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May 23, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
54:43
Episode 539 Scott Adams: Biden, Infrastructure Theater, Word-Thinking, Shadowbanning
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
Stanley, good to see you.
Grab your cups and your mugs, your glasses, your vessel, your tankers, your chalice, your thermos, your flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
Hey everybody! John, Margot, Ryan, It's time to join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
And it happens right now.
Oh, that's good stuff.
So, here's an update on my startup, because I know you care.
We've added a new feature now to allow you to put a button, if you know how to paste things into HTML, or a link, if you just want to keep it simple, so that you can have a link on your own page, whether it's a blog or social media or anything else, that will take you directly to an interface by Wenheb video call.
So if you wanted to do, let's say, customer support, you could put your link or your button on your page and somebody could go to a video call or just schedule one.
They click the button and it shows your schedule if you've set up a schedule when you're ready.
And so, all of you who would like to do that, the two steps are get the interface by WinHub And put in a profile as an expert.
And then separately you want to go to wenhub.com and then search for yourself and you'll find the links there that will allow you to paste onto a web page if you know HTML. If you don't know HTML you can just grab a URL and just use a URL. Alright, let's talk about all the news.
Some of it's pretty interesting. You all saw the news that Stormy Daniels apparently was ripped off to the tune of $300,000, or she alleges, by her lawyer Avenatti.
Now, as I tweeted yesterday, I think somebody, whoever's writing this simulation, because this can't be real, Are we living in a real world or some kind of a scripted world?
Because the fact that Avenatti, who was CNN's favorite for so long, would turn out to be, well maybe, allegedly, somebody who steals large amounts of money.
Now he has not been convicted and he gets his day in court just like everybody else.
And by the way, I think that by the time we get the details of this, if I'm being fair, And I like to be fair.
I'll bet that Avenatti has a better defense than you're expecting.
So don't be surprised if none of this turns out to be true.
Because I think it's going to end up looking sort of like he didn't know he was going to get paid.
And he gave millions of dollars worth of legal service, and so he just made sure that the funds that were coming to her went to him directly, so it's not exactly stealing, but maybe he did do something with a signature that's yet to be proven.
So I think you should expect these stories to start out simple.
And then it's going to get a lot more hazy as we go.
But we'll see. Just the fact that this story exists at all is hilarious.
And not only because Avenatti looks like a huge...
He looks like...
Well, I'm not going to use that word.
But there's a reason I'm not using it.
I'll tell you in a minute. But it's interesting that a porn star...
Would be, let's say, hmm, what's the right word?
You know what the word is.
Let's say, what are the odds that a porn star would be, hmm, fill in your own word, by somebody who not only acts like a giant, hmm, you know the other word, but because he has this shaved head, He sort of also looks like a giant, hmm, I won't use the word.
So there's something perfect about that.
Alright, the reason I'm not using that word is because I found when I tried to monetize the YouTube channel where these Periscopes get downloaded and turned into YouTube content as well.
So if you did a search for Real Coffee by Scott Adams or Real Coffee with Scott Adams, you'll find my YouTube channel that's the same content about an hour later.
But when I monetized it, I noticed that YouTube had a number of my videos unchecked and they would not monetize.
What did they have in common?
So there were something like 100 out of 500 of my videos.
YouTube's rules did not let them monetize it.
Which, by the way, I don't object to.
I think they should have rules That keeps some kind of content from being mixed with some kinds of advertisers.
So no problem with the fact that they have those rules.
Those are good rules. But guess what content was not monetized?
Some of them, I think, probably had a bad word in them.
Yeah, so I think some of them were because I used a bad word, and I'm okay with that, because actually it gives me a little, it gives me the discipline to avoid those words, because I kind of want to, but on the other hand, cursing is sort of part of my personality, and it's hard to, it's hard to It's hard to act that artificial if I'm in the moment.
If I'm in the moment, I tend to use the words that are most natural to me and they tend to be those.
But this extra bit of discipline might be good for me to try to keep away from it.
But the other group, the largest group that was not monetized was when I talked about a certain HOAX. Which I'm not going to mention, because this one would get demonetized.
So there was a certain F-I-N-E P-E-O-P-L-E H-O-A-X that whenever it was in the title or in the content, they were all demonetized.
Now, if you remember that content, most of you saw it, there wasn't anything there that should have been demonetized.
There really wasn't.
I didn't use any swearing.
I didn't call for any violence.
Nothing like that.
But that content is very damaging to a certain portion of the political world and it got suppressed.
Now, is that a coincidence?
