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May 18, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
49:12
Episode 533 Scott Adams: Buttigieg, Fake News, How to Frame Immigration, Abortion, Climate
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
Hello, Kelly. Still, I guess that's Jeff.
Jeff, how are you? Good to see you.
Jimmy, Sharona, Andrew.
Always a pleasure. Grab your chairs.
But more importantly, grab your cup, your mug, your stein, your chalice, your tankard, possibly a flask.
Maybe a thermos. Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
I only had a little bit left, so I hope we made that one count.
Well, I'm on the road again today.
Um... But enough about that.
So every morning I do the same thing before I make one of these periscopes.
I look at the news, CNN, I look at Fox News, I look at Twitter, and I'm looking for the big stories, the interesting things, the provocations, the crises, so I have something to talk about.
Have you noticed that the news has completely stopped being news?
We're so already into the summer reruns, as Greg Gutfeld says, that I don't know what's going to happen this summer when the Democrats completely run out of news.
So there's nothing about the economy today.
There's nothing about terrorism.
Do you know why?
Because there are no real problems.
Here are the stories that are in the news today.
The New York Times and the Washington Post are reporting that there's infighting that we can't see and they can't tell us who saw it.
Does that sound familiar?
That's right. Here's the news.
This is the best they can do.
The best they can do is that there's infighting inside the administration, but we can't see it and we can't talk to the people who saw it.
But trust us, totally some infighting.
The president tweets back, of course, that there's no infighting, they're just people with different opinions, and he makes the decisions.
To which I say, that sounds like every decision-making entity in the world.
Bunch of people disagreeing, stabbing each other in the back, fighting, and then the leader makes the decision.
How would that be any different in any large organization?
I would be a little bit more afraid if everybody had the same opinion.
That would be a little bit more of a problem, in my opinion.
Alright. So, the president tweeted...
The following. I think it was yesterday.
All people that are illegally moving into the United States now will be removed from our country at a later date.
So he's saying that people who come in now, currently, will be removed at a later date as we build up our removal forces and as the laws are changed.
Please do not make yourselves too comfortable.
You will be leaving soon.
Now, when I saw that, I tweeted that every time this president uses psychology to protect the homeland, whether it's about immigration or it's about ISIS or it's about Iran or North Korea or whatever it is, every time he does that,
and you see it all the time, he makes a direct psychological tweet or statement That is clearly just using psychology to make a war go away or to avoid one or to reduce immigration.
And every time he does this, I have the same reaction, which is, why didn't other presidents do this?
It's so inexpensive.
Because I think a tweet like that actually changes immigration.
Maybe not a lot.
I'm not saying that one tweet fixes immigration or anything like that.
I'm saying that because he's the president, that tweet will be covered and people will start saying, uh-oh, even if we get there, he might round us up and send us home, so why would we bother?
It's hard to get there. It's expensive.
It's dangerous. Why would we make the trip if he's just going to ramp up his deportation forces?
Now, I have no idea If he's really ramping up any deportation forces, I have no idea if the people who are arriving right now are really in any increased risk compared to any other time.
I have no idea. But does it matter?
It does not. It was the right thing to say.
If you're the president, you want to tell people it's a bad idea to come here, and you tell them why.
Is it true? Well, it's probably true-ish.
Increasing our border security is probably an ongoing thing.
He probably would like to ship people back.
But it doesn't matter how true it is.
What matters is that it was the right psychological framing.
Now, he does the same thing with Iran.
So he's complaining that the fake news has no idea what the administration wants to do with Iran.
And he says directly, he says in a tweet, that's a good thing.
Maybe it's a good thing that Iran doesn't have any idea what we're up to.
To which I say, well, there it is again.
Why does he make every other...
Let me give you an alert before I finish my sentence.
I am about to say a sentence that involves the animals' monkeys.
At the same time that I make this monkey-related reference, I will be talking about former presidents collectively.
There will be a variety of former presidents in the following statement.
Bill Clinton...
Obama, Bush, Reagan.
I will be mentioning a bunch of presidents.
I should note, most of these presidents are adult white males.
One of them is Obama.
Adult male, but African American.
The following comment applies to all of them equally.
The president makes every former president look like a chimp.
It's one of those things that I think people who are not white don't understand.
White people make monkey references all the time.
We're always calling each other monkeys.
We're calling kids monkeys.
We're calling leaders monkeys.
