that it would be a good idea to derail an ally in some important stuff in the Middle East over this.
So I've never talked to anybody in person who thought this one murder was a big deal.
So under that situation, all we really needed to get past it The president was signaling this as clearly as you could signal anything, which is we can't approve of it, but give us some kind of story that we can at least say, well, maybe.
Maybe it went that way.
And the only story that would have worked is that there were underlings who planned the entire operation, including killing him, from the start.
That's the only explanation that had any chance of being sold.
Which is to say that the Crown Prince didn't directly order it and didn't directly know about it, but somebody below him did directly order it and did know about it.
That's the only story that you could possibly sell.
Now I'm not saying that that's true.
I'm saying it's the only story you'd have a chance of having any reasonable doubt.
Because it is actually feasible that the Crown Prince didn't know the details and didn't know it had been ordered by an underling.
I don't know how likely.
Not 100%, not 0%.
But at least give us something.
But now we see this weak excuse of it was an accident and a fight broke out.
And then you see his body double leaving in the victim's clothes.
So the whole Saudi thing has just completely turned into an embarrassment for our president.
Who was really just trying to help, if you know what I mean.
He was trying to make this not something that affects our country and try to make it not something that affects the Alliance and something that doesn't affect the larger plans in the Middle East.
But man, are they making it hard.
They're making it so hard.
And then I realized that Rand Paul, It has taken a strong stand against Saudi Arabia and says something must be done.
So it looks like the smart people in this conversation are saying that the thing which could be done is directly punishing maybe royals, maybe leadership people who seem to be involved in the decision making.
But I don't know how you identify who they are.
I don't know how you'd leave the Crown Prince out of it.
If you're the President, and you've lost, you know, if you're President Trump, and you lose Rand Paul, that's sort of the canary in the coal mine.
You know, I've told you before that I have a high opinion of Rand Paul for his independent thinking.
So the fact that he's an independent thinker makes it especially powerful when he agrees with the president, because you know it's not automatic.
But he's also especially powerful when he disagrees with the president for the same reason, because you know he's an independent thinker and he's following the evidence, following his moral inclinations.
So now that Rand Paul has said something has to be done, something has to be done, right?
Once you've lost Rand Paul, you can't just say, well, let's just move on.
I mean, you could, but it's a lot harder.
So, I'm wondering what the Saudis will say now that the news has come out that the body double left wearing Khashoggi's clothes.
If they follow pattern, They will modify their story again, and it will look like this.
Well, sure.
One of the guys did leave wearing Khashoggi's clothes.
We acknowledge that. That's on the camera.
But it's not what you think.
It was a fist fight.
The fight broke out.
I think one of the guys punched Khashoggi so hard that he ended up wearing his clothes.
And then they're going to say, I think they're going to buy this.
I think this is going to work.
No, that won't happen.
But you know, this whole thing is making me wonder about the cultural differences in what honesty looks like.
Does it seem like there's some kind of a cultural thing that's happening here that the Saudis' explanation sounds ridiculous even to liars?
Even people who lie for a living Look at that one and say, dude, I lie for a living.
I'm a politician.
That's all I do. I lie all day.
But I don't do that.
Whatever the hell you're doing over there, who taught you to lie?
You're terrible liars.
And this gets me back to a point that I'd noticed, I don't know, decades ago.
I noticed this. Whenever you'd see the Middle East You know, people who are leaders or representatives in the Middle East talking, I would always say to myself, but wait a minute, the Islamic folks are lying, just like both sides. You know, in a political situation, I take it as a given that all sides are lying all the time.
So I'm not going to say The one side is the bigger liars, because in my sense of the world, everybody's sort of lying or exaggerating.
They're leaving out things.
They're lying by omission.
So my sense of the world is everybody's lying all the time.
But it seemed as though when the Muslim country leaders were lying, it looked different.
And the way it looked different was, It was lacking at least a thin coating of credibility.
It seems like there are some countries, some leaders, when they lie, you know they're lying, but you can't tell, is this one a lie?
Is it slightly exaggerated?
There's at least a little bit of protective, reasonable doubt around their lie.
