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Dec. 15, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
51:09
Episode 338 Scott Adams: Imaginary Presidential Risk, LBGTQ Under Trump, Inauguration Expenses
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Time Text
Yes, it's time for...
What? What is it time for?
That's right! It's time for coffee with Scott Adams!
And you are here to enjoy it!
Hello everybody!
Hello Brian!
Hello Sam! Hello Ray and Everybody else whose names are not real names.
Hello, Michelle, Tyler, Marcus, JP. Get in here and it's time.
We have a thousand people. It's time to raise your glass, your cup, your mug, your chalice, your stein, your container of beverages.
Lift it to your lips.
I hope it's filled with coffee, but it doesn't need to be, to enjoy the simultaneous sip.
It happens now.
Oh, that's good simultaneous sippin'.
So we've got a number of stories in the news.
Most of them are minor, but because the news has to sell product, they are being treated as major.
So the president has a new temporary, whatever that means, chief of staff.
Mulvaney. Initial reports are good.
So the people who seem to know this Mulvaney guy say he's smart and he's the real deal and he could be good.
So there's not much to say about that.
Sounds like you may have picked a good person.
Next, there's a judge who seems to have...
A judge in Texas seems to have said that Obamacare is unconstitutional.
Like the whole Obamacare.
I don't know what that means yet.
My first guess is to ignore it.
Like my first instinct is that, okay, that's a big nothing.
It'll be appealed.
It'll get turned over and appeal.
So the Obamacare story is probably closer to nothing than something.
But we'll wait and see on that.
There's another story on CNN who is always looking for trouble.
They're always looking for trouble if it's anything about Trump.
And the latest is that the Trump Hotel in Washington, where I have stayed.
I actually stayed at the Trump Hotel when I went to Washington last time.
Apparently they charged way more than normal.
For the campaign. So in other words, the Trump campaign paid the Trump Hotel.
This is what CNN is reporting.
And they're saying that Ivanka may have been involved in some part of the negotiations for the price.
And they talk about the price and they say, I guess somebody wanted to pay $85,000 a night, but the hotel was trying to charge $170 something a night.
So, here's what's missing from the story.
Do you see anything missing from the story?
So, for a big inauguration party, the Trump campaign wanted to use the Trump Hotel, and the price was about double what the campaign wanted to pay.
And therefore, it's a scandal?
Is there something missing with this story?
Yes, there's something missing.
Here's what's missing.
It's what every hotel does.
Somebody just said, do you know what a hotel charges for their facilities?
Here's the exact price that every hotel charges for everything they do.
And I'll be very precise.
This is exactly what every hotel charges for everything they do.
Whatever they can get.
All hotels charge as much as they can get.
And that varies based on the season, the day, the occupancy.
It varies on a lot of things.
Now, if your name was the Trump Hotel, and your location was Washington DC, and somebody named Trump Just won the presidency unexpectedly.
What is the market value of space in the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C.? Answer?
About double the market rate.
About double, right?
Because there was no place in Washington that would have been cooler, more appropriate, more perfect than For that event, for that group.
Where was the second place they were going to go?
Well, wherever that second place was going to go, probably it was busy, probably they were going to overcharge, and if you were there, you were not in a Trump property, which would have made it twice as cool.
When I visited the President in August, the only reason I went to Washington was to visit the President.
And For me, there was no decision about where to stay.
I didn't even price any other hotels.
Because if you're going to go visit President Trump, you stay at the Trump Hotel, right?
It just makes the whole trip a little bit more complete in some way.
So when I watched CNN cover this story, I watched to see, okay, somebody's going to tell them that all hotels raise the price as high as possible for the market conditions.
And that this particular case was the ultimate market condition.
So was it true that a Trump Hotel property, and I'm not sure exactly what the ownership is of that hotel, if it's more of a licensing deal where they're using the name or if he owns it, it doesn't matter really.
But Should they have negotiated as hard as possible with the campaign?
Yes, they should. The Trump Hotel should negotiate as hard as possible with the campaign.
Do you know why they should do that?
Let me put that out there.
If the Trump Hotel had not charged as much as they thought they could get, What would we be talking about today?
It's a trick question.
What would we be talking about in the news today if the Trump Hotel had given the campaign a good price?
