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Dec. 1, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
55:34
Episode 321 Scott Adams: Migration, China, Dogs That Don’t Bark, Soros
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Hey everybody!
Get on in here.
Ace Time Traveler, I see you.
I see you grabbing your coffee.
Sharona, Psy, Tyler.
Tyler, you're always in here quick.
Virus Joe, Jimmy, Ivanka.
I don't think that's the real Ivanka.
Well, I guess there's more than one Ivanka.
come on in.
Oh, hold on.
So did that work?
I put it on the microphone in the middle of the broadcast.
I'm not sure that the microphone will register, so tell me if that sounds better.
Didn't.
What does didn't mean?
Didn't.
Well, we've got a lot to talk about this morning.
Not the least of which is George H.W. Bush as deceased.
And that will be dominating the airwaves for a little while, but I don't have much to say about that, so I'm not going to talk about it.
All right. So some of you wanted me to comment on yesterday I blocked on Twitter Hog Newsome and said goodbye to him as a productive partner in making the world a better place.
It was based on his tweet from yesterday.
And his tweet was calling on President Trump To do something about all of the white people who are mass killers.
And he mentioned that there were, I guess, 11 shootings by white people this year.
And what is the president going to do about all these white people shooting people?
So, I don't have to tell you that that's just flat-out racist sounding.
And so, I'm out.
Yeah, there probably were lots of ways to address that topic without making a full-out black against white.
So here's the context which you have to appreciate.
Somebody who's an advocate, like Hawk, is sometimes talking to the other side.
In other words, sometimes he's trying to persuade other people.
But about 80% of the time, he's trying to persuade his own team.
And that would be true of any advocate.
They first have to get their team on their side.
So there are some things he's going to say that are for his own team.
But even understanding that, I can't work with that.
There's nothing I can do if he publicly paints it as a race problem and that the problem is white people, because white people are shooting too many people.
As soon as you put that frame on it, there's just nothing you can do with it.
So I said goodbye.
I'm out. I'm disappointed.
But I'm also cutting my losses because...
Oh, somebody says, is the 48-hour rule in effect?
Well, I would always consider...
Yeah, I would consider anything.
But I blocked them, so I won't be hearing anything.
But here's the thing.
The 48-hour rule...
It was designed to give people 48 hours to either apologize or to clarify, just in case what they said wasn't what they meant.
But in this case, there's nothing to clarify.
I think he said exactly what he meant to say.
There wasn't really any room for ambiguity there.
And there's nothing really to apologize for, because that's his opinion.
So I don't really ask for apologies From people who have an opinion, if it's their honest opinion.
If that's his opinion, there's nothing to clarify, there's nothing to apologize for.
It's just that I can't work with it.
I don't want to be associated with it in any way.
Alright, so enough about that.
I want to talk about the dog that doesn't bark.
I use this analogy all the time, I guess it's Sherlock Holmes, that if you expect the dog to be barking and the dog is not barking, you have to look for the negative as well as the positive.
So you have to look for things that are not happening, that should have been happening.
Here's one for you.
Did you hear about the million Chinese citizens who died of fentanyl overdoses last year?
Did you hear about that?
Did you hear the story about a million Chinese citizens dying from fentanyl?
Oh, you didn't.
Neither did I. I didn't hear that story.
You know, if you just adjust for population size, you know, and you take our number and say, okay, well, they have more people.
You know, maybe if it were the same proportion, there should be a few hundred thousand people a year dying of fentanyl overdoses in China.
Why not? Now, just to be clear, there is no story of any number about anybody dying of fentanyl overdoses in China.
I made that up. And the point was, shouldn't you be hearing that?
If most, I guess the vast majority of the fentanyl that comes into the United States is produced by and shipped from, originally from China, some of it goes to Mexico to get here.
But if they're the biggest producer of fentanyl, and you've heard nothing about fentanyl overdose deaths in China, dot, dot, connect.
How can you conclude anything except the government would kill them?
I mean the drug dealers.
The government of China would execute the, I guess it's the Zhang, Zhang, I don't know how to pronounce it, family.
So they know who they are.
There's a picture of the guy who's like the main guy in charge of fentanyl in China.
