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May 4, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
52:41
Episode 518 Scott Adams: Facebook Bans, Biden Lie Tally
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That's right, it's a little bump in circumstances because the situation calls for it.
You have stumbled upon, or possibly plotted to join, coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams, and all you need is a cup or a glass or a stein, or some kind of a container, a thermos, a flask, a tankard, if you will.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the silence.
I guess I can't even talk yet.
Simultaneous sip.
Oh yeah, that's good sipping.
Well, let's talk about all the news.
Seems like way back in 2016, people were Saying the President was crazy.
He was a crazy guy.
He was literally mentally incompetent.
He was a Russian puppet.
He was going to destroy the economy.
We're going to have a meltdown of the economy and a nuclear war.
But the dumbest thing he was saying is that the Obama administration had spied on this administration.
Spied, I say. Well, it turns out they spied.
It turns out there's no nuclear war.
And it turns out the economy is doing great and ISIS is largely defeated on the battleground at least.
Things are going well.
And I like to, every now and then, I like to call out new low points for the other side, the anti-Trumpers.
They're sort of running out of the A material.
You know the A material?
You're going to ruin the economy, start a nuclear war, he's crazy, Russian puppet.
That's the A material.
Here's what they're left with.
You can judge whether this is B material, C, D. Put your own judgment on it.
This is a quote from Comey about Trump.
He eats your soul in small bites.
He eats your soul in small bites.
Is that a material?
That's not a material.
I don't think it is.
Do you know who else eats your soul in small bites?
Your boss.
Yeah, your boss.
Maybe not intentionally, but your boss is eating your soul in small bites.
Probably. Do you know anybody?
Who once made a world-famous comic strip based primarily upon the theme that your boss eats your soul in small bites?
That's right. We went from, Trump is going to blow up the world, destroy the economy, put everybody in concentration camps, probably, to, well, he sort of reminds me of Dilbert's boss.
He seems to be eating our souls in small pieces.
That's it. We're done.
That's all you got? Because you don't have A material anymore.
Yeah, I believe that Eating Your Soul in Small Bites probably is not word for word from a Dilber comic, but it's quite suggestive of...
I've certainly done a number of comics.
Let me Google one.
I'm going to go to Dilber.com, and I'm going to Google...
I'm going to look for a soul.
Alright. How many comics do I have about your soul being eaten at work?
Quite a few, page after page.
More than I can even count.
So at least Comey has upgraded his material to a Dilbert comic level.
So that's good.
So, another big success today for the world.
And this is going to dovetail into my conversation about social media censorship.
We'll get to that.
I know that's what you want to talk about.
We'll get to that. And I tweeted it this morning.
So the Wall Street Journal had an extended opinion piece in which I was called out and featured in the article for successfully defeating, with the help of lots of people, not alone, But they called me out as sort of a leader in the movement to destroy the fine people Charlottesville hoax and declared it successful.
Now, I think successful is probably more than I would claim.
What I would claim is that the competing version of reality, the real one, What actually happened now comes up in search results.
It's likely that somebody's going to challenge somebody if they say it in public.
That wasn't true before.
And it's likely that if you researched it yourself, you would see the truth instead of the fake version.
So, I ask you this.
Was it valuable to have me on social media?
And again, it's not me.
I'm using myself as a proxy for everybody who did tremendous work on this.
You know, there were people who took big risks and did a lot of stuff.
Joel Pollack, Steve Cortez, Carpe Dunctum, and a number of people who helped, who are anonymous, but they helped on Wikipedia, for example.
This was an amazing, amazing thing, and I think that most of you thought this couldn't be done.
Most of the comments I was getting from the very beginning were along the lines of, Scott, Scott, Scott, you're just being Don Quixote.
You cannot change this, and by the way, we're not even sure if you're right.
But I did change it, again.
Not me, but those of us who were fighting this cause did change it.
So, this gets us to the people banned on Facebook question.
As you know, I have been holding my fire because of the fog of war.
On day one, when you're hearing people get banned from the social media platform, Your first instinct is, damn it, you know, freedom of speech, they can't do that.