Right! It would have been an illegal campaign contribution.
The one and only way this was legal, the only way it was legal is if the Trump Hotel tried as hard as possible to screw the Trump campaign.
And if the Trump campaign tried as hard as possible to screw the Trump Hotel.
And according to the story, that's exactly what happened.
The Trump campaign negotiated as hard as it could against the Trump Hotel.
And they ended up on a price.
I don't know what the price was.
But if you can tell me, tell me with a straight face that that's not the way it's supposed to work, tell me what's the other way it's supposed to work.
The other way is illegal.
We live in a capitalist country.
They're both supposed to screw each other as hard as possible.
That's what they tried to do.
No story. There's no story there.
Alright. I want to read you something that's funny.
To me, when I read CNN's homepage on their website, I'm not joking about this.
I read it for the jokes.
And when I say the jokes, I mean the things that just strike me as funny when I read CNN. So here's the top left story, meaning the most important story in CNN's opinion, because they put it on the top and the left.
That's where you put the good stuff.
It says, Trump's worst nightmare.
That's the big headline. And I'm thinking, my goodness, this is going to be some bad stuff.
Whatever's under the headline, Trump's worst nightmare, in the top position in the news, that's some bad stuff.
Let's see what it is. And it says, weeks of devastating revelations.
I'm like, oh my God.
Devastating revelations.
These are not normal revelations.
These are devastating.
Go on. Have left the president's political career clouded by criminality.
And his life under a legal microscope.
Wait, what did that say?
Clouded by criminality.
That means other people's criminality.
Do you know who else's life is clouded with criminality?
CNN. You.
Me. We're all clouded with criminality.
If clouded with criminality means that people you know well or have worked with have been criminals, well, I'm pretty guilty of that.
I have known people who...
I've even had friends.
I've had friends who were total criminals.
I didn't know about it until they went to jail.
So... Clouded with criminality.
So if you notice the CNN... They must have a whole department...
Whose only job is to come up with new ways to say that the president is a criminal without actually saying he's a criminal.
So you want to say things like the evidence indicates or the evidence implicates the president or he's under a cloud of criminality or there's a swarming turd parade around him.
You know, they're just coming up with more and more clever ways to say he's not doing anything, he hasn't done anything himself, but they're, yeah, the walls are closing in.
The walls are closing in.
That's one of my favorite ones.
Worse than Watergate?
Worse than Watergate.
Compared to Watergate, this would make people tremble.
It'll make people tremble.
And then you actually look at the news and you say, uh...
If everything about the Cohen story is exactly the way it's reported, there's no problem.
Let me tell you something that you're going to be mad you haven't heard on television if you're watching the news.
I'm going to tell you something that's insanely obvious, but only after I say it.
And watch how this hits you.
True or false, and I believe everyone on all sides of Trump-related things would acknowledge that the next things I say are true.
So I don't think there would be any dispute on what I'm going to say next.
There are very highly qualified lawyers who say that the President of the United States has broken laws and that he's in serious legal jeopardy over this Cohen situation.
True. We'd all agree that's true, right?
There are a number of highly qualified lawyers who say that this president has broken laws and that the Cohen situation is a dangerous legal jeopardy for him.
True. Everybody else would also agree that there's another set of lawyers, more pro-Trump lawyers, who are also highly qualified, highly paid, highly accomplished.
Who say there's no problem here at all.
Right? Now, I'm not saying which one's right.
I'm saying that as an observer, it is objectively true that there are highly qualified lawyers on opposite sides.
Some say he's guilty as hell and in a lot of trouble.
Some say there's literally nothing here.
Right? Now, can you remember what is the standard For conviction.
Is the standard for conviction, some people say he's guilty and some people say he's not?
No. That's not the standard.
The standard for conviction is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Did I just describe guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?
If I can fill a stadium with high-qualified lawyers who say, in my opinion, there's not even a law here that's been violated, is that guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?
Not even close.
Not even close.
Now, do you feel angry Then nobody put it to you the way I just did.
If you take into consideration the size and the quality and the experience of the lawyers who say, yeah, there's no real problem here.
It doesn't matter if they're only 10% and they're 90% saying the other thing.