Or is it just perfectly understandable because perhaps that content comes with a certain set of vocabulary That would seem racial, and that would be a good enough reason.
Just because it was a racial conversation, even though all intentions were positive, it might be there's an algorithm that's picking up keywords of some sort and says, oh, there's some kind of racial component to this, and we don't need that for our advertisers.
If that's the reason, I'm actually fine with that.
I don't have any problem with it at all.
So, here's the problem.
Because we're entering the political season, I have these questions.
Why did my Periscope traffic seem to drop off suddenly at the same day?
Could be because of content.
Why did my traffic from LinkedIn to Dilbert.com, which has absolutely nothing to do with politics, except that my blog lives there, so there might have been some keyword problems there.
Actually, that's probably why.
But when I look at that, was there an algorithm change?
Is somebody just preparing for 2020?
Is my profile being brought down?
And by the way, my YouTube traffic, forget about all the demonetization, my YouTube traffic just dropped by about 25% suddenly as well.
Now, here's the question.
Could all of these things be a coincidence?
And the answer is yes.
Not a coincidence, exactly, but could they have perfectly legitimate explanations, which if I heard them, I would say to myself, oh, okay, you know, it was free speech, I didn't say anything wrong, but I do see why this content doesn't match well with advertisers.
I can see that.
But I don't have access to that argument.
I am left to guess.
Is there something going on?
Is it a coincidence that LinkedIn, Periscope, and YouTube all showed a dramatic decline at about the same time?
Somebody says seasonal.
Could be seasonal. Could be nothing but the weather getting better.
But here's the problem.
I don't know.
And then you look at Dave Rubin, who is noticing a sharp drop-off in his traffic, too.
And I think he's wondering if he's being shadow banned.
So here's my point.
I don't know if any changes have been made that would be specific to my traffic.
I don't know.
And I have no way of knowing.
The fact that I have no way of knowing is absolute ironclad argument for regulating the algorithms of the major platforms.
The fact that I can't tell is all you need.
Because if I could tell, then maybe there would be something to debate, something to challenge, etc.
But the fact that I can't tell is the end of the conversation.
If I can't tell, and it's also true that these social media platforms will be one of the biggest factors in who is the leader of the United States.
I mean, big, big stakes.
We're talking about war and peace.
We're talking about economic development.
We're talking about how the poor are treated.
I mean, it's the biggest issues in the world, and it kind of comes down to one of the biggest variables, anyway, is the algorithms, and they're invisible.
I would say that as long as the algorithms on social media are invisible and people who are, let's say, influential in their own way, such as me, the fact that we can't tell what behavior we're doing is making a difference or if it's a coincidence, It's completely unacceptable as a system.
Forget about me.
Forget about, you know, Trump versus anybody.
Forget about the specifics of the politics.
If your influencers can't tell why their numbers go down, and then they do go down, completely unacceptable.
The system is 100% broken.
And let me make sure that I'm saying this as clearly as possible.
Without that transparency, democracy does not exist.
Now, we're a republic, but still there's democratic elements to the voting, etc.
But without transparency on the social media algorithms, we don't have, we do not have, and we should stop talking as though we have, something like a democracy, something like a republic.
We don't.
We lost it. Now, it could be, like I say, there may actually be nothing going on behind the scenes that I should be worried about at all.
In fact, there could be things going on behind the scenes that are helping me, and I don't even know that.
But democracy is dead.
The republic is dead.
It's not something you have to worry about in the future.
It already happened.
That lack of transparency is the end of That's not an exaggeration, is it?
You tell me. Is that an exaggeration?
The lack of social media transparency is the end of the republic.
There is some new source of power And we don't even know their names.
It might not be that they're talking to each other.
It might not be that they have a specific agenda beyond, you know, the left they prefer over the right, or they don't like the president.
It could be limited. It could be something that goes away in the next cycle.
Possible. But the fact that we don't know is the end of the United States as it was written up in the Constitution.
The founders did not anticipate the internet.
If they had, I'm pretty sure they would have written the constitution differently.
Actually, literally, it would be a different constitution.
I don't know how exactly, but it would be different.
All right, let's talk about another topic, nothing about that.
I'm watching Biden's strategy, and it's so funny Yet nobody's laughing and I can't tell what's going on.
So here's Biden's strategy.
He wants to contrast himself to Trump.
So Trump's strategy is make America great again.
Under that umbrella, he has things to brag about in terms of, you know, we're safer than we've ever been, and the economy is great, and he's got the judges he wants, even if you don't, etc.
So Trump has all these things that can certainly be sold as accomplishments.
Biden Has a bunch of laws that he was involved with years ago that people don't like today.