Calling people monkeys is what we do all the time.
It's not limited to any particular type of person.
It's certainly not limited to any ethnicity.
It doesn't mean that.
We like to make lots of monkey references.
I think you all know that.
So, here's the thing.
I actually don't appreciate the racist comments I'm seeing in the comments.
It's okay to have fun.
But don't cross the line. Don't make this an unpleasant place to be.
So, anyway, the president, when he does a lot of things, I think that historians and future pundits are going to be forced to compare anybody in the future to how well President Trump did things.
Any president in the future, people are going to say, you know, that president should be a little bit more unpredictable, because that's good.
Where do we learn that?
President Trump. When a future president doesn't negotiate with trade for some future deal with some future country, the commentators are going to say, you know, if that were President Trump, that president would be doing some negotiating right now.
And likewise with this, you know, using psychology on the border, people are going to say, why was President Trump the only one to think of telling people that we might send them back so don't come?
Why was he the first one to think of that?
Nobody else could think of that?
So I think what we have, and also with the economy, we're going to see, for example, you're going to see with the economy...
Future economists saying, you know, President Trump was really good at talking up the psychology of the economy.
By the way, I think it was a consumer confidence hit a record for 56 years or some damn thing.
The facts are wrong.
But once again, the psychology of the economy has been reported as high at an unprecedented level, at least within recent decades.
Unprecedented. And likewise with North Korea.
I'm guaranteeing you that in the future, and maybe Russia too, that President Trump's highly criticized style in which he acts like he's good friends with dictators and people that are either nemeses or frenemies, that he acts friendly to them while negotiating tough.
You know, you know that future historians and future political pundits are going to judge every other president by that standard.
They're going to say, uh, why are you being so unkind to this dictator?
Uh, When we have to negotiate with him, him or her.
You know, why don't you be a little bit more respectful and then maybe we can be a little tougher in our negotiating without worrying about a nuke coming our way.
Because at least we're being respectful to the leader, which is important to the leader.
So I've got a feeling that Trump is quietly and nobody's noticing At least not in a collective way, they're not noticing.
He seems to be setting the standard for how all future presidents are going to be judged.
I think that's clear.
Now, of course, I'm not saying that everything he does will get an A+. But on all the big stuff, he's setting a standard which other presidents are going to have to answer to forever.
Let's talk about Pete Buttigieg.
He says... There's something called a Jefferson-Jackson dinner.
I don't know the details, but it's some kind of annual thing.
And because Jefferson and Jackson, I guess mostly Jefferson is the problem.
I don't know what Jackson's history is.
I'm not a Jackson follower.
But Jefferson owned slaves, and Buttigieg was asked about changing the name of that dinner.
So that it no longer had a slave name associated with it.
And he said, yeah, maybe we should look at that.
Because times change.
And of course, Fox News and the conservative world goes, ah, we knew it.
It's a slippery slope.
And we'll be getting rid of all these.
The founding fathers will be relegated to the racist jail of history.
Now, I don't disagree with Buttigieg.
I like the basic idea that society can change who they honor.
I don't have a problem with that.
You know, as long as you don't forget your history, and I don't think that's a risk.
I was planning to do some kind of little sarcastic tweet or video, and now I'm going to tell you the punchline so I can't do it.
But I was going to say that I had just recently heard of this thing called the Civil War.
And I was going to tweet that, have you guys heard of this?
There was a war in the United States I'd never heard of.
It was called the Civil War.
And apparently something like the North and the South fought each other over slavery.
Have you heard of this?
I only recently heard of it.
Do you know why I only recently heard of the Civil War?
Well, it's obvious. I grew up in a town with no statues.
There were no statues in my town.
I grew up, you could walk around all day long in my town where I grew up, you would never see a statue.
So how in the world am I supposed to know the Civil War existed?
Duh! I could not know the Civil War existed without statues.
There were none in my town. So I was going to do some funny skip on that, but apparently it wasn't that funny, so maybe I won't do it.
The point is, you don't need any statues for history.
That argument that you're changing history, that's not an argument.
That's not an argument at all.
Everybody knows the Civil War.
Everybody knows the names of the generals.
You don't need a statue to augment your history books.
So, I would say I frankly would be okay with society making some decisions about when to change things and why not.
I'd be okay with that.
You know, here's another thing that technology is going to change, and you don't see this coming.