Does the Chinese government know How to find the top fentanyl producer in China?
Of course. They know who he is.
Why do you think he's allowed to live?
Well, I would certainly start asking questions this way.
Why doesn't China have a massive fentanyl overdose problem when they have so much fentanyl?
The only reason I can think of is that the government says, if you ship it to the United States, we'll ignore it.
If you start releasing this stuff in China, you're going to be dead by morning.
Can you think of any other explanation for why we're not hearing about massive fentanyl deaths in China?
Now, you also wouldn't hear about massive fentanyl deaths in China because as soon as there were a few, the dealers would be killed.
Because again, they know who's doing it.
They know where they live.
They know their names.
They have their faces. They know their social security number or whatever the equivalent is over there.
They know everything about them.
If they were releasing this stuff in China, they would already be dead.
So, my personal opinion, and I'm always open to fact-checking and somebody who has a broader, better opinion about what's going on internationally, is there isn't any chance I don't see any chance that President Xi isn't directly and specifically allowing them, if not ordering them, to ship this stuff to the United States.
So I say once a week on Twitter that I'm not in favor of any trade deal with China, as long as that's the case.
And as long as these drug dealers are still alive.
And people keep telling me, I've heard smart people say, Scott, you keep advocating that if China doesn't kill these drug dealers, why don't we go in and covertly kill them ourselves?
And smart people say, my God, you can't do that, because that would start a war.
Here's the problem. Sometimes you've got to push back, even if it's going to be a war.
Now, I don't think it would be a nuclear war.
Tensions could rise or whatever.
But do you let somebody kill 30,000 people a year in your country to perpetuity because you don't want to start trouble?
Does that make sense? And suppose the 30,000 goes to 100,000 in a couple years.
Do you say, well, yeah, they're killing 100,000 people in our country intentionally while preventing it from happening in their country.
They could turn it off in a minute, and they don't.
But we don't want to cause trouble.
Does that make sense? In what world do you give people everything they want so you don't cause trouble?
In no world. In no world do you give people what they want because you don't want to cause trouble.
It's the same with the tariff negotiations, the trade negotiations.
The people were saying, don't start a trade war.
Trade wars always end badly.
Who taught you anything about negotiating?
That's the point of view that just says, ah, well, I'm in a negotiation.
I better give you everything and ask for nothing because if I don't, you'll get mad.
That's not how you negotiate.
You negotiate this way.
If I don't get what I want, I'm going to get mad.
There's a big difference.
There's two ways to negotiate.
More than two, but two that I'm going to talk about.
One way is, oh, I don't want you to get mad.
I better give you what you want.
Here's the other way. You better give me what I want, or I'm going to get mad.
Which way gets you a better deal?
I think it's clear.
So that's the first thing.
Here's another dog that isn't barking.
The other day, I forwarded around articles in the New York Post by a think tank head, a business guy, in other words, someone who knows economics and money and that sort of thing, Bjorn Lomborg. He's somewhat famous for talking about the economics of climate change.
Now, what he said, and the reason I forwarded it, is that he said the same thing I said.
I said it first. It took him a little while to get his article published.
But to be fair, I have been influenced by him.
So even though I said it first, that the numbers that came out of the latest climate report actually show it's not that big of a problem.
Using their own figures as published, not adding anything, just looking at their numbers, they said that in 80 years there might be a 10% hit on the GDP. To which I said, why is that being reported as a big problem?
Because by then the GDP will have grown so much that you wouldn't even know if it was 10% less than it could have been.
You wouldn't even know.
And on top of that, So we're going to do a lot of things to remediate things.
We'll learn how to keep people safe from the heat.
We're going to learn a lot in 80 years.
So it's very unlikely that that 10% worst case scenario is going to happen.
It's probably not likely because we've got 80 years to soften the blow.
And we're pretty good at that.
The human race is really, really good at it.
Somebody says, what about the heat deaths?
Well, I guess a lot of the cost in that report was people dying from the heat.
And if you have 80 years, you're going to be able to fix a lot of stuff and be able to build homes that resist the heat, etc.
I think it was just this week, there was a...