But I said to myself, either cleverly or not cleverly, you'd be the judge, we're going to find out more about this, and I don't want to jump in and put my, let's say, put my credibility on Paired with any people who, for their own reasons, got kicked off of social media.
Because you run the risk that you become the person who defended Farrakhan, right?
So it's very easy for a person like me, it's very easy for them to pair me in the headlines and attach me to whatever badness any one of them allegedly did to people who were banned.
And so I waited.
And this is specifically what I was waiting for.
I wanted to wait to see if we learned why they were banned.
Because I feel like it makes a difference.
Doesn't it make a difference why they were banned?
Don't you want to hear the reasoning and, you know, here's our rule, here's what the person did, and this is what we judged.
Now, you could agree with it or disagree with it, but you certainly have to hear it, right?
Because I would feel differently if they banned a pedophile, for example.
There's no suggestion.
Well, I think Milo has been accused of that.
But you want to find out what they're banned for.
Because it does make a difference.
You know, if you think it doesn't, I respect your commitment to complete free speech.
But we don't really live in that world.
I also have a real problem...
With forcing a private company to change their business model for the few.
Let me give you an example.
Disney creates content that's family friendly.
So does Disney discriminate against writers and actors and directors who would like to make an edgier movie?
Yes, they do.
Disney discriminates Blatantly and in public and legally as far as I know, because that's not their product.
Their product is something that the whole family will feel comfortable with.
So they discriminate like crazy against anybody who would do something that's not along those lines.
You know, even if somebody was the best gifted director of child movies ever, but they also happen to be in the KKK, well, Disney would say, no, that doesn't work with our brand.
So the general concept that a company can decide what their brand is is very important.
You can't take that away from a private company unless they're discriminating in one of the ways that we recognize as discrimination.
So now again, I'm not getting to my conclusion yet.
So wait for the conclusion. I'm just giving you the pros and the cons.
Now I know that a lot of you were...
Hector-ing me yesterday and saying, Scott, you've got to, quote, get in the game.
Let's fight this fight.
Let's pick up our pitchforks and our torches and storm the castle of these social media giants.
Somebody's saying it's a bad analogy.
It's not an analogy.
It's an example.
It's an example of the general concept of That a company should have some freedom to define what its brand is.
You're either the adult brand, the kid brand, the G-rated brand, the R-rated brand.
Those are decisions that companies should be able to control.
Now, when you're saying it's a bad analogy, I'm not saying it's the same.
I'm not saying that a platform for public communication, which the social medias are, I'm not saying that's the same as Disney.
I'm just saying that companies in general should have some freedom to define what their brand is.
So these are all the factors.
They're not deciding factors by themselves.
And so the next question is, is there a slippery slope in play?
In other words, is there something about this group ban, they did a bunch of them at the same time, is there something about it that suggests it will just keep going?
And my first reaction was, Maybe not.
Maybe there's nothing special about it, but I'll have to listen to the reasons.
Because if each of these people had done something that was specific and recent, I'd say, oh, okay, this is not really a slippery slope.
What they're doing is, like, very few people are going to do whatever that was.
But we did not hear that.
And Paul Joseph Watson, for example, I haven't heard anybody even really suggest why he did it.
James Woods, we'll talk about him in a second.
But the level of things we know about don't quite make sense in terms of at least the whole group of people who were banned.
Some of them are a little more obvious than others.
And so I'm just trying to sort it out and waiting for the information.
And I've waited long enough now to give you some opinions and also a way forward.
The first opinion is that this event is large enough, meaning that Facebook packaged up the people that they were banning to a large enough and visible enough thing that it can no longer be ignored.
Okay, so the first big change is you can't really just go forward business as usual anymore.
It is now no longer just a few people got banned.
We wish they hadn't. We wish they had.
It's not that anymore.
It's now transitioned into a national decision.
We have to decide what the future looks like in terms of how the public relates to these social media platforms.
And I would say that these social media platforms failed.
They failed as hard as you can fail to take care of it themselves.
Because the social media platforms are so successful, they have become a de facto Public utility, meaning that you can't really have a business without a social media presence.
You can't be a media, you know, you can't be a writer.
You can't really succeed in the normal business of life without a social media presence.