So it seems like a Western form of lying is trying not to get caught.
Whereas the Middle East form of lying, and again, this is just an observation.
So I'm not making any claim that anything I'm going to say here would hold up to any kind of scientific scrutiny.
It's just an observation that I'd be interested if it held up to scrutiny, but I'm not predicting that.
You can't predict that based on anecdotal evidence.
But anecdotally, It seems to me that the style of lying is fundamentally different.
And that to us their style of lying looks like not even trying.
Whereas the Western style of lying looks like you're at least trying to get away with it.
That's just an observation.
So I don't know if there's a cultural difference there that matters or not.
Let's talk about Let's talk about opioids.
So, I'm getting a lot of pushback on my call for China to execute their fentanyl lab owners as they find them.
And people have pushed back this way.
They said, hey, you idiot, don't you know that if you shut down one lab, there'll just be another lab?
Or people are saying, you idiot, don't you know that there are thousands and thousands of illegal fentanyl labs?
China couldn't possibly know where they all are, couldn't possibly shut them down.
To my critics, I say, you are completely right.
There's nothing that China can do Or that we could do that will ever change the supply.
Because the nature of it is you can start an illegal lab just about anywhere, so if you shut down one, sure enough, another lab would jump up.
But you're missing my point entirely.
There's nothing I'm saying that has anything to do with supply.
Alright, so when I say that China should execute its illegal fentanyl lab dealers, it's not to reduce the supply, because that can't be done.
I'm not suggesting that anybody try to do the impossible.
What I'm suggesting is that they're mass murderers.
And if somebody is a mass murderer, and collectively they're killing perhaps 30,000 Americans a year, 30,000 a year.
That changes everything. If one person was dying in America, even I would say, well, maybe that person should have made better choices.
If 100 people per year were dying in America from Chinese fentanyl, I might say to myself, that's terrible, but that's 100 people who should have made better choices.
If a thousand people per year, Americans, died from Chinese fentanyl, I might be tempted to say, a thousand?
Wow, that's a lot of people.
But that's a lot of people who should have made better choices.
When 30 frickin' thousand people a year are dying from Chinese fentanyl, that's a war.
That's not personal choice anymore.
Personal choice is always, you know, involved in the fabric of it, but the size of it changes entirely what it is.
And therefore your approach to it has to entirely change to recognize what it is.
And one of the things it is, is a big frickin' problem that should be attacked with maximum strength on every dimension you could attack it.
So when I say that China should be executing their fentanyl dealers, and if they can't, that we should do it for them with whatever wet work type people we can arrange.
Literally kill them, is what I'm talking about.
And don't care if we get caught.
So if we get caught executing Chinese citizens who are illegal drug dealers in their country, I don't care.
I don't care if that becomes public.
I don't care if China doesn't like it.
Because this is no longer about some supply and demand and a product and some people should have made better choices.
It's a war. In a war, you don't care that some of you guys get caught killing the other side.
It's a war. We are not at war with the government of China.
And I think we could make that distinction because they would be on the same side trying as hard as they can to go after their own fentanyl dealers.
Now let me ask you this.
If we killed a few of their fentanyl lab owners and China's government found out about it, what is the most likely response?
Well, of course, they'd complain and they might make some trouble about it.
But the most likely response is they're going to try a lot harder to police their own business.
Now, they can't stop all their fentanyl.
That's never the goal, because it can't be done.
Here's the goal. To send a message about how big the problem is.
That's my goal.
When I say China should be executing the fentanyl lab dealers, or we should go in and do it for them on their soil, even at the risk of getting caught, when I say that, it's because I'm sizing the problem.
I'm persuading.
I'm using death Of people who deserve it because they're mass murderers and they know it.
I'm using their death simply to amplify the message.
That's it. I want to kill people who have it coming.
They're mass murderers. I don't favor killing any innocent people.
Ever. Period.
But people who are mass murderers, we can morally Kill if it improves our result.
It changes the size of the message.
So don't argue with me about supply.
If you would like to try legalizing fentanyl in a small trial, I say let's try it.