He's got frickin' nothing.
There's just nothing Joe Biden has to sell as an accomplishment.
So he's decided, and the media is treating this like it's smart.
Here's the funny part.
The media is treating this like a clever strategy.
That Biden is simply focusing on getting rid of Trump instead of talking about any real topics in detail.
He does talk about policies, but he has a very sharp focus on simply getting rid of Trump.
So the setup here is that Trump is making America great again, and even his critics would argue that America looks pretty good right now.
We're looking pretty good.
And Biden's approach is to get rid of that guy who did all that good stuff.
You can't make that up.
Can you think of a worse thing to focus on than getting rid of the guy who presided over the most golden period the United States has ever experienced, in my opinion?
I mean, you're seeing progress against AIDS, you're seeing progress against terrorism, really progress about just about everything.
And Biden's sales approach is, I'm going to get rid of all that stuff.
All that good stuff you like?
I'm going to get rid of that stuff.
It's laughably ridiculous.
Now, I tweeted a humorous framing that I think is so strong it might actually take Biden out of the race if he wins the nomination.
And here's the framing.
A presidential candidate has to pick a vice president who looks good as part of the team.
And the trick is you want your vice president candidate To be the weaker, less interesting version of the candidate for president.
So just as Ronald Reagan picked boring George Bush, and then when George Bush ran for president, even though he was a watered-down version of Reagan, Reagan was so popular that even his watered-down version became president.
But he could only last for one term, And his vice presidential pick was the twice-watered-down version.
So you had Reagan was the star.
He picked a watered-down Bush Sr.
to be his VP. And then when Reagan could no longer run for office because his two terms were up, the watered-down version becomes president because, well, you know, we really like Reagan, so we'll take the watered-down version too.
And by the way, Bush Sr.
was a pretty good president. But when he picked his vice president, he had to go one level deeper in the watering down.
So boring Bush Sr.
had to pick somebody more boring than him, or less capable, somebody who was weaker or less interesting, and he picked Dan Quayle.
Now, if Dan Quayle had somehow miraculously become president, who would he pick as his vice president?
You know, that would be like three levels watered down.
It's hard to get less interesting and less qualified than Dan Quayle, so that would have been fascinating.
So Biden has the same problem.
He is the watered down version of Obama.
The reason Biden was a perfect running mate is that he's more boring than Obama, less interesting, seems to be less smart.
Perfect. Boring, uninteresting, Relatively solid in terms of his experience.
Well, very solid in terms of his experience.
But now who does Biden pick who isn't more interesting than Biden?
Think about it. It's a real problem.
If you're Trump and you've got star power up here, you've got all this room To pick a vice president.
I mean, you could pick somebody who's really strong, and I think Pence is pretty strong, but he's still not even close to the wattage of the president.
So I'm seeing some names coming across the screen.
So let's say that Biden picks Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris is a little bit younger, more interesting version of Biden.
If you saw, let's say you're a woman or a minority, and you see that Kamala is picked as the number two, don't you feel like you just went back to the 70s?
Or whenever there was Geraldine Ferrara?
Don't you feel like, wait a minute, we're the Democrats?
Why is the woman person of color who's been a frickin' senator and who's the right age and doing a good job and all that, why is she second?
Why is she second? She would have a little bit too much star power.
So when you say to yourself, oh, he has to pick a vice president who's also popular and, you know, looks like they could be president, that's a real problem.
Because if he does pick somebody like that, people are going to say, uh, why do we need the 80-year-old president when the vice presidential pick seems perfectly capable?
All right, so watch for that.
Watch for the Biden vice presidential pick being a real, real challenge because he's already in the watered-down version.
All right. I'm watching the news on CNN and MSNBC during this period when there's nothing really bad to say about Trump.
They're trying hard.
But because the headlines are not serving up any good stuff, they still have to report stuff.
So here's how they're trying to make news with words.
So watch this trend.
CNN and MSNBC are the ones who do it the most.
They take a story that if you just described it objectively, there wouldn't be anything interesting there.
But when you describe it with your colorful words, you turn it into something That's uncritically accepted by the audience without any evidence for it.
So, for example, here's some words from today.
CNN is reporting that Pelosi is, quote, talking about Trump, that she's, quote, getting under his skin.
What's that mean? What does it mean that somebody is getting under somebody's skin?
All we're seeing is politicians who ordinarily bicker with each other continue to bicker with each other the way they always have.
Who gets to say that that's getting under somebody's skin?
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say Democrats and Republicans say things about each other?
There's nothing in any of the headlines That really would indicate anybody's getting under anybody's skin.