Here's my technology prediction about statues.
In the future, we're all going to have augmented reality glasses.
I would say that that's close to guaranteed.
Augmented reality means that you've got your glasses on and you can see the regular world that you live in.
But overlaid on that world are images as if they are part of the real world.
That's what augmented reality is.
And sometimes you can interact with them with your hands and stuff as if they're real, even though they're just floating images.
And it seems to me guaranteed that whether you took away the Confederate statues or not, there will be a period of time where maybe there's no statue.
But as soon as everybody has augmented reality, which I think is common, you should be able to walk to that same park where, let's say, hypothetically, a statue used to be, but it was removed.
And you just hit your glasses and the statue will be back.
So in the augmented reality world, you'll always be able to see not just the statue, but you'll be able to hit it again and you can see the actual battle.
of Gettysburg.
You should be able to stand at Gettysburg and go and actually replay the battle right on the battlefield at least in some general sense.
So I would not worry about removing statues because we're probably only half a generation away from statues being things that happened in your glasses anyway.
And at the very least, you could add, let's say, an explanation part to the existing statue.
So if you don't take it away, you could add a plaque that says, a lot of people say this is racist, but we kept it for whatever reason anyway, because we added this plaque.
So, the future of whether you should or should not remove statues will become less relevant, because people who want to see them will just go, and people who don't want to see any racist symbols will go, and they won't see them.
Alright, let me ask you this.
Give me the date or the example of the last time President Trump crossed the line into something so provocative that it was headlines and it was obviously a mistake.
It seems to me that after the midterms, the President took a more, let's say, less provocative public persona.
And he said so in pretty direct language.
Right after the midterms, he said something about being, he didn't say nicer, something like that.
And is it my imagination?
Or has it been, let's see, so since November, five months, six months of the president not saying something that made the news go crazy?
Is it true that he said, just fact check me on this, is it true that he said in direct language publicly that he was going to try to tone down his rhetoric after the midterms?
Can we fact check that?
That's true, right? And is it true that he has done that as far as we can tell?
Because, remember, it seemed like there was one Alfred E. Newman is sort of proving my point.
We knew he was going to do nicknames, but Alfred E. Newman is clearly a playful name.
Nobody ever said, President Trump, stop being playful, because really that's all that was.
It seems to me that he took away his critic's greatest weapon, which was himself.
Am I right? The critics of President Trump, their greatest weapon they had against him was things he said.
And he took that away.
And he said, I'm going to take that away.
And then he took it away right in front of us.
Now, I don't think anybody took him seriously when he said it.
Because you thought to yourself, yeah, you're going to say you're going to be nicer.
But are you going to be nicer?
Are you really? Aren't you just going to wait a week and go right back to the way you were?
Well, nobody knew, did they?
We had to find out.
So I'm asking you, can you think of anything he did that was along the lines of any of the outrages of the past since November?
That's a fairly long period of time for us not to see anything like that.
Meanwhile, how many things has he done that works against the narrative?
Works against the narrative.
The narrative, of course, is that he's crazy, that he's uncontrollable, that he's a racist, whatever you want to put in the narrative that the other people are saying about him.
They're just running out of stuff because he keeps doing things that are counter-narrative.
You know, I've used these examples before, and I don't think people understand How big a deal it is.
That when the President gave the Medal of Honor to Tiger Woods...
Now, Tiger Woods, I don't know what he identifies with in terms of ethnicity, but most of the public will say, Tiger Woods is black.
I think that might be half true.
It doesn't matter for this example, but that's how the public perceives things.
It's such a small thing.
A Medal of Freedom is what it's called.
Yeah, the Medal of Freedom. Giving an athlete a Medal of Freedom is such a small thing in terms of the world, the country.
It's the most irrelevant kind of thing in the world.
But people turn on the TV and there's the president who probably on his own, I doubt there was a committee that came up with a recommendation, probably the president said, I love Tiger Woods.
We've been friends for, you know, the president and Tiger Woods have been friends forever.
And so he thought, great comeback.
Tiger's an inspiration. That's why we give these medals.
I'll give Tiger Woods a medal.
And so the news shows the president putting this medal around Tiger Woods.
And then all the people in the country who say, wait a minute, we were positive that the president is a racist.
There are two things here I don't understand.
Tiger Woods has known them for a long time and they like each other.
Explain that. How does that work?