So anybody who's arguing that the problem is on the supply side, I'm not ruling that out.
In fact, that's a very good argument, and we should work on that as hard as we can.
At the same time, we're helping the world see the size of the problem by executing Chinese fentanyl lab dealers if their government won't do it for them.
And by the way, even if China is doing it as fast as they can, And they're really trying to help?
If it's not fast enough, we should also kill their fentanyl dealers.
Because again, it makes the size of the problem look more realistic.
Let me put this in starker terms.
There are two dumb opinions on every big policy decision.
So whether you're talking about how to treat opioids or climate science or just about any other problem from the urban situations, if you say, here's a proposal, and if you say, yes, let's do it, or you say, no, let's not do it, those are the two stupid opinions.
I'll let that hang there for a while.
No matter what the proposal is, if it's a big government proposal, there are two stupid opinions.
And I'm being blunt here.
There's no way to shade it.
There are two opinions that are stupid about every major proposal idea.
One of them is, yes, let's do it.
And the other is, no, let's not do it.
Those are the stupid opinions.
Now let me tell you what a smart opinion is.
Can we test it as small?
That's what a smart opinion looks like.
A smart opinion says, if you're considering doing this big plan, we don't know how it'll turn out.
Nobody knows. Nobody's smart enough.
So if you say, yes, let's do it, you're stupid.
If you say, no, let's not do it, you're stupid.
Those are the two stupid sides.
If you say, is there some way to test this small so that we would have better visibility about whether it would work, that's a smart decision.
So when you're saying to me, it's smart or it's dumb to do this or that about fentanyl, you're not part of the intelligent conversation.
If you say, is there something we could test in a small scale, And then we'd know whether it's worth considering for large.
You're part of the smart conversation.
So when somebody says to me, Scott, why have you ruled out making it legal in some cases so that people could get a safe supply of their drug and then you work on the addiction problem?
And I say, can you trial it?
Is this something you can do small?
The answer is absolutely yes.
So if you can test it and it has some, you know, some reasonable chance that it could work, then the answer is you test it.
Absolutely. And when the size of the problem is this big, you test every freaking thing you can think of.
You don't leave any rock unturned.
The problem is this big.
You test, you test.
So when you're looking at Any big government program, there's some exceptions like, for example, well, probably something like tax policy is the sort of thing that you either have to do it or not do it.
But most things can be tested small.
There's almost, I would say 80% of everything can be tested small.
And that's the smart way to go every time.
You think, and I know how some of you are Those of you who have experience in business are probably thinking some version of, duh, all experienced business people are saying that's right.
Duh, of course you would try as small.
If there was a way to do that, you would of course try it as a trial before you went big.
But most people don't work for a big company.
Most people don't have this kind of experience.
The average American The government doesn't think in terms of, is there a way to do a small trial?
As a result, our government does not think in terms of, can we do a small trial?
It's kind of rare to see that, isn't it?
It's kind of rare to see the government say, we don't know if this is going to work, so we're just doing a small trial so we'll find out.
That's how the government needs to evolve.
I think it can and will under a Trump administration.
If you hear somebody in the Trump administration say, we don't know if this is a good idea, that's why we're trying it, or that's why we're suggesting somebody tries it, then you know they've evolved.
Let's talk about something that's fun and interesting for a change.
Oh, and by the way, I'd ask for an expert on my app, the Interface by WinHub app, my company's app.
I'd ask for an expert on Suboxone.
It's a chemical used to get people off of opioids, and apparently it makes you sick.
If you take an actual opioid when you're on Suboxone, I think you'd get ill, so it keeps you from doing it.
But the question is, can you use Suboxone and then wean yourself off of Suboxone, or are you on Suboxone forever?
Because it's the only way to protect you from the opioids.
So that was my question, and I'm looking for an expert on the Interface by WinHub app to answer that.
At the same time, I had done a sort of a public call.
And so the Suboxone is something that falls into the category of something that you could test.
So the hypothesis is that you could wean yourself off of Suboxone, even if that's not the medical recommended treatment.
Under doctor supervision, it would be easy to test that in a small-scale test.
So I'm wondering if it's been done.