I don't know the details, but Richard Branson is part of it.
I believe he's sponsoring or maybe putting up some money to have some kind of a challenge where they're trying to get people to invent better air conditioning.
So there's a very high level effort to bring in inventors and innovation so that the cost of air conditioning can drop.
Now probably in five to ten years, the cost of air conditioning and the availability We'll be, I don't know, maybe five times as good as it is now.
And that's in 10 years.
The IPCC report, or whatever it is, was over 80 years.
How good will our air conditioning be in 80 years?
I don't know. It might be really good.
So, as Lomborg said, and I also say, if you have enough time to adjust to stuff, you're usually pretty well off.
The problem is if you have some immediate thing that sneaks up on you, right?
If a problem sneaks up on you, that's a big problem.
A flood you didn't see coming, a tsunami you didn't see coming, an earthquake in Alaska, those are problems.
But if you've got 80 years to worry about the temperature creeping up, You could probably figure out a way to not die in the heat.
All right, but here's the dog that didn't bark.
When I did my very public analysis of the climate report, and I was just talking about the economics that they presented.
I'm not talking about their science.
I'm not doubting any of their science.
Just the economics and just using their own numbers.
And I said, the way it's being reported is upside down.
It's really basically not much of a problem the way it's being reported.
Who pushed back?
Did you see, those of you who've been, you know, watching me for a while, know that when I say something stupid, wrong, or questionable, which happens at an alarmingly regular basis, I always get pushback, right?
You see it on Twitter.
People will write articles.
If I had been wrong in the way I framed the climate report, it would already be in major publications.
People would be tweeting to me and say, oh, you got this backwards.
Ha ha ha, you idiot.
How dumb of you to not consider this or consider that.
They would have clearly pushed back on me.
But I could say to myself, well, you know, maybe people aren't paying attention to me, the holiday season's here, whatever, so maybe it's just a coincidence that this is the one time I said something so completely opposite of what the rest of the world seemed to be saying, but this one time nobody complained?
That would be a very large coincidence.
That, my friends, would be a dog.
That is not barking, but it gets better.
So I retweeted Bjorn Lomborg's article in which he said a version of what I said.
Now, it's not a coincidence.
As I said, he's influenced me for years, so it's not a coincidence that we have similar points of view because we come at it from a similar business economic perspective.
Neither of us are scientists.
And so I tweet that around and I'm waiting for the pushback.
I'm waiting for somebody who, let's say, is an economist or, you know, somebody who's good with numbers.
I mean, remember, it's the Internet.
The Internet is just bristling with people who are good at math.
Most people are not good at math, but the internet, collectively, a lot of people are good at math, good at statistics, good at thinking, good at all that stuff, right?
So he puts out his opinion that the economics say exactly what I said, that it doesn't look like it's any big deal according to their own numbers.
Where was the pushback?
The only criticism I saw on my feed was, well, it's time to introduce Dale.
Dale, can you summarize the pushback that I got when I retweeted Bjorn Lomborg's piece?
And it looked like this.
Oh, Scott! Ho, ho, ho!
He's not even a scientist.
Smart, smart.
You retweeted a climate science opinion from someone who's not.
Not a scientist.
Not a climate scientist?
Not a scientist in training?
Not even a scientist student?
He's not even a scientist!
Well, Dale, he doesn't claim to be a scientist.
He claims to know how to do math.
And when he did math, he said, 10% over 80 years is not that big a deal.
You don't really need science to do basic math.
And again, that was the only kind of complaint I got.
Literally nobody that I've seen yet had any kind of a criticism, complaint, or pushback about the fact that the news was reported upside down and that biggest problem in the world was actually No big problem, according to their own numbers.
That means something, right?
Because, trust me, that would be the kind of thing that got some pushback.
All right, now I'm going to introduce a topic that I like to introduce every few years to get myself in trouble.
I would like to tell you about the most, let's say, the most trouble I've ever gotten myself into, I think, probably.
And it goes like this.
And I think it maybe was, I don't know, 15 or 20 years ago.
And I said in a book and then probably maybe in a blog post and other times, somebody's saying, oh no.
I made a prediction.