And then the president chooses Tiger Woods to give this highly visible, highly prestigious, literally the highest award you can get as an American citizen if you're not in the military.
And you have to look at that and say, I don't know how that fits with my narrative.
Trump is not supposed to be the guy who does this.
Likewise, the Prison Reform Act worked against the narrative.
Likewise, the President's continuous bragging about his progress with black and Hispanic and women employment.
Those are the things that even if they happened, you wouldn't continuously brag about them.
So it just doesn't work with your narrative.
If you said to yourself, yeah, but in his mind he's still racist, he's just pretending not to be...
Even if you were pretending not to be, would you bring up and brag about how well you did with black unemployment?
Would you continuously harp on that?
Would you say over and over again that the reason you want to secure the border is for the benefit of the entry-level employees, potential ones who would have to fight for jobs, who are largely in the black and And so we have like six months of watching this president do things that are unambiguously just don't fit the other story.
Now do all these things fit the story that you had in your head?
You, meaning most of you, were probably Trump supporters from the start.
I think most of you probably are.
Does everything that you've seen in the last six months fit what you expected back in 2016?
I would say yes.
In my case, everything I'm observing about this president, probably everything.
If I thought about it, I might come up with some example of something that has surprised me.
But it's not coming to me right away.
I thought he would be good for the psychology of the economy, which would make the economy go up.
That's what I thought. I said it out loud.
I said it publicly. I said it often.
And sure enough, I thought that he would be effective against ISIS. I thought he'd be the right person to talk to Kim Jong-un.
I mean, these are things I said in public months and months and months before any of this happened, because that's the movie I was watching.
And I said, if this movie is the movie I think it is, we're going to have a good economy.
Things will be really good with foreign relations.
Trade negotiations will probably be aggressive, but eventually successful.
So those are the things I thought.
And I thought that the rumors of the Trump rounding, you know, what were the rumors before the election?
He was going to round people and putting them in concentration camps.
Or how about this president was anti-LGBTQ. Now, they did get something to work with because the military is still discriminating against transgender.
But as long as it's limited to the military, one of the things that all of us say, maybe we don't say it out loud, but we all understand it, the military is the one place it's okay to discriminate.
Now, you don't want to discriminate for the wrong reason.
So when the military was not, I guess, what's the right word?
Before it was integrated, people had bad reasons.
That in time we learned were bad reasons, and so, okay, that was a bad reason.
You don't want to discriminate based on race.
So that was a bad reason, so eventually humans figured that out and they stopped doing it.
But if the military says, I think there's a certain group that will have more medical issues or less availability because of whatever, they're either right or wrong about that.
Now, it could be that the military is concerned...
The transgender will have more time away from readiness.
And that's either true or false.
I'm no expert. Is that true?
Or is it false? And what if it's only true for half of transgender, but the other half are just being discriminated against because they're suffering because some other group has more medical problems?
Was that fair?
That's not fair.
That's totally not fair if some transgenders who don't have any readiness problems are being lumped in with ones that might.
That's not fair. But the military is the one place nobody's asking them to be fair.
It's the one place where we say, the only thing I care about is you're good at killing the other side.
I'm exaggerating a little bit, but mostly with the military, you say, hey military, are you letting people with physical disabilities...
I'm not talking about transgender, I'm talking about blind, missing a leg sort of thing.
The military discriminates against handicaps.
The military discriminates by height.
The military discriminates by gender.
The military discriminates by age.
They discriminate by physical health.
They discriminate a lot.
The military is the most discriminating organization that could ever be, but it's the one place where we say, eh, we can, you know, there's some gray areas and maybe we don't think this is where the military should discriminate.
But nobody really asks, are they allowed to?
Because they are allowed to.
They're allowed to discriminate in any way that gets the job done, even if they're wrong.
So over time, we hope that the wrong parts are decreased and the right parts are increased.
But they're certainly allowed.
So anyway, if you compare, what's the worst thing the LGBTQ community worried about in the beginning?
They literally talked about concentration camps, reversing gay marriage.
I don't see that happening. And then the president goes full out trying to cure AIDS and negotiates these free doses of medicine that would effectively eliminate AIDS in this country if it's done right.
So there's nothing about what the people in the other movie predicted that's happening.
Just nothing. But 100% of the things I thought would happen We're happening.
So how do people explain that?
All right. Let's talk about immigration.