So we're no longer in a situation where it's just And this is probably where you were getting ahead of me and saying, this is not like Disney because you can quit Disney.
You don't have to watch a Disney movie.
It's pretty easy to avoid them if you want to.
But you can't really avoid social media if you want to have a real life with real humans and business and make money and all the things that people like to do.
So had the social media companies done this minimum thing, I would have said, okay, they can handle this on their own.
The minimum thing would have been to say, either with the permission of the people who were kicked off, maybe you need that, to say, look, if the people who were kicked off give us permission, we'll tell you exactly what rule they violated, but otherwise it's a private situation.
Now let's say James Wood says, yes, I give permission.
Then I'd love to see the argument.
And we saw one tweet.
We did see one tweet that we think was suspicious.
Suspicious, that's the wrong word.
It was the one that got James Wood kicked off, we think.
But I'm still in the fog of war, so I'm not convinced that's the one thing that went into the decision.
So I'm not going to claim that as fact yet.
It's just something that's floating around out there.
And apparently what he said was, hashtag hang them all, in reference to a tweet about discovering that the Russia collusion thing was really a conspiracy by various deep state people.
And he said, hang them all.
Now, is that a hate speech?
Well, it's really kind of a gray area.
If I'm going to be honest...
It's a little bit gray.
Now, my understanding is that the quote comes from a movie.
If you understood that it came from a movie, you might see it differently.
It's like, oh, he's a movie guy.
He's making a movie phrase.
Hang them all doesn't mean literally violence.
It means let the justice system do what it does.
So if you use your critical thinking...
And especially if you know who James Woods is, Do you know his IQ, by the way?
Do most of you know James Woods' IQ? It's sort of like off the chart, right?
He's not an average person.
He's not average in a lot of ways.
He's crazy smart.
It's like 160 or something crazy, right?
181, somebody said? Yeah, it's not just genius.
It's like whatever's the level above genius, right?
So if you know who James Woods is...
That helps you interpret things he says.
So you're going to say, okay, if a genius said it, maybe we reinterpret this as the smart version, not the dumb version.
Because the dumb version of hanging them all would be, oh yeah, get some ropes.
You know, gather up the Democrats.
That would be the dumb version.
If you thought James Woods was dumb, you might think that's what he meant.
If you happen to know, his IQ is roughly double half of the people on this periscope.
If you knew that, You would say, okay, he's not suggesting Civil War because that would be dumb.
Maybe it's some clever little quote.
Oh, yeah, look it up. There it is.
It's just a movie reference.
He's just talking hyperbole.
He's a fan of the president who talks in hyperbolic ways.
He's a similar personality.
It's a little hyperbole.
It means nothing. But here's the gray area.
So you and I know who he is.
Maybe you're more familiar with how he talks.
So you don't take it as anything dangerous.
But suppose you didn't know anything about James Woods except that he was a Trump supporter.
And I think that would describe most of the world, right?
Most of the world is not some expert on James Woods.
They know he makes movies.
They know he says stuff about Trump.
That's probably all they know.
And so if he says something that looks to them It looks to them like he's suggesting literal violence against one side of the political aisle.
You can imagine that that looks like Hayes Beach.
But the larger question is this.
Who gets to decide?
I would have been perfectly happy with social media companies handling business themselves.
I would have no problem with that.
I would say do it yourself, but because of your special role in society, where you're now a public requirement for a normal life to be on social media, you do need to explain it.
You need to explain it in a way that isn't just BS. It would not be sufficient in the case of James Woods for somebody to just send him an email that says, well, here's our rule.
Here's your tweet. Because a reasonable person could look at that and say, I don't see it.
I'm looking at your rule.
I'm looking at his tweet.
I know he meant it in sort of a movie, hyperbole way.
You didn't get this one right.
So what do you do? Whose job is it?
There's no government entity.
It's not my job.
It's sort of up to Twitter.
And then Facebook has a different situation, because the people that got kicked off of Facebook, they all have their own individual stories.
So Infowars doesn't really have something in common with Paul Mellon, who doesn't have anything in common with Milo, for at least the things they're saying and the reasons for getting kicked off.