I made the boldest prediction ever.
Since predicting that President Trump would win, since predicting that North Korea would start working toward reunification, I've made some pretty bold predictions.
Yes, my prediction was the evolution, you know, the theory of evolution, which I remind you in the context of science when they say theory, theory, the word used in the context of science means fact.
When you use the word theory in common language, you're talking about something that may or may not be true.
But when scientists say it's a theory, it means that all the tests, there's a consensus that it's true.
And I said that evolution would be debunked in my lifetime by science.
Now, what happens when you say you predict 15 or 20 years ago?
What happened to me when I predicted That evolution would be debunked by science in my lifetime.
Well, I was accused of being a creationist and an apologist for intelligent design.
Now, I'm not a believer, so I'm certainly not a creationist.
I don't have any religious belief.
But, you know, people take teams, right?
So they say, oh, if you're not on our team of evolution, you must be on the team that's a creationist.
So for a period of like a decade, every time I did anything in public, anywhere on the internet, trolls would come in to the comments section and say...
Oh, he's a creationist.
He's a creationist and he doesn't believe in the theory of evolution and therefore we must disbelieve every other thing he's ever said.
Now I'm going to let you in on a little secret.
When I made that prediction, I was pretty sure that it would be unpopular.
I was pretty sure that I would get some blowback.
Now, I didn't think that people would be so dumb that the blowback would come in the form of accusing me of being a creationist and a New Earth person or something.
I didn't think that was going to happen, so that caught me a little off guard.
I think today I would have been smarter and maybe seen that coming, but I didn't see it coming at the time.
And so I got into it a little bit on Twitter yesterday with somebody who was accusing somebody else of claiming that intelligent design was real.
And I mentioned that simulation theory is already, in scientific terms, largely, in my opinion, debunked evolution.
Now, I know you hate it.
75% of the people on here just went, what?
So for the few of you who don't know what the simulation theory is, the simulation theory is that if any civilization ever learns to make a simulation, let's say a software simulated world, that the people in it believe they're real, and they act as if they're real, then probably it'll happen a lot of times.
And our current civilization is right on the edge of being able to create creatures who live as though they're real, but they're just software simulations.
So the idea is that If you could ever have one of those, chances are you'll have lots of them.
So the odds of being the original species is very, very low, you know, maybe one in a billion.
And the odds of us being one of the copies made by the original, or, here's the fun part, copies made by the copies, Because the simulated world would be fully functional and they could program their own simulations within it.
So it could be nested simulations.
So the math of that is so compelling.
Meaning that it's so extraordinarily unlikely that we're an original species, that people as smart as Elon Musk, Naval Ravikant, guys like this, some of the smartest people you've ever met in your life, and a number of, I don't know how many, but at least some physicists who are serious, Nick Bostrom, I think.
So, somebody says, that's insane, Scott.
It's not insane, it's just math.
It's math that's based on two things that we can see are completely true.
Now, the two things that are true are that we'll be able to create simulations that think they're real and act like they're real.
That part is, I think, guaranteed.
And the second part is that if we can do it, we'll make more than one.
The minute, well let's say, the year that we can make a simulation that evolves and acts like it's real, we're not going to make one.
It's going to be a kit.
Children will be making them over Christmas vacation on their computer.
This is not new-age nonsense.
This is actually straight-up physics and straight-up math.
So this has a place within the legitimate physics world.
So somebody said, who made the original?
And that question can remain open.
But the odds of us having an intelligent design, meaning that we were created by another species of human, is pretty close to 100%.
So the question that people ask is, how could you prove it?
If you were in the simulation, how could you know you were a simulation?
And one of the ways you could...
You could test is to find out if history exists and it's just there to be discovered or if history is written on demand because that's the way a simulation would work.
That things wouldn't come into existence until somebody needed them.
If you're walking into a forest nobody's ever been in and no creature has ever seen, it doesn't exist until you walk into it and the trees form just like they would in a video game.
So, I believe that we will be able to test this.
In the small world, like the double-slit experiment in physics that somebody mentioned, and I think there are a few physics situations where it does seem that reality is only created by observation.
The entire quantum physics world that I certainly don't understand.