Probably the biggest complaint about this president, in terms of emotionally, I guess, is the thought that he was a big old discriminator when it comes to immigration.
But the president's views on immigration have been proven completely true.
By the fact that one of the main things the President always said is, and again, here's the psychology of it, that if you make it attractive to come to this country illegally, you're going to get more of it.
Wouldn't you say that that was essentially the entire message of the President, if you could boil it down to one thing, which is, if you make it a pleasant experience, To come to this country illegally, you're going to get more of it.
Wouldn't you say that's just the whole message?
Because if she said, President Trump, we have some magical way of knowing that the amount of immigration will never get worse than it is, and in fact, in some ways, it's lessening in some ways, I'm not sure it would be a big problem.
But the President's all about incentive.
If you create an incentive to do something, you're going to get more of it.
It's just always. That's what capitalism is.
There's no exception to that.
If you make it attractive, you'll get more of it.
So the president's been working hard to make immigration look more or less attractive.
And now because of the caravans, especially because the number of people hitting the border right now is unprecedented lately, he's been proven completely right.
The essential claim That if you have your incentives wrong for immigration, you get the wrong outcome.
And sure enough, you can no longer argue the central claim.
You can still argue how much wall do you need, etc.
But people are going to stop arguing that stuff.
People are going to stop debating with the experts on border security.
Oh, I don't think you need a wall there, even though you're the expert who says, of course you need a wall there.
I think people are just going to say, let's talk about something else, because the president was so frickin' right on this, it hurts.
He was so right, it probably physically hurts people to see how right the president has been that immigration increased because it was an attractive thing.
All right. I thought, let's talk about framing.
I was going to do a separate periscope about this, but I'll toss this in.
I'll probably do this following topic maybe in more depth in a separate periscope, but I want to give you a teaser for it, see if you like this kind of stuff.
Here are some different ways to frame some of the big debates in the headlines.
Abortion had been framed as, when does life start?
So it had been, is this a life yet?
Or is it not a life yet?
So that's the way it had always been framed.
Without framing, you can never get a good result.
It's impossible to get a result everybody's happy about because, is this life or not?
We'll never agree. So if you have a framing that can't be solved, in other words, a framing that locks you in place and makes you hate each other, maybe think of another one.
Now, as it turns out, the so-called heartbeat bills are probably some of the strongest persuasion I've ever seen.
Like, really, really strong.
And I've told you why.
If you say, does life start at conception or some other time, you've got this weird, gray, hard-to-defend standard no matter which way you go.
But if you say heartbeat, we humans are all primed to think that when a heart stops, that's the end of life.
We all think that's true.
There's nobody who believes that a mammal with no heartbeat is alive.
Nobody. 100% agreement.
Or something like it, probably.
So, by calling it a heartbeat bill, instead of some other framing, they've put the pro-choice people in a completely indefensible position.
It's indefensible.
I'm not saying right or wrong.
And again, I always tell you, nothing you hear when I talk about the topic of abortion is my opinion of what things should be because I recuse myself from that in favor of women having more say because that's your most credible standard.
By the way, how long have you been listening to me say That I recuse myself from the abortion question because men should not be influencing it.
And the reason men should not be influencing it is because we don't add to the decision.
In other words, we're not smarter than women on this topic in some way that makes any difference.
Women have this. Whatever women collectively come up with is not going to be dumber than what women plus men come up with.
I just don't see that as a possibility.
And I said that since you can't come up with a decision on abortion everyone likes, it's just not possible.
The best you can do is have a decision that's credible to the people who didn't get their way.
You want the people who didn't get their way on abortion to say, well, I don't like this outcome, but at least the right people are making the decision.
They've looked at the right stuff.
They've taken it seriously.
I respect the process, and I respect the people who are involved.
I just wish it had gone another way.
That's your best situation, because you can't get to everybody you agree.
That's not possible. So, what happened when Alabama, I guess it was, passed their new abortion law?
The first thing you saw was that picture of a wall of just men who were behind the decision.
It was the first thing that the opposition went to.
They went at the credibility of the process.
And were they wrong?
They were not wrong.
If you're a man, try to put yourself in this position.
Forget about what your opinion of abortion is.
That's not relevant to what I'm going to say.
You could be pro or you could be anti for this next comment.
Somebody says, stop apologizing for being a man.
Nothing like that is happening.
There is nothing like me apologizing for being a man that's happening here.