So a number of people have started getting on the Interface by WinHub app to volunteer as sponsors.
So we're getting very close, and I think there are already some sponsors on there.
Let me check. I'll just look right now while I'm talking.
So the idea is that sponsors could charge zero for their time, because the app lets you set your price, and you could charge zero if you want.
So I'm just going to look up Addiction.
And see if anybody's on there.
Alright, so we have addiction sponsor.
It looks like there's one, two, three, four.
Now, three people who are on right now, that doesn't mean they'll necessarily answer, but they're online as sponsors.
So somebody can get somebody immediately.
Now, do I know that that will work?
I do not. I don't know if having more sponsors on an app will save lives.
But can it be tested in a small way?
Yes. And therefore, you don't have to ask if it will work or won't work.
You just test it.
That's the smart thing to do, given that the stakes are so high.
Now, while we're talking about the ability to test things small, let me talk about something that's really, really exciting.
That's happening right before your eyes.
And it goes like this.
It was not long ago that if you were a citizen and you had a great idea for the government, that idea would just be stranded in your brain, right?
If you're just a voter, You're one of, you know, hundreds of millions of people in the United States.
You're just a voter and you have a great idea.
How could you get your great idea to the government?
Well, it was possible.
I mean, I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but the average person really didn't have any relationship with the government.
That has completely changed.
And I'm going to take you to my whiteboard in a moment and show you.
You saw it recently and you've seen it how many times?
How many times have you seen the President of the United States, President Trump, how many times have you seen him retweet an idea that came from just a citizen?
You've seen it a bunch of times, right?
So we know that the President of the United States, on a regular basis, Receives the ideas, the framing, the way of thinking of things from the public, and then actually retweets it.
It's not an accident. It's happening on a regular basis.
And I want to show you that pathway that didn't used to exist.
And it looks like this.
I apologize for my whiteboard being hard to read.
But let's say you're a citizen and you've got an idea.
And you want to get your idea to the President of the United States.
This is how easy it is right now.
Now keep in mind that only good ideas are going to get there, right?
Bad ideas are going to die a premature death.
But there's now a direct pipeline for any good idea to get to the President and to get filtered along the way so that by the time the President gets it, it's already been checked out.
In other words, the president won't get the bad ideas.
The president would only get the ideas that other people have filtered through.
And it looks like this. If you're a regular citizen, and let's say you're sophisticated enough to know the difference between LinkedIn and Instagram, so you know enough about the world, the digital world, that you could find me.
How many of you watching the Periscope have sent me a personal message through one of the various social media mechanisms?
Those of you who are clever have figured out that I'm on LinkedIn and that I accept as a connection everybody who asks.
So you could just connect to me on LinkedIn and send me a message and what are the odds I would read your message?
Almost 100%.
So, what are the odds that I would read a message if you put it on Instagram?
I only have about 6,000 Instagram followers.
I'd probably see every one.
What are the odds I would see a message if you sent it to me on the Patreon app?
So, I'm on Patreon.
I collect funds to spread my Periscopes into other realms, to turn them into podcasts and stuff, so I use that money for that.
How many of you would know that you could send me a message on the app that is used for that, Patreon, and that I would almost certainly, close to 100%, see your message?
So people who are comfortable with technology know they can get a personal message to me through probably, I don't know, six to ten different channels and that the odds of me seeing it are pretty high.
So if you can get a message to me I have, I think, 278,000 Twitter followers.
So I'm a blue check.
So I'm a verified blue check, but on the small side.
Having a few hundred thousand followers is still smallish.
But what I do have is larger blue check accounts that do follow me.
And they would certainly see my work if something I tweeted was popular.
So if you've got a good idea, your ability to get to me or people like me, which are the smaller blue check accounts, It's close to 100%.
Almost anybody could get to me or somebody who has a small blue check account.
If we like the idea, we have filtered it once, meaning that it was good enough that we retweeted it.
If we retweet it, it's always going to be at least noticed by the bigger blue check accounts.
You've seen this in my case, right?
If I tweet something and it has some quality that people want to spread, you'll see it come out of the larger accounts.