But one of the things that seems true is Is that you either have to have a machine measuring something or a human or some kind of creature observing something to, you know, collapse its wave and make it real.
That is a perfect explanation of what the simulation looks like.
So anyway, enough on that.
Here's another question I have.
I'm seeing more and more about the idea of open borders, and some notable economist said, and I think it was actually an article in The Economist, so it was a credible publication with a credible-sounding economist who wrote,
That if we open borders, at least just for work, not in terms of becoming all one country in the world, but if you open borders so that anybody who wanted to work could just, you know, fill out easy paperwork and just go to work across the border, that it would unlock something like, you know, I don't know, dozens of trillions of dollars.
This enormous amount of wealth would be created.
And here was the economist's argument.
The economist argument is that the people who come from poor countries, when they immigrate to a wealthier country, Their pay goes from pennies an hour to a multiple that.
So if everybody could go from a low income to somewhere where they could make more money, everybody would have more money.
Then they would spend their more money and that would create even more money.
And so the idea is that allowing people to go from where the jobs are bad to where the jobs are good It's good for the people who hire them, and good for the person who gets a raise, and just good for everybody.
And then the whole world is richer.
Do you see what's wrong with that?
Is it not obvious to you on the surface that that is a ridiculous idea?
And here's the reason.
It's completely true as long as immigration is at a low rate.
The whole thing breaks down as soon as everybody can do it.
The reason that Mexicans can come to the United States and get a raise is because not many Mexicans can come to the United States, relative to the number of people in the country.
If everybody could go everywhere all of a sudden, what would happen to wages?
I don't know, but I think a lot of people who used to be making a high wage are gonna get a low wage, because all the new people coming in will work for less.
The problem with capitalism, let me give you, this is a good model to look at.
Capitalism guarantees that every business will go on a business.
Now, if you haven't studied economics, that didn't make any sense.
Capitalism, I'll say it again, guarantees that if you start a company, you're going to go out of business.
It's guaranteed. And the reason is that if you start making a lot of money, somebody else will make a company just like it.
And they'll drive your costs down because you're competing with them.
And then a third person will make it.
And you will drive the profits down So low that eventually nobody can make money and so we all go out of business.
So capitalism drives companies out of business by its design.
The only thing that keeps capitalism from doing what capitalism does Is that we put legal limits on it.
And there are people who put illegal limits on it.
So in other words, companies form illegal monopolies.
Governments allow them to operate with, let's say, patents.
So it's not capitalism that's making companies thrive.
It's the limits on capitalism that makes them thrive.
If you couldn't start a company and make sure that other people can't catch up with you easily, the whole system would break down.
So you need inefficient capitalism to work.
If it's efficient, the whole thing breaks down.
So similarly, the reason that you can go from Mexico to the United States and get a raise is because we have an inefficient immigration system.
The moment you made it efficient, where anybody can go anywhere just to get a job, it doesn't change their citizenship.
They can just go anywhere to get a job.
As soon as you do that, it's like full capitalism.
And unless you put limits on it, everybody's wages are going to go down.
Now, full immigration probably would be great for people who don't have anything.
All right.
I was looking at the G20 and amused at how many countries there are now that President Trump should not be nice to.
So Trump is not allowed to be nice to Saudi Arabia, Russia or China because they're all our nemeses now.
What a weird G20 this is.
There are only 20 people there, and three of the more important ones, he's not allowed to be nice to them.
That's weird. Alright, I guess I didn't have much to say about this.
I have come to an opinion on George Soros.
I know you've all been waiting for it.
You watched me being skeptical about all the stuff on mostly social media that says, George Soros is the devil, he's behind everything bad, he's funding all these bad organizations, etc.
But every time somebody would point me to a link, it was always a dead end.
And I kept thinking, what are other people seeing?
That I can't Google.
You know, there were stories about the things he did when he was 14, which doesn't matter to me.
There were stories about how he makes his money by betting against currencies and it's bad for countries.
And I hate that, but it's all legal.
You know, you can hate that separately from what he's doing politically.
But the political stuff about what he's funding and how much impact he has, etc., just seemed this big, opaque, I couldn't penetrate it.