You have to look at them as all individuals.
So you say to yourself, alright, what can be done?
What can be done about this situation where it does look like the companies have a legitimate business reason to want to show some, let's say, to use Jack Dorsey's word, to keep healthy conversations.
I like healthy conversations.
What's not to like about that?
But you imagine there's an easy way to get there.
There's one thing I can tell you for sure.
If there were an easy way to solve this, the smartest people in the world would have figured it out by now.
The people managing and working for social media companies, some of the smartest people in the world...
They would have figured this out if it was easy to figure out.
And it's deceptive and seductive for us to imagine we know the easy solution.
So if they're not using that easy solution, well, they must be up to something bad here.
And let me give you an example.
Let's say they just said, we won't ban anybody.
Everybody can do whatever they want.
What would happen to their business model eventually?
It would corrode until it was so hard to be on social media.
You would see so many Nazi references that you just eventually would say, I can't even be around this stuff.
It would destroy their model, and the world would not be better off if social media went away.
Some argue it would, but I think we're past that point.
So, they can't really just let anybody do whatever they want.
They do have to have, for the good of society, somebody says you totally disagree, but I think I know what you're going to say and I'll try to represent your argument, the one who said I totally disagree.
So if you have completely unfiltered, everybody sees everything, it would ruin the experience for the rest of us.
It is a private business.
They have some right to have a quality product and not have it destroyed by Nazis.
So just letting anybody do anything, you end up with pedophiles and God knows what.
So you can't really do that.
You have to have some standard.
But who gets to decide?
If you let the companies decide, then you're a victim of their bias, or just as bad, assumed bias.
Because right now, if you take Jack Dorsey's view, they're going after behavior only.
That's the corporate line.
We're going after behavior only.
It's not about what you're saying, it's how you behave.
And I actually think that that's true, at least in terms of they really are intending to do that, and they're really putting effort to make sure that what they're doing is going after behavior.
I think that's genuine in the fact that they want to do that.
But it's almost impossible, because somebody ultimately is going to have to decide that Did this cross the line or did this not cross the line?
And if the people deciding are known and even self-identified as left-leaning, it's never going to work.
In the minds of, in the psychology of, and even in the reality of, people who don't identify as leading left.
They're always going to think they're being left out.
So that's not a stable situation, even if, let's say hypothetically, even if the social media companies did in fact only deal with behavior.
And they really could somehow achieve this somewhat impossible standard because we're human beings making human judgments.
But even if they could do it, it still wouldn't be a stable situation because nobody would believe they're doing it.
So if you think it's easy, For these social media companies to solve this, you haven't thought it down to the next level.
Now, I also said to myself, hey, why can't you just put a feature in there?
This is something I've said before, just a filter.
And if somebody wants to see everything, they can turn it on.
And if they don't want to see the rougher stuff, the things that are more controversial, they can just turn it off.
And I said to myself, how could that be hard?
It couldn't possibly be hard to have these same people simply flagged as potentially dangerous.
And then people like me can say, I'd like to see potentially dangerous stuff.
I'll decide. It's up to me.
I'll block them individually if I have a problem.
But that wouldn't be fair.
Because there has to be a default.
And you couldn't default it to every...
Church-going person being exposed to these horrible things the moment they log on.
So you'd probably default it to blocking out the worst people unless you change the option.
That's not good.
Because the people like Alex Jones, if you assume this is a free speech thing, and I'm not defending anything he has said or will say, but as a free speech thing, if the day you signed on to Twitter for the first time, the option was turned off to see Alex Jones, how many people would even know to go click it on?
Not many. So if you had a filter so people could choose to see the bad stuff or choose not to, it would have to default to not, because that's the safe place.
And in other words, the user interface would almost guarantee that 95% of the world never saw these people, which would essentially ruin their business model.
So you can't add a feature or a filter because there's no way to make it fair.
You can't ban everybody.
And you can't have a rule where the company makes decisions.
So what's left?
All of the obvious ways to deal with this absolutely don't work.
In very obvious ways they don't work.
So you only have choices of things that don't work.
What do you do? I have a suggestion.
My suggestion is this.
Create a social media court that's actually part of the regular justice system.