So that choice of words tries to add facts without facts.
So you tend to say to yourself, oh, there's something special going on here.
There isn't. There's nothing more personal or more annoying about each other than there ever was.
I mean, it's just the same people arguing the same way.
Here's some more. Saying that the president is, quote, engaged in a cover-up.
So they're trying to use the word cover-up to convey more information than the facts have.
The facts are that the president believes that there's no crime and it's a big waste of time and bad for the government and bad for the country and bad for Trump.
If all he's dealing with is more investigations when there's already been a pretty big investigation that found nothing of legal consequence, at least nothing that's going to affect him.
And so calling that a cover-up is trying to turn it into more than it is.
When somebody believes that they're innocent, And they don't want endless...
If somebody doesn't want endless investigations of themselves, what do you call that person?
Normal, right?
You call it normal.
Nobody wants endless investigations that are just politically motivated.
Is that a cover-up?
Is it a cover-up to not want investigations for something that's...
There's not even an allegation of a crime.
With any evidence that would make it a credible allegation.
How about this?
Chris Hayes said on MSNBC that Trump, quote, colludes with Putin out in the open.
He colludes with Putin out in the open.
It's that word collude that turns something that completely happened in public and I think he's talking about the joke that he made and Just adding that word tries to turn a nothing into a something.
Here's another one. It was at MSNBC or CNN, I forget.
They said that Trump is showing his contempt for immigrants.
Now, what has Trump done that would show you his inner mind that he has contempt for immigrants?
All he's doing is his job.
It's his job to secure the borders.
Where is this contempt for immigrants?
He has a preference for people who are legal citizens and have followed the rules.
That's just sort of being a conservative.
So when you say he has contempt, that of course is the mind-reading problem.
MSNBC twice used the word tantrum.
About Trump walking out of the infrastructure meeting.
If you watched the details that Trump went in and said a few words and said he wasn't going to have a meeting because they just keep investigating him and he can't work with them.
Is that a tantrum?
Is tantrum the word that describes what I just said?
I don't see any tantrum.
Unless you want to say everybody's having a tantrum.
Everybody who's not happy with the situation, are they all having a tantrum?
So the most healthy situation you can imagine for this world is when the news on both sides are trying to make up words to turn the complete lack of news into something interesting.
And the complete lack of news is because this president has largely taken away most of the big problems.
It feels like most of them are handled or on the way to being handled or moving in the right direction.
Takes away all the good news.
Jeff Daniels, actor Jeff Daniels, said that if Trump gets re-elected in 2020, it's quote, it's the end of democracy.
What does that mean?
What does it mean? If we have a fair election and the leader who emerges from that fair election Goes on to lead to four more years of incredible American prosperity.
And then he leaves office because of course he would.
He's not going to hang on to office after his second turn.
Is that really the end of democracy?
Or is that democracy?
Now, the social media networks will probably determine who becomes president because they're smarter than they were in this last cycle.
And whatever they're doing in the last cycle was a little too obvious.
And not quite effective enough.
Do you think that the smartest people in Silicon Valley did not notice that their moves against Trump supporters were too obvious and not effective enough?
Yeah, they noticed.
They noticed.
And they will have had four years to figure out how to make it less noticeable and And more effective.
The odds of the social media companies not being able to completely change the result of this election are low.
I'm not saying they have 100% control, but I think it's low odds that they haven't figured out how to stay under the radar and still affect the election.
I would say that that's almost as certainty.
Rex Tillerson said about Trump, That in one of the summits with Putin, he said that Putin out-prepared Trump.
He out-prepared him.
So that's another one of these using words to create news.
So? What does it mean to be out-prepared?
What did we lose?
What was the cost of that?
How do you judge how well-prepared somebody is?
How do you know how well-prepared Putin is?
I don't know if you can judge that sort of thing.
Saying that Trump was outprepared by Putin sounds like the sort of thing you'd see in some boring corporate board meeting.
It feels like something that means something, but it didn't translate into anything that I could notice.
I mean, I just don't know what that meant.
How about saying what went wrong, or did he do something that caused somebody to die, or the stock market to go down?
Where is the meat?
What does it mean to be out-prepared?
How do you measure such a thing?
So these are the worst problems in the world right now, and they're nothing.
I loved Chuck Schumer trying to defend that the Democrats were serious about infrastructure.
And his argument is, he holds up his document.
He says, I've got a 35-page document I was going to give the president.
35 pages of how we want to spend this infrastructure money.
To which I say to myself, is the point of saying that you came to the president's office with a 35-page document, was the point of that to tell me you're an idiot?