That doesn't matter. 10% of highly qualified lawyers who are not even involved in the case who say, I don't see it.
Looks to me like it's confusing.
The law is ambiguous. It's not being applied evenly.
There's nothing to see here.
That's 100% good enough to guarantee this president's not in trouble legally.
Politically, yes. But legally, no.
So now that I've said that, How do you feel about the president's legal jeopardy from just the Cohen stuff?
We're just limiting it to the Cohen stuff.
So somebody's saying Judge Napolitano on Fox News said the president's in trouble.
I didn't see that, but I saw the headlines.
Does that matter? Does it matter how many lawyers say he's in legal trouble?
It doesn't matter. It only matters that there is a substantial number of legitimate, well-trained lawyers who say, I don't know, it looks vague to me.
The standard is not useful.
There isn't the slightest chance that given all of those lawyers who say it's not even illegal that he's going to get Now keep in mind, the lawyers who say it's not even illegal are not saying that he didn't do it.
Everybody's looking at exactly the same facts.
We're not even arguing the truth of the facts.
Even the people who say there's no law assume that all the facts that have been in evidence are the facts, right?
That there was a payment, blah, blah.
What logical fallacy is stacking the deck with all those lawyers?
What I'm saying is that there is no stacking the deck.
As long as there are plenty of lawyers who say we can't even determine that there's a real crime here, you can guarantee That no jury is going to be 100% on one side.
If you can't even get the lawyer's degree if it's illegal...
Because that's not the case with anything else, right?
If you said somebody murdered somebody, could you find a lawyer to argue that murder isn't actually even illegal?
I don't think so.
Anyway, that was a bad analogy.
Um... CNN also has an article on here called Impeachment 101.
It says, here's how it would work, and then in parentheses, if it actually happened.
What persuasion technique is CNN using when they write an article that says Impeachment 101, here's how it would work if it actually happened.
That's not news.
That is persuasion.
They're making you think past the sale.
So they're making you think past the impeachment as if we're just accepting that as sort of a routine thing, and now we're thinking about the details of it?
Yeah. So that is just persuasion.
Now, it's not an unreasonable article, but...
It would be better to say, here's how impeachment works, just as a reminder.
That would be a little more objective than to say, if it happens, here's how it would work.
They're taking your mind into the future where you're thinking about a specific president having a specific income.
They could have made this objective and said, It's very unlikely there would be an impeachment because the Senate is never going to go for it anyway, so it's a waste of time and it's politically unwise.
But wouldn't you like a refresher about what an impeachment is?
That would be an objective way to say it.
This still makes you think a little bit past the sale, but because it's framed differently, you start by saying, there's no way it's going to happen.
But since we're talking about it, here's a refresher course on what impeachment is and how it works.
That would have been fair.
This is just persuasion.
Okay, now here's my most fun topic of the day.
I sent out a, let's say, a poorly conceived tweet, the day before yesterday, in which I was saying that President Trump was the most pro-LGBTQ president ever.
Now, of course, I knew when I said it that it would be provocative and would get people chattering, which was part of the fun.
I mean, why use Twitter if you can't be interesting?
But I got some pushback.
I wanted to talk about the pushback because I thought it was pretty good.
Now, since it's such a rarity in this world to see anybody...
incorporate new information and then revise their opinion.
I thought it would be useful to see me do it in public.
Now, I will confess that I was under-informed on this topic.
And if you tweet something that's under-informed, you will get informed very quickly.
So, I got quite informed.
But there's still some big holes here.
Maybe some of you can help me fill it in.
Alright, so I'm going to give you the President Trump pro-argument, and then I'll give you the pushback.
So the pro is that President Trump is the first president to come into office in favor of gay marriage, or at least not having a problem with it.
It's not so much in favor, it's just he didn't care one way or the other.
So on that narrow point, he's more advanced than every president before him, because even President Obama came in a little anti-gay marriage.
So that's one thing. We'll talk about the negatives in a moment, so I'm not ignoring them.
We're just going to get to them second.
Secondly, he's appointed the first openly gay diplomat to a major country, Ambassador Grinnell to Germany.
So that, I think you have to give him that, right?
Now, I'm sure there have been plenty of You know, openly gay people who have served in government, so I'm not sure that's the biggest deal in the world.