It doesn't happen often and it shouldn't happen often because most of my tweets are not worthy of the entire world seeing them.
But some are. So now the blue checks, tweet it, and what happens when you have this much visibility?
Once you reach this much visibility, there's somebody on the president's social media team who's going to see it.
And they can tell how popular it is when they see it.
Because they'll see how many retweets, they'll see how many likes, they'll see what kinds of comments people made.
So you saw this with the jobs not mobs idea.
So I don't know who actually came up with it.
It was a citizen. So some citizen said, you know, a good slogan would be jobs not mobs.
I saw that on the internet.
And I made a comment about it that jobs not mobs would be a good slogan and it works on a number of levels and it's persuasion correct and doesn't have any downside.
So I said that and it took a very short time for other larger Twitter accounts and for lots of other people to retweet it.
It took six days, I counted, from the time that I saw a citizen with a good idea To the time it percolated up and came out of the president's Twitter account.
This is not the first time that you've seen this happen.
And I think there is something special about this administration, because obviously the tools have been here for a while, but there's something about this administration that makes you think participating matters.
Because the president does this so often, you can feel, here's the key point, because the president so often will take a good idea that comes from the base and amplify it, you can feel the connection.
It's like a real thing.
It's not a concept that could work in theory.
It's something we observe on a regular basis.
So you're watching the most connected president you've ever seen in your life who is essentially A-B testing on a continuous basis and he's part of a system that does it for him.
So the bad ideas don't go very far because I won't retweet them and then these people never see them and he just never sees them.
But if it's good enough to get the attention of somebody with a smallish account, it could make it all the way to the top.
So that is a big, big change in society.
It unleashes the best ideas in the world that could be coming from the people who are closest to the problem.
So when you see me doing these periscopes, and I know some of you were complaining that you've seen too much on the opioid situation.
The ideas that I'm putting forth are that we should be trying everything on the opioid crisis.
And if that's true, if my suggestion that we should be trying as many things as possible is valid, Then some of the things that come through the system, to me, are going to make their way up.
So when I asked about Suboxone, it's because there was somebody on the internet who had an experience with Suboxone curing, essentially being a very easy path to getting off of opioids.
But I didn't know if that was something that other people could experience too.
It might have been something specific about this person.
And so I raised the question because it was such a good question.
That doesn't mean it's the answer, but it was such a good question that I raised it.
So now you're seeing me do it at my level.
I've put out the call.
Can somebody tell me about Suboxone?
Can we look at the question of whether tapering off makes sense?
Because there's some suggestion that doctors are recommending Suboxone as a permanent drug.
So you're just getting off of one drug and getting on another.
And so the question is, does it have to be permanent or could you wean yourself off it?
And As I explained earlier, the real question is, could you do a small test of that?
Or has somebody already done a test of it?
And I would just find out that.
But watch the power of the system.
That idea just came to me this week.
The question about Suboxone and whether it could help.
I raised it.
So far it's trapped here.
So far the idea has filtered up to here.
And there's nobody with a larger account who's picked it up and said, yeah, that's a good idea.
Now, probably nobody will.
Most ideas don't go that far.
But the system is really strong.
If it doesn't go that far, it might be because the idea didn't have enough legs.
It might be it's not quite the right idea.
But we get to test it and find out fairly quickly.
This is all new. This effect It's pretty new.
Or at least it's becoming something that works better under this president.
It's not entirely new.
All right. Society is not always ready for an idea.
Well, there are also persuasive people in this stack.
So persuading people to get ready for an idea is part of the process.
All right. How many of you...
Let me just ask this question.
Is this model that I just explained about how easy it is to get from a good idea to the leader of the country, did that seem new to you?
Because it's a big, big deal.
It's a super big deal.
And I've argued before that the citizens, at least until the algorithms take over, the citizens are really in control of the country in a way that's never been true before because of this.
You know, good ideas have now, for the first time in history, it's never been true before, that a good idea could take on its own life and could just rise.
Before a good idea would be sort of trapped in your own little bubble of non-influence, but now a good idea can rise infinitely.
There's nothing to stop it.