I'm talking about the credibility of a system, and let me finish my point.
Imagine that you're a woman.
This is for the men who are watching.
Imagine you're a woman, and it's a decision about your body, about your health, About your potential offspring.
The most important things to you, period.
That's it. Your body, your health, your life, your potential offspring.
Nothing's more important than that.
And then you say, let's see who made the decision about what I do with my female body.
Are you freaking kidding me?
Nothing but men.
Just imagine.
Just imagine you're a woman. It's your body, and you say, whichever way the decision goes, I might like it, I might not like it, but I sure want the right people making the decision.
And then you see a wall of male, old male faces that were the only ones making the decision.
Now, as somebody saying, women vote.
Do you care? Do you care?
I'm putting yourself in this situation.
You say to yourself, yes, women voted for these men who made the decision, but it's a wall of male faces telling me, a woman, in this imaginary situation, what to do with my body.
Are you okay with that? Are you okay with that?
There's no way you're okay with that.
Okay? Reverse it now.
Let's say the question is about circumcision.
All right? I'm a man.
Let's say there became a national question about whether a young male baby should be circumcised.
And then I'm watching the news and I see it's a bunch of women that made the decision.
Hypothetically, this isn't going to happen.
How do you feel about that?
You're a man and you found out that women decided whether your penis should be sliced.
No men were involved.
How do you feel about that? No frickin' way.
No frickin' way I'm okay with that.
Because that is not a credible law.
A credible law on male circumcision should be mostly men.
Throw in some women just so you haven't missed anything.
But I want that to be mostly a male decision.
So, to my critic from a minute ago, am I apologizing for being male?
No. Freaking not.
I'm saying that if you could have a law about circumcision, I don't want your female opinion.
Period. I do not care what women say about the law.
Now, I do care if they prefer circumcised men.
So I would certainly factor that in.
I would want to hear what they have to say.
I would definitely want to know how women feel about it.
But if you showed me that only women made the final legal decision, I'm in the street.
Completely non-credible process.
So all I'm saying is that the same way that I would feel if the situation were reversed, I'm willing to take that same approach.
So, I believe I've been shown right.
Have I not been shown right?
Having men be too prominent in the abortion question reduces the credibility, not whether it's a right or wrong decision.
That's separate. I'm talking about whether the society will accept the decision.
Do they accept it as credible?
And the answer is unambiguously no.
You saw that the pro-abortion people went right after that.
Here's a wall of male faces.
This is not a credible process.
And you know what I say? They're right.
That was not a credible process.
It might be the right decision.
It might be the wrong decision.
I recuse myself from that.
But this was not a credible process.
And the women and the men who were complaining about the fact that it was all males making this decision, spot on.
They could not be more right with this criticism.
Now, I know that no laws were violated.
I know that these men got elected.
I'm sure the elections were fair enough.
But that's not really the point.
Anyway, let's frame another one.
Oh, let's talk about immigration.
When the president framed his merit immigration policy, he compared us to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
And he said that we're just trying to change our immigration policies so it's more in line with these other countries that we compete with.
So that it's less family-based and more skills-based like our other countries that we like so much.
And then if you've seen the chart where you can actually compare the United States' planned and future policy with the other countries, it's very persuasive.
To actually see that Canada and Japan, etc., have a competitive system And we have a clearly uncompetitive system because it does not value skills or less competitive system.
It doesn't value skills. It's a really strong argument to simply take our policy and move it to where our allies that we like so much and we assume, you know, we don't assume Canada is a bunch of racists.
So simply making our policy like theirs is a strong argument.
I'm not making the argument.
I'm just saying that persuasion-wise it's very powerful that that comparison was made.
I found that very persuasive. Alright, let's do nuclear.
The way nuclear is framed, has been, is nuclear energy dangerous or practical?
That is the wrong framing.
If you ask yourself, is nuclear power dangerous?
You get where we are now, which is a little bit of progress.
It looks like it's picking up, but not enough.
Here's the way you should frame nuclear energy.
Is it more or less dangerous than runaway climate change?
That is the framing that saves the world.
And when I say it saves the world...
Maybe literally. Because there are smart people, plenty of them, Bill Gates among them, who say that nuclear power is really the only thing that's ready enough, safe enough, economical enough to make a big push on climate change.
But here's the great part.
Even if climate change is a hoax, Even if climate change is not the problem that most scientists say it is, even if it's not, you would want to do exactly the same stuff.