Now I don't know what it would take, an act of Congress, executive order, cabinet level stuff.
I don't know what it looks like.
But just imagine, if you will, there's an actual court with real judges, and they handle situations like this.
And so Paul Joseph Watson would say, I got kicked off of this social media platform.
Here are their own internal rules.
Here is my body of work.
Including the latest one that got me triggered.
Am I on or off?
Then you let this court, which we can imagine it would be fairly transparent.
I think it would have to be transparent.
You'd want all those court cases to be somewhat public and that people can see what happened.
And then, if an external court...
And maybe it's more than one person so that you've got, you know, a mix of, you know, left and right-leaning people.
Just have them decide.
There can't be that many cases that are this high level, right?
So there's that.
The other thing that...
I've suggested is color-coding tweets.
Right now, if you look at your Twitter feed, they're all the same background color.
In this case, I've got the black turned on.
But if I were looking at the tweets, I would like some of them to be a slightly different shade.
And that slightly different shade would tell me, oh, these are all the Alex Jones things, or these are the ones that people have determined are too edgy.
And then once I saw that they're in my feed and that they're always highlighted, then if I had a button that I could turn those off, it would be like, turn off highlighted dangerous tweets.
Then I would first see them, but I could very quickly and easily say, oh, okay, I see what things are getting filtered.
I don't want any of that. But again, somebody's going to decide who's in that filter or not, and that's going to make a huge difference about how much traffic they get that's going to affect their real life.
And this is a public platform, so you probably still need this external court.
So I would say this.
The social media companies have created a situation in which they either need to be fully transparent, especially on these big visibility cases, or regulated.
So we don't have the option of ignoring it anymore.
Now, tying my last point together with my current one, people wanted me to dive in this and join the boycotts or whatever we're doing and retweet the things that got people kicked off the platform, if we all do it, blah, blah, blah.
But I really wanted to understand this one.
So that what I did would make a difference.
The last thing you want is for me to get kicked off of social media.
Can we agree that I'm more useful if I'm on the platform than if I'm not?
Would you agree that that's just a common sense statement?
You watched me try to do something useful with the fine people hoax, and if I had not been on social media, I could not have helped in that effort.
You watch me trying to persuade people to understand that the nuclear option is the only way to solve climate change, or even if there's not a problem with climate change, it's still the only thing you should be doing, or you should push it hard.
It's not the only thing. So I would say that you can't judge everybody who's participating in this question about the banning the same.
I am a special case.
And my special case is, number one, I can talk to anybody.
So I can talk to Black Lives Matter.
I can talk to anybody who got kicked off of social media.
I can talk to anybody.
That's my brand. I can talk to anybody.
I don't take on their views if I talk to them.
I'm not supporting them if I talk to them.
Most of you sort of need to stay on the team.
I don't need to do that.
My value is I can talk to anybody and I can cross political boundaries whenever the science or the common sense says to do that.
So you don't want me to get kicked off of social media if you like the things I can do with it.
But I would say we're beyond the point where this could be ignored.
We're at the point where the president does need to act.
The president does need to put pressure on this for a solution.
I don't want the president to describe the solution, but I think he needs to put a big old foot on this and just keep pushing on it until we have a real solution.
Let me offer you a suggestion.
I would like to see a universal, what do you call it, What do you call it when you give people a get out of jail free card?
A pardon. What's the other word for it's not a pardon?
It's something like that. So I'd like to see a one-day mass pardon.
In which all of the people who have been blocked on social media, except for there might be a few cases that are just so bad that you can't let them on, but the people like Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson, etc., people who have just done ordinary angry things,
what if you just said, we're going to start today, we're going to be more clear about our rules, we're going to put every one of you people on there, You're all warned, and you've got like a yellow flag there, so we're watching you.
But amnesty, thank you.
Amnesty is the word. So I think social media, and this is something that the president could...
Could promote. You know, he could just say, we should have an amnesty day.
You know, it's June 1st.
Just pick a day and say, this should be a social media clemency, somebody says.
Clemency, pardon, amnesty, it's one of those words.
But let's say amnesty. Pardon.
Yeah, exonerate amnesty.