But I've penetrated it enough to learn the following.
And fact check me on this, if you will.
That George Soros puts a great deal of money...
I guess they would all be called political activist groups.
So the two facts that I think everybody agrees on, he puts in a lot of money, and that they're for political things, and that they tend to be more on the left.
Now, people who are more on the right say, okay, that's all I need to know.
He's putting a lot of money into things I don't like.
I'm not quite willing to make that leap because we don't really know what his intention is.
We can't see the budget.
We don't know how much impact he has.
We don't know if the organization is doing things that he would approve of or he just gives money and sometimes they do things he likes and sometimes they don't.
We just don't know.
It's this big hard to determine, you know, is he really the main funder behind this or that or is he just one of them?
You can't tell. So here's my opinion.
Because he has so much money, and because we know he is employing it in political ways, and here's the key, because we can't tell how it's being used, that's enough to declare him an enemy of the state.
Am I wrong? It wouldn't matter what he was funding.
So I would say the same thing if all of his money were going into causes for conservative purposes.
I would say exactly the same thing.
The fact that we can't tell what he's spending it on, and it's a tremendous amount of money, and its very purpose is to change the political nature in my country, It doesn't matter what he's spending it on.
So I was a little bit obsessed trying to figure out, okay, but really, what is he actually putting the money into?
Like, if I don't know what he's spending it on, how am I supposed to judge him?
But I've seen now that there's so much money, and it's being funneled into things that are absolutely showing up in the headlines, and they're absolutely changing how people feel about things, and they're absolutely changing politics, and we didn't vote for him.
I don't remember voting for a billionaire to run my country in some way.
Let me be as clear about this as possible.
If, and I can't imagine this happening, but if Soro said, hey, you know, I'm going to be more transparent.
Here's all the money I give, and here's all the groups I give to, and here's why.
I like these groups.
Let's say he goes full Tom Steyer.
Somebody said it just before I asked.
Tom Steyer, I dislike everything he's doing, But I don't find him to be an enemy of the country or something because he's so transparent.
It's my money.
I'm putting it here.
Here's what I want to accomplish.
Now I hate what he wants to accomplish.
I hate that. But it's a free country.
He's got freedom of speech.
He's got money. There's no law against it.
I can at least respect, yes, I can respect the transparency.
But Soros seems intentionally not to be transparent.
I think sometimes you can find out that he has donated to groups, but if you don't know how much, you don't know exactly what they're up to, and you don't know how he may have influenced them, it's all invisible.
So... I think the Soros could legitimately be called an enemy of the state, the state being the United States in this case, only because of the lack of transparency.
And big influence, lack of transparency, worse situation.
All right. And again, I would say the same thing if he were funding only conservative things.
So my opinion has nothing to do with his politics.
It has to do with the lack of transparency combined with its big impact.
I'm reading this story that I don't quite understand about somebody's floating the idea in Europe to make it illegal to criticize mass migration.
And the story is impenetrable because it's boring.
Meaning that I read it and I go, oh, my eyes are closing.
It's like this organization and this person I don't know.
But apparently there's Talk about making it illegal to criticize mass migration because it'd be sort of racist.
Now, if that happens, then that pretty much guarantees that mass migration will become even more mass.
So I think somebody tweeted, Europe has fallen.
It's hard to imagine how it could be reversible at this point.
Who is it?
Nassim Taleb talks about how Islam is different than some other religions because you can't leave the religion.
It's hard to leave or else you could be punished or killed or something.
And, you know, they have high population.
They tend to have a lot of kids, etc.
And And they prefer their system, Sharia.
So when you reach a certain level, and that level might be just 5% of the population or 10% or something, the whole civilization needs to accommodate you.
If you're 10% of a population, you're going to get some stuff, right?
That's big enough that you can make a lot of noise and get some stuff.
So it seems to me that their system...
And again, it's hard.
I'm gonna be as clear as possible.
I'm not talking about their ethnicity.
I'm not talking about whether their religion is right or wrong, good or bad.
I'm not making any comment on the people.
I'm not making any comment on the goodness or badness of the religion.