You'd want more nuclear energy because it's the most economical, it's the safest, it's the best for pollution, and just in case, it's also the best for CO2 in terms of the best thing that you can do quickly and at scale.
So stop framing nuclear as, is nuclear dangerous or not?
That's a losing frame.
Change it to, is nuclear safer or less safe than letting climate change be dealt with with only solar or only wind, or the combination of those two, which is more dangerous.
And I think that gets you to more nuclear energy in a good way.
All right, so...
Those are my three frames.
I'll run through them again. On the question of abortion, the bad way to frame it is, has life started, yes or no?
With that, you can never get any progress.
Everybody will be unhappy forever.
The better frame is who decides.
Who gets to decide something that no matter who is in control, there will be bad mistakes made.
Somebody's going to die who didn't need to, no matter what.
So the question for a stable country is who gets to decide.
This question that there's never going to be a decision we all agree with.
On nuclear, is it better than climate change or not?
And on immigration, how does it compare to the other countries?
And also on immigration, the way you frame it is who gets to decide what our country is.
If we have strong border control, then it's people in this country who get to decide what the United States is and what it becomes.
If we don't have strong border security, then the fate of the United States will be decided by Guatemalans, Central American folks.
And as wonderful as they are, and I mean that sincerely, Central Americans, Mexicans, Mexicans, great people. I mean, they really are great people.
But do they get to decide?
Do they get to decide what America is?
If that's okay with you, then just be clear about what it is that you're agreeing with.
Alright. Those are my topics for the day.
I'm going to make a couple of observations here, which you should not put too much stake in.
So, there are two things that happened recently that I'm scratching my head on.
One is my Periscope YouTube and, yeah, Periscope, YouTube, and LinkedIn traffic all dropped a lot at about the same time.
So, for reasons that I don't know, the traffic from LinkedIn that was going to Tilbert.com just suddenly disappeared.
I mean, it went from a lot to nothing overnight.
Don't know why. Haven't been able to find out why.
Likewise, my YouTube traffic took a step down.
Not sure why. My periscope traffic, as you can see, had been typically 2,000 people, and I would get around 20,000 views.
Now, yesterday, for some reason, the number of people who were watching it at one time spiked to 3,000, so it doubled for reasons I never figured out.
But if you look at the total number of people who viewed even that periscope, it's actually down.
So at the same time that my troll activity got really high, I assume the media matters or some other trolls were coming after me.
At the same time the troll activity got high, I took tremendous hits to my income in a number of areas that were social media related.
Now here's the thing.
What do I make of that?
Here's my argument for...
For regulating the social media companies.
The fact that I can't tell if these changes are a coincidence, or some kind of change that had to do with nothing important, or if I've been targeted, is pretty important.
What do you make of the fact that I can't tell?
And I have no way to tell.
I have no way to know.
I have nobody to talk to, nobody to complain to.
I have no way to know why suddenly my traffic falls off a ledge.
One of the things that I notice happening is that I have a lot of influence over some topics that people don't like because I'm pretty good at framing things and finding out what's the most persuasive way to talk about something.
So, do I need to prove That bad things are happening to me in terms of algorithms or social media or bias or anything.
And by the way, I'm not making that claim.
So I'm not making the claim that these changes which have a huge impact on my income, I'm not saying that it's any kind of organized bias against me.
I have no way of knowing.
But that's the problem.
There was a big change.
It was negative. It happened all of a sudden.
It happened across platforms at the same time that troll activity ticked up considerably.
So I know I'm on some kind of list.
Clearly I'm being targeted, as other supporters of the president have been.
But if I can't tell That's enough reason for regulation, isn't it?
Because there must be other people in my situation where they can't tell if they've been targeted in a way that's very, very destructive.
I mean, it could not be more destructive if it's intentional, if it's just a coincidence or just something about the weather that's causing less people to watch or something.
How would I know?
I wouldn't know. So the very fact that you can't know That's all the argument you need for regulating the social network platforms.
The way I'd like to see it done is there should be somebody, some kind of a judge or external group that can look at their algorithms and can investigate certain claims.
There should be a way for somebody, some kind of a judge or external body, To go to any of the social media platforms and say, here's his name, show us what the algorithm did with this person, and show us why the traffic went down.
And then in most cases, I would assume, it's going to be just regular reasons.
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