This is the golden age, my friends.
The golden age is when we realize that resource constraints are not the big problem anymore.
Resource constraints were a problem all through history, but now it's the good idea.
That's what we lack, is a good idea.
And the president has weaponized The process of getting a good idea from somebody who knows something, somebody who's close to the problem, or just somebody who has a good idea.
He's weaponized the Twitter path to get them to him so he can amplify them.
And by the way, when an idea gets to the president, And he tweets it?
That doesn't mean it's done.
That just means he's still testing it.
He's just testing it at the highest level.
What do you think? He gets a lot of input.
If it's good, he does more of it.
If the input is bad, he does less of it.
This is a good system.
All right. How about the idea of prosecuting Soros for the caravan?
I am a Soros skeptic.
I can be convinced that Soros is some kind of an enemy to the world.
My current impression, because I've asked a lot of people who should know, you know, tell me why Soros is the enemy of the country, and I find that people get a little vague about that.
Clearly his organization is funding some things, but you have to connect a lot of dots to make him trying to destroy the country.
So I would say I'm agnostic on Soros, but I lack the kind of facts or argument that would make me anti-Soros.
I'm not pro-Soros.
I'm just concerned that so many people have a strong opinion and nobody can explain it to me in a way that sounds even a little bit convincing.
And I don't know what's up with that.
Do we have other problems that can't even be explained?
Because I'm not saying Soros did or did not do anything.
I'm saying that nobody can explain what he did.
What is his intention?
What is he trying to accomplish?
And what did he do to accomplish it?
I'm completely lost on that because it reads like a conspiracy theory to me, which, again, does not mean it's a conspiracy theory because conspiracy theories and the real thing can look identical to us, right?
We can't tell the difference most of the time.
But why have we gone so long?
I'm pretty well informed, right?
I'm fairly well informed.
I would say I'm in the top...
At least 5% of well-informed Americans.
And that's without even trying, really.
I'm probably in the top 5% just because I pay attention to the news.
And I've never seen, never, a good explanation of what Soros is up to that makes him the devil.
Yeah, I know he did currency speculation.
That was his job.
That's all well documented.
Read the Wall Street Journal article on Soros.
Without reading the Wall Street Journal article on Soros, here's what I predict about it.
I predict that if I read it, There would be lots of information about Soros, and when I was done, I wouldn't know what to make of it.
That's before I've read it.
That's my prediction. Because that's what's happened every time I've read anything about him.
I read it and I go, well, this is concerning.
And I can see why people would be concerned.
And then by the time I'm done, I think, I don't think anything's been shown here in any persuasive way.
It's just a whole bunch of things that should maybe almost concern us.
So nobody's credible on this topic yet.
He strokes social unrest and then profits from chaos.
Yeah, so somebody just said that his game is to fund social unrest and then place financial bets in which he can win based on that.
That is ridiculous.
To me, that sounds so much like a conspiracy theory that I wouldn't even bother looking into it a little bit.
Like it's too ridiculous on its surface that even if there was an article that purported to tell you about that idea, I wouldn't even read it, honestly.
That would be too far beyond the believable.
So I'd need something a little more solid than that.
He is funding most, if not all, of the lefty groups.
Well, okay.
Do you know who else favors a lot of the lefty groups?
Democrats. Is there some reason that he can't fund lefty groups?
Oh, Cory Booker.
Let's talk about Cory Booker.
Let's leave.
Here we go.
Come back to me. So, there's a report in the media that I consider very low credibility.
And there's a man who says that Cory Booker tried to grope him in a restroom or something.
Now, my interpretation of that claim is that it's very unlikely.
Very unlikely.
But the context is...
I think I'm back now.
The context is that Cory Booker was on the team that was saying, you know, accusers, in particular women, should be believed.
I think the audio is back now.
I think your comments are behind the actual.
So somebody tell me if you can hear me again, because I believe that my audio is back.
So the accuser doesn't sound...
Credible to me. Very much like the Kavanaugh multiple rape party accuser didn't really sound credible on the surface.
Doesn't mean it's false, but it just doesn't sound credible.