It just, it must be, it must be just specific to diplomats.
So I wouldn't say that's the biggest thing in the world, but the fact that he did it at all, you know, goes in his column.
All right, now, let's talk about the negatives.
So here's the pushback I got.
Number one, His vice president is Mike Pence.
And Mike Pence could be, arguably, the most anti-gay politician that we've known.
Or, you know, he's in the top 10% probably.
So how could the president be pro while his vice president he picked is so anti?
Good point.
Except, let's put it in context.
He hired Trump, I'm sorry, Trump brought on patents, not because they agreed on that stuff, He brought him on to win because he needed a certain constituency to be on his side.
And so Pence, for the next four to eight years, let's say, not the next, but for a period of four or eight years of the Trump presidency, What did Trump do to the most anti-gay voice in America?
Pence. He completely silenced him.
Because the vice president doesn't have the option of having his own opinion on this.
At least not one that he can say in public.
So, which democratic president ever silenced the most anti-gay Political voice in the country.
I've never heard of any Democratic president silencing a Republican anti-gay voice.
But President Trump did.
He took the most anti-gay guy and completely silenced him.
Right? Do you remember at the...
I guess it was at the Republican convention...
And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the president...
President Trump, candidate Trump then, held up a, didn't he hold up a rainbow flag that was pro-LGBT? And I believe he had a full-throated endorsement of, you know, taking care of that community.
I said this the other day, and this next part is completely invisible to the entire left.
And that is this.
Since Trump became elected, I have never heard even, I can't think of one anti-gay thing coming out of a Republican.
It feels as if Trump changed the Republican, I don't know, priorities, maybe?
If not their minds.
Because he paced the Republicans for so long that when he gets in office, oh yeah, and then Peter Thiel spoke at the GOP convention.
I thought that was important.
So it seems to me that Trump has done something that no Democrat has ever done.
He completely, it seems, and again, I'm going to put this out to your opinion and or fact-checking, But it seems to me that Trump has changed the GOP platform and entire attitude about the gay lesbian population in a way that no Democrat ever did and no Republican ever did.
Am I wrong about that?
I believe that Trump's sort of live and let live attitude, especially, and here's the weird part.
The weirdest thing about Trump Is that his own personal life is, let's say, complicated.
And therefore, he takes a Republican group that was judgy about personal stuff.
Wouldn't you say that the GOP has traditionally been pretty judgmental about what you did in your personal life?
And am I correct that that's gone?
It wasn't that long ago everybody was saying, hey, get the GOP out of my bedroom.
It's not even an issue anymore.
It feels to me that Trump has completely taken the anti-gay, at least on the surface, of the GOP and just made it go away.
I hear no anti-gay stuff from any GOP person.
Period. Now, But I'm not done, because as I said, my critics on this point were not without their good points.
Here's the next one.
Somebody said that Trump has nominated more anti-gay judges than anybody before.
Now, I don't know if that's true.
I don't know if there are more anti-gay judges, or if every time a Republican appointed judges, they seemed anti-gay.
But here's the thing. What is an anti-gay judge?
Is it a thing?
Because the Republicans are more about just picking judges that will interpret the Constitution and not favor anybody.
So... I'm going to take my critics' comment that there are such things as anti-gay judges, and I'm going to give them at least a little more than partial credit.
I'm not going to discount that one, because we do live in a world where judges are not really unbiased entirely.
Judges are biased because they're human beings.
And so that might be a real thing.
I would say that doesn't matter until they actually rule on something that matters.
So if they never rule on something, it probably doesn't matter.
There was another comment I didn't quite follow about dropping protections in the workplace, but I don't remember what the details of that were.
I don't know how many people it affects, but that probably was a good point too.
I just don't know the details.
Alright, so the next one is the interesting one.
It's about transgenders, transgender folks in the military.
And it is on that point absolutely true that the president is not the most pro-transgender president we've ever had.
That would have been Obama. And Obama was more permissive of transgender in the military.
The president's orders or his administration apparently is less so.
I think the current situation is that if you're already in the military, you can stay.
Which is not really a very friendly policy.
So that's sort of anti, not sort of, that's anti-transgender, just to say, all right, you can stay if you're already here, but we can't let any more like you in.