Anyway, it's one of those things.
Commute to sentence. But I don't think I would have this amnesty day for social media where everybody gets to go back on, unless you also pair that with a new level of clarity about what's okay and what isn't.
I use Periscope, and one of the features that...
I just told you I use Periscope while you're watching me on Periscope.
Not my best moment, but let me finish this point.
You've seen on this that it has a feature where if you say something that I guess the algorithm or somebody or something catches...
It will ask you, the viewers, whether something unacceptable is happening.
And then you can flag it. And I don't know exactly what happens, but if enough of you flag it, then I think my connection gets caught.
And my experience has been that that works.
But I'm sure it doesn't work every time.
So there may be refinements on that.
But I kind of liked... Having the public decide what's too far.
There's something okay about that.
And I think, you know, how okay that is depends on how many people have to flag it before it's bad enough to be blocked.
If 5% of the people can flag something and block it, I would say that's worse, not better.
If more than 50% say something should be banned, then I start thinking, well, if over half of the people watching this think it should be banned, you know, it's hard to get over half of the country to agree on anything.
If half of the people watching this think it should be banned, maybe they're right.
But maybe it needs to be 75% or maybe it needs to be 90%.
That's something that could be played with.
All right. I thought that Facebook, including Farrakhan and their group of people who were being banned, was brilliant PR to the point of, well, it's evil.
It might be evil, but it's really smart.
Because if Facebook had banned the group of band except for Farrakhan, Then they would be wide open for, hey, you're only banning conservatives.
So they throw Farrakhan in there because he's the single name that has been asked to be banned by the right more often than anybody, I think.
I think more people have asked Facebook and the social media to ban Farrakhan than anybody else who's associated with the left.
Now the funny thing is that the Washington Post reported this and they decided to label Farrakhan as far right.
They're so used to racists, you know, labeling racists on the far right that when they saw the, you know, they saw Farrakhan, they were like, well, you must be far right.
This is not the case, and they corrected that.
But it was quite brilliant in not necessarily a good way, but it was brilliant for them to include Farrakhan in the bunch because it really does, takes a lot of power out of the argument.
So I would like to see the social media people say, we've upgraded our process.
Let me put it in even simpler terms.
I'd like to see any one of the social media platforms that has this banning problem.
So it's mostly Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
I'd like to see one of them say, look, we're going to try something new.
This is our new revised rules.
We've made them easier. Maybe they simplify them.
Let's just say this. Let's just say Twitter takes their pages and pages of rules, and they simplify it down to a few bullet points that is pretty easy to understand.
And at the same time, they say, we're going to give everybody an amnesty.
It doesn't matter how bad you were.
Maybe a few are still too bad.
But you're all back.
Here's the new rules. And if you violate these, you're going to be gone in a heartbeat.
I'd be okay with at least trying that.
And if it didn't work, well, then maybe you just got to bring in the government.
You know, maybe the government just has to put his big old fat foot on social media.
And then that's, you don't want that if you can avoid it.
So I'm very much in favor of the process that all tech companies use, which is rapid experimentation.
So I would be completely happy if Facebook or Twitter said, we don't know how to fix this.
Because first of all, that would strike me as honest.
And I think Jack says that.
I think Zuckerberg says that, not in so many words, that this is not an easy problem.
If any of you have an idea, you know, stop sitting on it because nobody else has an idea.
It's the smartest people in the world working on this, right?
So the only thing you can kind of do is try a few things and see how it works out.
So I would try first turning those regulations into some simple bullet points, do an amnesty, and say, let's try again.
Let's just try again.
And if Alex Jones gets kicked off again, In, you know, five days, because the simplified rules, you violated again, hypothetically.
Well, at least we'd have more transparency, wouldn't we?
That'd be a situation where I could look at those bullet points, I could look at, Alex Jones got kicked off, hypothetically, and just say, okay, does that look right?
Because I think the social media companies are legitimately responsive to their customers, and if half of the people looked at this and said, uh, no.
I'm looking at the rules.
I'm looking at what he did.
I'm not seeing it. Well, then maybe you do need some kind of an external judge.
It doesn't have to be the law.