So I think it's Cory Booker suffering from karma or suffering from a political attack, but it probably has more to do with With outing him.
So one of my assumptions is it may not be so much that somebody is trying to take him down for this accusation, because I doubt there's any corroborating evidence.
Doesn't sound credible to me.
But I think it's probably a ploy to out him on his sexuality because it would make him look like a phony.
So the thing that Cory Booker has to worry about in terms of his brand and the attackers Is that he might be accused of being sort of a phony.
And, you know, his Spartacus thing plays into that.
It's like, oh, you're just pretending to be some kind of hero.
You know, you're kind of a phony hero.
So if he's also been less than forthcoming about his sexual preferences, Which again, I don't think anybody in the country really cares about.
We're way beyond that being a reason not to be elected.
We're way beyond that being a reason to judge him.
I'd like to think at least the vast majority of the country could not care less About the president's sexual preference.
I hope we're at the point where that's not a real issue.
But what could be a real issue is not being forthcoming about it.
So it would be, I think, a devastating blow to him politically if the people on his own team start asking why he has to hide his sexuality if, in fact, that's going on.
So I don't have any inside knowledge about Cory Booker's sexual preferences, and I'm not interested in them, and I don't think it should be any kind of disqualification for anything.
Of course, you know, I think this is 2018.
It's not 1960 or whatever.
But there is a question about why somebody would hide it if that's happening.
And I don't know that's happening because I don't know his sexual preferences.
And I'm not going to pretend I do.
I'll just say it doesn't matter to me.
Somebody says, he's not gay.
My cousin works on his staff.
Ha, ha, ha. Come on, did you just write that?
Somebody just wrote in the comments, and I'll quote, he's not gay, my cousin is working on his staff.
You could have worded that differently.
Alright, so on that count, oh, wait, I'm not done yet.
Remind me tomorrow to talk about self-driving cars.
No, I'm going to do it now because it's interesting and fun.
I keep forgetting to talk about this.
Self-driving cars, right?
When you think about the idea of self-driving cars, you think about them integrated on the highways with their human cars for however many decades it takes until they're all self-driving cars, I suppose.
But you imagine self-driving cars and real cars driving together.
That's the first thing you assume.
Secondly, you assume that each of these cars is an independent entity, made by different companies perhaps, but they all operate like they're aware of their surroundings, but they're independent.
That's the second assumption.
Third assumption is that they would share the existing highways.
What if you throw away all of those assumptions?
Let's say you say to Detroit, Hey Detroit, we're going to make you the automotive capital again.
And we're going to overlay a new highway right on top of Detroit, which is just for self-driving cars.
Now, of course, there are lots of regular highways.
So where are the regular highways?
You're going to have to either go next to them.
When you need to cross them, you might need to bridge over them or tunnel under them.
But there's probably enough blight in a place like Detroit that you could map out a whole parallel highway that would get you within walking distance of any destination in the city.
So now imagine that you build, you say that Detroit's going to be the self-driving car test city.
And here are the rules.
The highway we build is going to be an overlay to the regular highway system, so the cars will never share a highway with human-driven cars.
Secondly, all of the cars on this highway have to be able to communicate in real time with all of the other self-driving cars.
So if you're an Apple self-driving car or a Google self-driving car, you've got to be in constant contact.
The reason for this is that if one of them has a failure, The other cars should know to get out of the way.
Because let's say they're tracking that car and it goes offline and they know it shouldn't have.
The other cars should adjust.
Let's say one of them has a mechanical problem.
Perhaps another car could sense it, come up behind him.
All the cars behind him in that lane would slow down automatically and the back car would push the other car in a controlled way onto the side of the road until it could be serviced.
So the first thing you'd want to test is cars that only have self-driving cars.
Second thing you want to test is networking them all together so that they understand where each other is, which would make everything much safer.
You know, we have some kind of a requirement for that.
The next, somebody says they have standards for this already, but they don't have a place to test them in a large working environment with lots of vendors and stuff.
I assume there would be some protocol for that.
Maybe not as extensively as I'm talking about.
Now here's another fun thing.