All right, so I would say that the critics are correct when they say that's more anti-transgender.
But I would add this context.
The military is the one place where discrimination is expressly allowed, if not encouraged.
So, if you try to Take the military situations and lump it in with any civilian situations.
It just becomes nonsense.
It's sort of nonsense to say that the way we treat the military tells us something about the way we treat the rest of life, because the military is a discrimination organization by design and by universal preference.
Let me give you an example. If I went to join the military, would they let me in?
No! They'd say, you're a certain age, we cannot let you in.
When my father went to join the military before World War II, or I guess the war had just started, my father was not allowed to join because he had a He had an unusual deformity in his chest, something he was born with.
And the doctor said, no, we can't let you in the military because you've got this chest deformity thing and we don't know how that will affect your health.
Now it turns out he lived to, I don't know, 86 or something, whatever he was, 83, 86.
So it didn't really affect his health in any way that we ever determined, but they discriminated against him.
For a medical condition.
So the military is where we ask people to discriminate.
We don't stop it.
We just make sure that they don't discriminate for stupid reasons.
So discriminating against black folks would be a bad reason because all the evidence suggests that everybody's fine in the military.
It doesn't matter what your ethnicity is.
That doesn't make any difference.
Yeah, we want the best fighters.
Now, so the question on transgenders is whether they fall into the category that I do, or my father did, which is that there's something about us that from a standpoint of looking at the averages, that you don't want people like me.
You don't want people who are, you know, Too short, too heavy, unhealthy, et cetera, because it's expensive and they might affect the readiness.
Now, my understanding of transgender in the military is that if you're, let's say, if you've had your surgeries and you're all good and your health is good, it probably doesn't make much difference at all.
But there must be people who are in different stages Where they have greater military risks and costs.
I think that's the argument, but I would not claim that to be true because I'm not the expert on the medical conditions of transgender.
But here's the point.
If the decision about whether they can serve or not is based on medical expense, even if it's just the average, meaning that there could be plenty of transgender who just don't have that problem.
They're stable, they don't have a medical problem, they're fit for service, they're A+. That could be true and still It would be okay for the military to discriminate because they discriminate against all kinds of classes.
Old people, short people, etc.
And surely there are short people who could be good soldiers.
Surely there are old people who could operate a drone or do some paperwork or be a pilot, I suppose.
So the question is, on a fact basis, is the military discriminating in a way that's similar to the other ways they're allowed to discriminate?
If they are, then they're doing the right thing.
If they're discriminating without the benefit of fact, well then it's just wrong.
And that should be changed.
But I don't know which is the case.
So, to my critics who said, hey, the president is not the most pro-LGBTQ president because transgenders don't have as much rights as they do for the military, as they did under Obama, I rank that criticism true.
Absolutely true.
Good pushback and an accurate correction.
And I have to admit that when I sent the tweet, I often forget about the T in LGBTQ. But I also have to ask myself, why are they lumped in there?
Why do you throw transgender in with gay and lesbian?
Who decided that that's where they belong?
Isn't that by itself a little discriminating?
If you were transgender, would you be delighted that you were thrown in with the gay and lesbians who you might love?
I'm not saying that you would dislike that.
But from a political perspective, if you're transgender, is that your team?
Is your team the people who are not transgender?
Because do you know what gay people are?
Not transgender. Do you know what straight people are?
Often transgender.
Right? So I don't know how LGBTQ makes sense.
I get gay and lesbian.
That makes perfect sense why you'd lump them in a politically active group.
But I don't know how T belongs in there.
But that said, my tweet that this president was the best to all the LGBTQ is false in the transgender category.
And then with the judges and when the selection of Pence, you definitely have some eyebrows going up, and that's fair.
I would say Pence is irrelevant.
He's been silenced.
I'd say the entire Republican Party has been silenced on at least gay and lesbian stuff.
The transgender stuff ends up being a little bit more about the budget.
And we could be wrong about that, or we could be right about that, and it would be terrible to be wrong about it.
But it's not the wrong question, because the military does get to discriminate.
Alright, then there's one other issue.
In the same topic, which is there's some problem or there's some issue with this administration has reduced access for HIV testing of some kind because of access to, I don't know, stem cells or something like that.