Facebook could simply hire external moderators.
What do you call the people who are not in the legal system, but they help negotiate things?
They're the... Why can't I think of words today?
Somebody help me with that word.
It's the word where you don't use lawyers necessarily, but your contract says you negotiated outside of the contract.
Damn it, why can't I think of that word?
Mediators. Yeah, mediators, exactly.
So I think they could appoint mediators and say, we'll take ourselves out of the decision.
Kick it to the mediators.
The mediators will look at our simplified rules, and they'll see if, once again, you violated them or not.
I'd be happy with that.
Keep the government out of it. Alright, that's enough on that.
Apparently, so we're seeing, of course, all the opposition reporting on Biden now.
It's all coming out. And...
Apparently he lied at one point in the past.
It's the distant past.
But he lied and said he had three college degrees.
Turns out he has one.
And he said he graduated from the top of his law school.
So I guess his legal degree would be the second degree.
So I guess I'm confused about the story itself.
But he claimed he was in the top half of his class, but he was actually pretty close to the bottom.
So now people are going to start revealing his lies.
And of course he lied about the fine people hoax, as the Wall Street Journal and most of the major publications have reported now.
So I wonder, is anybody going to start the lie count of Biden versus Trump?
How many lies does Biden have to tell?
Before he gets a fact check counter for his lies.
And it gets interesting because you know how it's been widely reported that the president crossed 10,000 lies?
Well, there was an article in Market Watch where somebody took, I think, the most recent 50 alleged lies that the president told and looked at the fact check to see if the fact check was accurate.
Guess how much of the fact check was inaccurate?
About 25%.
So about 25% of the things that are documented as lies by the president, at least in the recent batches of them, 25% of them, if you dig in, it's either not a lie, or it looks like it only because it's out of context.
Or it's true enough that it was sort of a jump ball, you know, something that, well, you could have gone either way.
That's sort of true, but I can see how you would say it wouldn't be.
So about a quarter of all the lies are just fake news.
And this leads me to my next provocative thought.
I'm going to toss out an idea that's going to break your brains.
So all I'll ask is that you don't let your first impression...
Get too firm.
Your first impression is going to be a massive rejection of the next thing I'm going to say.
Just let it...
Don't let it sink in too hard.
Don't let your first impression be your last impression on the following topic.
What would happen with the world if the news industry, the professional news industry, completely went away?
Okay, now you're having a first impression.
And your first impression is probably like, oh, you can't do that.
That would be, you would have nobody as the safeguard of the press.
You would have, the government would just be helpless.
I mean, the public would be helpless to the government because there would be nobody checking the government.
That's your first impression, right?
Let me ask you this.
Who was it who gave you the Russia collusion hoax?
It was the media.
Did that help you or hurt you?
Who was it who gave you the Charlottesville fine people hoax?
That was the media.
Who was it who said they're fact-checking and 25% of them are just made up?
It was a wing of the media.
Now let me ask you this.
What would happen To step into the gap if professional news organizations with real reporters and stuff, what if they all went away?
What would replace it, if anything?
Well, if the industry went away, it would be replaced with other people trying to do the same work.
But let's just say it was social media.
What if you reached a point where the only things you could learn about the news, you heard on social media from somebody who was there?
So if there was a story about a riot somewhere and somebody attended it, they could just do a social media post and use the right hashtag.
You could just call it hashtag news so that anybody who saw an event or they have some insight or they did a little digging on their own.
Just hashtag it, and then if you want to watch the news, you just go to the hashtags, and it would just look exactly like the news.
Now, you'd have to pick through, does this person look believable versus this person?
But you would have competing stories, so that would help you at least sort it out.
Now, you're probably already moving a little bit from your first impression that you couldn't possibly have a successful society without a professional news organization.
But you're starting to think, oh my god, everything the news has told us is a lie.
Because you know what?
Everything the news tells you is a lie.
Now, I don't mean it's a lie in terms of the facts.
It's always a lie in terms of the spin.
We don't have anything like objective news organizations.
Everybody's on a team.
So, if they're on a team, can you trust any of the news?
Not really. You can't trust any of the news, because even when they get the facts correct, they can change the context.