The self-driving cars are going to have cameras in 365 degrees.
Imagine if you were in a dangerous part of the city and you could choose to live near a self-driving car road.
You would automatically have a safer place, because all the self-driving cars would create a security video situation for anything they drove past.
So everything on the street, wherever there's a self-driving car, is going to be recorded, or potentially could be.
So that you would almost remove street crime anywhere there are self-driving cars, because there would be a camera in every direction.
Next, I'm wondering if you could put a Wi-Fi system into place so that each of the cars is receiving Wi-Fi but also broadcasting and connected as a node to other self-driving cars.
Could you build, I'm just speculating here, a high powered Wi-Fi or even cell network that works on the cars as the moving cells?
So if you were in a situation where no cars were going by for a while, you might have no service.
But since the city always has cars, you probably would not worry about that too much.
Yeah, a mesh Wi-Fi system.
Just spitballing here.
If you could build this system, the people who live near these self-driving cars, assuming that they're the kind that can be shared, so it's like Uber but self-driving cars, those people would have full transportation at a low cost, especially if it's being tested in the city.
They'd have Wi-Fi.
They'd have more security.
It would bring the automotive business into Detroit.
And Detroit seems like a good place to test because you have infrastructure and you have four seasons.
So you'd want to test these cars in an environment in which it snows, it gets hot, it gets cold.
Detroit! So I'm just going to put that out there as a suggestion that Detroit should become the new Motor City but for driverless cars.
And that all the companies that are working, no matter where else they're working, Should put a facility in Detroit.
This assumes that Detroit thinks it's a good idea.
And figure out a way to build a test roads in Detroit that could start small.
Maybe it's just a few roads and then they build them as they go.
Maybe you need to do some tunneling to get around the existing structures.
So you bring in the boring company.
You bring in Elon Musk's boring technology that makes tunnels cost-effectively.
If we're just those places you need to get around something or under it or over it.
Scott, the self-driving idea is a farce.
Well, you left down all the reasons.
I would say that self-driving cars are a guarantee.
There's no chance that it won't happen.
So whatever you're calling a farce, I would certainly be on the opposite end of that opinion.
Yes, and bringing this level of industry in would create a whole range of jobs from the high-end engineers to the laborer level, because you'd still need to repair a lot of cars, you'd need to build a lot of roads, so it would be a massive infrastructure transportation jobs program, and at the end of it you'd have this vibrant Motor City Detroit again.
So I'll just throw that out there as an idea.
Alright. Scott, natural language processing isn't even there yet.
I don't know what that has to do with anything.
Yeah, self-driving cars are all over Mountain View, for example.
So Mountain View is testing.
And we'd still need to test the self-driving cars in places where it's going to be integrated with other cars.
So somebody just was putting my own words back to me to say, "Don't say whether it's a good idea or a bad idea.
Say whether you can test as small." And testing as small is essentially what I'm suggesting.
So you could test as small simply by having a limited highway within Detroit and then just build it as it makes sense to build it.
So yes, by its nature it could be tested small.
Should the car protect the driver or pedestrian?
I think a lot of that problem goes away with self-driving cars.
Because one of the things you could do with a self-driving car highway is to make pedestrian traffic non-existent.
So, for example, If you're going to build a self-driving car only highway, you might make sure that you have pedestrian tunnels under all of them or crossways over them and you just get rid of the pedestrian question altogether.
They don't work in snow.
Well, that's what you'd be testing.
So self-driving cars will be a choice, right?
For the foreseeable future, yes.
I think self-driving cars will be a choice in the same way that owning a smartphone will be a choice.
It'll seem like a choice early on, but eventually it'll be just the only way people do things because it will be so much better.
There's no way that human driven cars will be able to compete in the long run.
Alright, just looking at your comments.
Human interface is always the bug in the system.
Yeah, the worst component of your car at the moment is you.
The car, every part of the car works well except the human.
The human is all the errors.
You know, 98% of the accidents, probably.
I'm guessing this is true. Wouldn't you guess that 98% of traffic accidents are caused by humans?
Maybe 95%, something like that.
Alright, that's all for now.
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