And if that makes a difference, Then I would say that would also be a good criticism for something that would look, you know, anti-LGBTQ. In this case, anti-gay and lesbian.
Yeah, anti-gay and lesbian primarily.
Anti-gay, mostly. So, if that's true, then I would say that's a good point.
But here's my question.
A lot of what the Trump administration does is get rid of regulations and things that just weren't helping.
So it could be true, for example, that climate change is a problem, while it could be also true that getting out of the Paris Accord Agreement was still the right thing to do.
So you have to distinguish between the problem and what we're doing about it, because if what we're doing about the problem doesn't help, Getting out of that doesn't mean you don't believe in the problem anymore.
Likewise, if whatever the government was doing before, and I don't know the details, was really helping, and then we stopped doing it, that would be bad.
But I don't know that's the case.
It could be the case that whatever we were doing with allowing people access to stuff, they have another way to get it, so the government doesn't need to be involved, et cetera.
So I don't know the details on that, but I'm open to the criticism.
All right. So I take my criticism seriously when it's actually fact-based.
So the criticism I got in this were all fact-based, and I take them all seriously.
So I appreciate the correction, and I'm getting beat up all day on Twitter about this, so maybe I'll send them to this Periscope.
Hey, thanks for the super heart, Herbert.
By the way, any of those who would like to reward me for the fun you have, During the simultaneous sip and coffee with Scott Adams, you can send a super art.
There's a little icon at the bottom of your screen.
If you click it, you'll see what that's all about.
Google still has me as a Nazi, you say?
Well, so giving you an update on that.
Let's see what...
I'm going to Google myself and see what comes up.
All right.
So here will be a test to see if they're still calling me a Nazi.
Now, on the top page, all good.
So the first search results that come up, it looks like they've been scrubbed of the Nazi Photoshop job that somebody did on me.
But that's probably because, probably because at least some of those pictures, or at least one of them went to a Twitter account that got killed by Twitter.
So, fair is fair.
Let's give credit where credit is due.
I had a problem with Twitter because it was a Twitter account pretending to be me in a Nazi uniform.
I reported it using Twitter's own process, and within one day, the account was taken down.
So if I'm being objective, Twitter did everything I would ask of Twitter on this topic.
I have nothing but positive to say about this topic, about Twitter.
Google, however, is another question, because if I were to click the images How far down would I have to go before I see a picture of me in a Nazi uniform?
Photoshopped, of course. I would never put on a Nazi uniform.
And then right below that, a second one.
So Google still has me listed in the top ten, which you would see in your first, you know, if you clicked Google Images and saw all my images, it would be in the top ten.
Now, I don't know how to Score this because the fact that so many of you went and clicked on it because I'm talking about it might be the reason that they're surfaced so high.
It could be that I've just talked about it too much.
So there's no way to really know if the algorithm is driving it up at this point because so many of you clicked on it because I drew attention to it.
So I'm going to have to wait a few weeks To see if the algorithm lowers them naturally.
If it doesn't, I would still conclude that Google is a racist, basically.
There's no other way to say that, right?
If Google either allows Or is behind the demonization of me in a Nazi uniform.
Let me ask you this.
Would they ever put a non-white male in a Nazi uniform?
Well, you might see a meme somewhere about that.
But generally speaking, it's an anti-white male thing.
It's racist.
So, Google right now Does Google have other racist images that they leave up?
Is that a thing? Does Google allow any image that's a real picture to stay up in their images if it's obviously and unambiguously just a racist image?
Because they've got two completely racist images.
So if If those images don't go down in the rankings or disappear, it's not reverse racism.
It's just plain old racism.
Let's stop saying reverse.
There's no reverse to it.
It's not fucking reversed.
It's just racism.
There's no other way to paint that.
Google Is allowing racist images on the top search.
Now, if that's who they want to be, I'll wait a week or so, but if that's who Google wants to be, then I will certainly help their brand.
If Google wants to be racist, I will be the first one to help them brand that.
Hashtag racist Google.
Or hashtag Google racist.
No, racist Google is better.
Because I'd like Google to come up as an autofill whenever you type in racists.
If they keep it.
But, you know, let's wait a week for that.