I'm just making a systems comment that it's a very sticky system and that once it gets a certain foothold, it's almost impossible to stop it from growing in a system that has freedom of speech.
Because if they can get to the point where you're not allowed to criticize and you're not allowed to work to slow it down, So it does appear to me that this conversation about whether you can even talk about it in critical ways, even if you're talking about just the economic impact or anything else, you're not allowed to talk about it, that feels like a tipping point.
And, you know, things don't go in a straight line.
If you're trying to predict the future, the worst way to predict the future is that the current trend will continue, whatever the current trend is.
Because the current trend usually doesn't continue.
But what is different about this is that the system is so robust.
You know, the system of, you know, of growing the religion, I guess you call it.
The system is so robust I can't imagine what would stop it.
Now, if you look at what China's doing, China sees the risk, apparently, as so bad that they've created a prison system, and they're literally Jailing mostly the Uyghur minority, which is an Islamic minority within China.
And apparently they built these massive concentration camps, which they call re-education centers.
To essentially torture them and brainwash them to become, and here's the part that's so shockingly blunt from China.
One of their politicians, I forget which one, actually referred to it as re-educating them until they became, and he used the word, normal.
Normal. So, the Chinese are viewing Islam as almost like a, I don't know, a mental problem.
Wouldn't you say? So they're treating it like a medical problem, that the only way that they can treat it is by isolating the people, literally putting them in prison, and And then re-educating, brainwashing them, basically the equivalent of electroshock therapy to get rid of their religion.
Now, I would be fascinated in a bad way to know if they think it's working.
Don't you wonder? I mean, they're doing it at such a large scale.
They must have some idea whether it's working.
And in this case, working means whatever their goals are as a country.
You know, not working as in creating a good result.
And I'm fascinated by that from the persuasion brainwashing perspective as to, you know, my sense of it is that it couldn't work.
It's hard for me to imagine that it could work.
But remember, China is a very sophisticated country.
They've got a lot of technology.
This seems to be something they care about enough to put a lot of energy into it.
So they may be using some pretty sophisticated methods.
Or maybe they're just beating people and making them change their minds or something.
I don't know. But aside from the fact that it's essentially a holocaust, I don't think they're killing them, but they seem to be mass incarcerating and mass torturing an entire group of people.
So that's about as evil as you can get.
So yeah, they're not killing them per se, but I would imagine that there's a high death rate in those camps.
Alright. So...
Now, I've heard the idea that migration is good, allowing migration across borders is a good thing for the people who are migrating, and of course it is.
If they could be allowed to migrate, it's good for them.
The question is whether it's good for the rest of the country.
And it makes me ask this question.
Why wouldn't we put more effort into making migration within the country easier?
Imagine, if you would, that you were a low-income or unemployed American, which is exactly like the migrants, right?
The migrants are low or no income and low education, etc.
But they can help themselves by being able to go from where things are bad to where things are better.
That's very hard to do if you're living in the United States and you're poor.
You wouldn't know where to go.
And, you know, it'd be hard to get a full hold in another place.
But imagine if it were really easy to just migrate within the United States, so that if you're poor in Detroit, how would you know even where to go in this country to get a job?
At least the Mexicans, or at least anybody from south of the border, they kind of know where to go.
Because there might be a big farm that needs them to work, etc.
They have a pretty specific idea of where to go.
But it seems like we could improve that system so that people within the country would have more mobility.
Yeah. Employment mobility within the country.
And take advantage of the same effect that people are coming across the border for.
All right. Is there anything I didn't talk about that you want me to?
There's plenty of info on the internet.
You are right. But low-income people are probably not the most capable of finding information, and then they don't have any money or resources to go there.
I talked about talk already at the beginning.
GW, yeah.
So, yeah, George Bush Sr.
has passed away eight months after his wife went.
And it is really amazing how often that happens.
The one parent dies and the other one dies within a year.
My parents went the same way.
My father followed my mother fairly quickly.
Oh yes, how did I forget the simultaneous sip?
Will you join me?
Raise your glass, your mug, your cup, your chalice.
Fill it with your favorite beverage and join me now.
For the simultaneous sip.
All right.