They can put it in the narrative they want.
The press doesn't report the news.
They manufacture it.
And they've been manufacturing it for a long time.
Somebody mentioned Mike Cernovich in the comments.
If you haven't seen his film, A Hoaxed, Which is available on Venmo.
It's one of the best things I've seen in years.
As an entertainment vehicle, the last 15 minutes of Hoaxed, Mike Zermich's film, is just some of the most mind-blowingly great stuff that I've seen.
I don't know, a long time.
It's just one of the great pieces of media and entertainment.
But it's very educational and will change your mind, so you have to look at that.
Yeah, so if you take all the news that's being manufactured by the CIA, you take the fact that the news media, and I don't think this is any kind of an exaggeration, the existing news media just tried to overthrow the government of the United States.
Do we need more of that?
Would we be better off if there were no news?
Because all the news is fake.
So think about it.
The news organizations may have, just because, you know, other events happening in society, it's entirely possible that the news profession went from, you know, having its flaws but unambiguously good for the world.
You know, it's flaws and all, but unambiguously good on average.
Yes, I'm sorry. I said Venmo for the hoax movie.
I'm getting all my words wrong.
I meant Vimeo, V-I-M-E-O.
So if you want to see Mike Cernovich's hoaxed movie, go to Vimeo, V-I-M-E-O, and look for hoaxed, the word, and you will be happy you did.
So just think about that.
Think about whether the news is a positive force on average, of course there are awards, or is it at the moment actually just a brainwashing technology run by unscrupulous people?
I would say the best description of the news business today And I'm not talking about local news.
Local news is probably just news.
But the national stuff and the political stuff is really just a manipulation tool run by people who have agendas.
So we can no longer put up with the social media platforms having no transparency because they are our last hope against the enemy of the people, which is at least the political news reporting organizations are illegitimate which is at least the political news reporting organizations are illegitimate and probably need to be completely
So Biden said he had three undergrad degrees, but he only had one with two majors.
Yeah, that sounds right.
Alright, so, what do we do about it?
What do you do about the fact that social media has kicked these people off?
Well, the only thing you could do is push for specific solutions.
If all you're doing is bitching about it, you're not really helping.
If all you're doing is complaining, you're not really helping.
If you're taking a goal versus a systems approach, it doesn't really help.
What I mean by that is a goal would be to not kick people off who shouldn't get kicked off.
That would be a goal. But goals are not very good if you don't know how to get there.
A system would be, hey, let's have an independent arbitrator.
Let's be more transparent.
That would be a system. Let's boil down our complicated rules into simple bullet points and manage to the simple ones.
That would be a system.
So, if the social media companies are not iterating systems, then I think the government has to be persuaded to move in.
Now, not quickly.
I don't think it should be move in with the big boot.
But I don't think there's an option anymore.
The two options are, we see the social media people rapidly iterating and telling us that's what they're doing.
Because if they tell us that's what they're doing, we're going to be more understanding, right?
They say, look, we know this is difficult.
Let's try this for a while.
Just see if it works. Let's try an amnesty.
That would be part of the system.
And then let's run it through the new system and see if we get the same result or a better result.
If they're not talking to us in those terms and then showing us that something is happening, I don't think we can support the social media companies not being regulated by the government.
So that's where I'm at.
Trump is watching this.
I'm sure the level of social media...
Activity will have a big bearing on whether he acts, let's say, decisively or just talks about it.
You know, and I think one thing that Trump could do would be to suggest something specific.
And he could say, we're going to regulate you if we don't see something from the social media companies in...
Three months. Whatever it is.
Whatever is the right amount of time.
Just say, we're watching you, and if in three months we don't see something that looks like you're iterating toward better solutions, even if they don't work, I'm completely forgiving.
Of trying something for the first time and it doesn't quite work?
Just try something new.
Keep going. So if they're doing that, I think the government could back off.
But probably at a very minimum, they need to run a new system, do an amnesty, and see if the same people get kicked off at the same amount of time.
See if the new system makes a difference.
All right, that's all I've got for today, I think.
Or another system would be to label the dangerous people better so that people have more options about who they watch.
All right. That is all for today.
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