No, I don't think lawsuit, Lawsuit is not really the way to go on any of this, because it's impossible to win lawsuits like this.
Did you know Johnny Hart was...
I met him once.
Are the new free speech platforms doomed?
Well, the trouble is that the big social networks have what's called the network effect.
If you don't invest in startups and tech companies, you don't know what the network effect is.
And the network effect is that Once all of your friends are in one place, such as on Twitter or Facebook, you're just not going to leave because everybody you know is on the other platform.
So now, I would say there's no real chance that the big social networks will have a free speech competitor.
Let me tell you why.
The day a new free speech competitor opens up, let's say Gab, they have one really, really big problem.
Who are the first people who go to a free speech app?
Who goes first?
Well, who goes first are the people who got kicked off the other ones.
Yeah, racists. So real racists...
Real racists end up being your base users.
And then people who are not racist, they say, oh, I like free speech, too.
So I think I'll go over there.
And the first thing they realize is that there are a lot of racists over there.
So they have a business model.
The free speech apps have a business model that almost can't work.
They need to figure out how to tweak that business model To prevent that problem.
And one of the ways that I'm wondering, I don't think anybody's done this yet, but suppose you had an app that allowed you to post to the social media entities But when it did, it also posted automatically to a free speech place.
So let's say nobody can join the free speech site.
It's impossible to join it.
You can only join the other sites.
But every post also shows up as a mirror on the sort of a mirror free speech site.
And if you've already been kicked off of Twitter, then your message just goes wherever it's allowed.
If you had that, wouldn't you be able, over time, to build an audience for this free speech one because there wouldn't be any comments on it?
How would you like to have a social media platform that showed all the tweets but none of the comments?
And if you wanted to see the comments, you'd have to go back to the site it came from.
So I'm just brainstorming here.
So let's say you've got an app that posts all of your tweets to multiple platforms.
Puts it on Twitter, but it also puts it on Gab.
Maybe it puts it somewhere else.
And then if you want to read them, if you want to read tweets, you just go to the free speech one.
You'll see everything. But the one thing it doesn't have is no comments.
Because aren't the comments the bad part?
If you had a choice of just not reading any dumbass troll comments, would that be a plus or a negative?
Somebody's saying Hootsuite.
And Hootsuite is designed for a different purpose.
And that's important.
Because Hootsuite is optimized for business users who are trying to schedule things and time things and measure things and hit all the social media stuff.
But it's a little awkward and hard to use.
So I tried to use Hootsuite a few years ago.
And it was just so...
It's hard that I just stopped using it.
So if you had an app, it would have to be as easy to use as just posting a tweet.
If it's not as easy to use as just posting a tweet, nobody's going to freaking use it.
and Hootsuite is harder to use than posting a tweet.
Somebody says they like the comments the most.
Well, you would still have access to the comments.
If you clicked on the tweet and you wanted to see the comments, you would just go over to the platform where they show the comments.
Your tweets appear on Gab.
My tweets appear on Gab.
Do they? Somebody says, my tweets appear on Gab.
Is that true? Is somebody mirroring them somehow?
A magazine. You're proposing a magazine.
I guess I am.
You know what? Suppose you took all the...
Alright, so here's a model.
So right now, if I read my Twitter feed, or any social media feed, it's in chronological order.
Suppose you created a social media site that organized it like a magazine.
So you would send your one message, it would go to Twitter in its normal way, and people could comment on it and everything.
It goes to Facebook, it goes to Instagram if it's Instagrammable.
But it also goes to a magazine.
And what the magazine does is it organizes the tweets by topic.
So you would see all the You would see all the tweets on this hashtag, all the tweets on that.
Now, of course, you can always click on a hashtag and do that within the social media networks, but it's a little extra step.
It's not edited and organized right.
Somebody's saying Flipboard.
Flipboard is sort of what I'm talking about, except that there's no app that sends one content to all those things, including to Flipboard, as far as I know.
Not me, too complicated to...
So suppose you had an app that let you post to all those media sites, including this magazine-y one.
And from the app, you could then go read your comments on any one of those sites.
So it just lets you go back and forth from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or whatever the other is.
Anyway, that's the idea.
Enough on that. The basic idea is that the current free speech platforms have a problem with their business model that I don't know you can solve.
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