Dershowitz has a great new article out.
Let me just talk about what I call the gotcha porn.
Does it seem to you...
So it's well documented that the country is split into these two silos, the left and the right, and they don't talk to each other.
I talked about it as two movies on one screen, but now everybody has their own version of two movies on one screen.
Now it's become the common way to talk about the country.
I guess it was a little common before.
But... It's turned into sort of a team, theater, entertainment kind of a thing.
It's no longer really politics, is it?
Does it seem to you that politics used to be sort of a dry, boring thing, and people were like, I like these policies, I like these policies, but maybe these two policies can find some middle ground and then we can get something done.
It seemed to be politics was politics.
And entertainment was entertainment.
And what's changed is that entertainment and politics have merged to the degree that we get joy out of this political entertainment thing that people didn't used to get.
And you see this very clearly with what I'll call the gotcha porn.
The best gotcha porn, here's a good example.
So NPR did a story that turned out to be fake news in which they were sure that Don Jr.
Trump had said something and lied to Congress and he's going to go to jail or whatever.
And then it turns out that they just had the story wrong and there was nothing there.
But let me ask you this.
You probably saw people get excited because they're like, oh, President Trump and his son might go to jail.
Doesn't it seem to you that the reason people are sort of rooting for the president to go to jail, sort of rooting for his family to go to jail, doesn't it feel more like an addiction?
Then it feels like politics.
Because it feels like, you know, imagine you will, imagine if you will, that you were one of the people who has a severe hatred for the administration.
And so you turn on CNN, and there's Jeffrey Toobin, or one of their pundits, and one of their pundits says, we got him now.
They're going down. The handcuffs are out.
As soon as Manafort talks and Cohen flips, oh my god, it's all coming down.
How do you feel?
When you watch that show, if you were a hater of this administration, and especially of the Trumps, if you really, really hated them, and you turned on CNN and they said, oh man, good times.
These guys are all going to jail now.
You would feel a rush of actual physical pleasure.
Would you not? Wouldn't you get an actual hit of, I don't know, dopamine or serotonin or whatever the hell the happy chemicals are?
So when I call this gotcha porn, that's not much of a stretch.
Because I think people are getting a hit from the fake news that feels like a drug.
That feels physically good when they read that something bad might happen to one of the Trumps.
And that seems to be the primary driver of news coverage.
It seems to me that the news is almost entirely, the anti-Trump news, is entirely focused on what I'd call some form of gotcha porn, where people go, ah, we gotcha this time.
We gotcha, Don Jr.
We gotcha with our fake news.
And every time you see, you know, one of the anti-Trumpers say something like, oh yeah, now they're in trouble.
This time we got them.
It probably just gives you like a charge, a buzz.
It's got to feel almost, yeah, almost sexual.
So that's what they're selling now.
They're selling that feeling now.
The news used to be about giving you information, but if I've taught you nothing, and I probably have, then the information you get from the news is so out of context, so incomplete, and in many cases so complicated you wouldn't understand the whole situation anyway, that you're not really seeing news anymore.
Take the Saudi Arabia situation as a perfect example.
There's probably a sense when people follow that story that they're following something called the news.
But Saudi Arabia, the situation with the Cheshogi, etc., there's probably so much around that that we don't know.
Like, you know, what is Israel doing or saying or wanting?
What is the secret conversation going on with Saudi Arabia?
What are our plans with Iran?
So how much you know about that story is this much.
How much matters about that story is probably this much, and you don't know what that is, because it's complicated, it's secret, it's changing all the time, but that's the important stuff.
So, you're not really seeing news, it's just stuff that feels like news, because you don't really know the big ball of stuff.
Take, what was the biggest story this week?
It was that Trump signed the USMCA agreement to replace NAFTA. How many of you understood what NAFTA was?
Not me. I didn't.
I mean, in a general way I understood it, but I don't know the details.
How many understand what the USMCA is?
Not me. I mean, I understand it at the high level, but I don't know what any of the agreement is.
I don't know how much different it is.
So, I have the false impression that I've seen something that you might call news.
But not really. Because I don't really understand it.
Anyway, that's all I got for now.
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