Because if that was the point, message received.
Do you know what you don't bring to a meeting with a top executive, much less the president of the United States?
What you don't bring is a 35 page document.
You know what else you don't bring?
A 34 page document.
33? No. 32?
No. Do you get the pattern? That's a lot of pages.
Do you know what would be the right amount of document?
Possibly one. And that might be too much.
Maybe one. Clearly the president did not call a meeting so he could go through a 35 page document.
Nor would anybody really understand it, nor would anybody be able to check exactly, you know, what they had in mind.
So when you see Schumer waving his 35-page document, everybody who's had any experience in corporate America is watching that and saying, what's wrong with him?
The President's claim that Schumer was not really serious about infrastructure seems sort of bolstered by that 35-page document, if you know what I mean.
Now, maybe that thing had an executive summary, which would have been a slightly different story, but the way Schumer is presenting it, it's as if the whole 35 pages have meaning, and clearly that would be the opposite of reality.
All right. There's a little story about actor John Cusack.
He apparently, social media noticed that he did not stand at a Cubs game at Wrigley Field for a Boeing military salute.
And I guess Boeing sponsored it, but it was a military salute.
And there's a picture of basically everybody in the whole stadium standing up and a little picture of him with his little black hat so he could pretend to be invisible with a sort of a big lip pout.
He's pouting like that.
And then he tried to defend himself in some weak way.
And I love the fact That the Democrats' worst representatives are getting a lot of attention.
Cusack, he's trying hard to be an intellectual, but he doesn't pull it off.
So he looks like an actor acting like an intellectual, but nobody wrote his lines for him, so he can't pull it off.
And then Jeff Daniels, literally famous for being the Dumb and Dumber star, Criticizing Trump in a way that just sounds ridiculous.
And I want to at least propose the following possibility.
If social media decides to eliminate or suppress, let's say the most...
I'll try to use the word without...
Without bias. So I'm going to try to carefully pick a word here.
I'll say, if social media starts blocking or deplatforming the most, let's say, no, I don't want to say that word, the most provocative, okay?
If they start getting rid of the most provocative people on the right, but they keep all of the wackos on the left, it's not going to help them the way they think it will.
So, the people on the right were doing nothing but the farthest people on the right.
So I'm not talking about, you know, Dave Rubin, and he wouldn't identify exactly with the right anyway.
So I'm not talking about Carpe Dantum, right?
I'm not talking about James Woods.
I'm not talking about them.
They're pretty much mainstream.
But James Woods could get back on social media anytime he wants.
He's got one tweet that's a problem.
So I'm not talking about mainstream people.
But if the serious racists on the right, if they get blocked, it's actually going to improve the brand of those people who did not get blocked.
Because they will not be, you know, conflated with people who are the more provocative, shall we say, people on the right.
But as long as we're looking at Jeff Daniels and Representative Omar and John Cusack, if those are the people that we're paying attention to on the left, it's going to completely annihilate their brand because they get conflated with their worst, dumbest people. And the people on the right...
The herd has been called, perhaps illegally, perhaps irresponsibly, perhaps unconstitutionally.
Those are interesting questions.
But the effect of it will be that the people who are left on the right, the people who are remaining on the right, to be more clear, will be the people who don't have the most provocative reputations.
So I'm not sure things are going to go the way they hope.
I wanted to do a follow-up on a point I made about socialism the other day.
I'm trying to improve my thinking on this topic, so let's try this out for you.
I had complained that when people say socialism is bad, they have trouble explaining exactly why that is, except that past socialism has caused all kinds of problems.
Venezuela is a problem, other communist countries, the economies don't work, etc.
So there's a history of socialism not working, but there's also plenty of history of where it does.
So, for example, in the United States, social security and disability and some other things are essentially socialism, but they have not ruined the country.
We seem to be able to handle those things and find value in them.
So here's a distinction I want to try out with you.
That socialism can work when the sharing, that is the socialism part, happens after the money is made.
So that's what social security is.
You make some money, and then the government reallocates it, and people complain, but the system seems to be fairly working.
Here's where it doesn't work, when the government takes control before the money is made.
And that would be such as nationalizing big corporations.
That's the Venezuela problem, if I understand it correctly.
If you nationalize the big oil companies, the big producers, You have socialism before the money is made, and then no money is made.
Because the socialism of owning the assets of production will absolutely ruin your productivity.
I think 100% of people would agree with that statement.
If you nationalize private companies, you don't have any hope of them competing in the real world.
And it's all going to go to hell.
People will have too much control, corruption will spread, etc.
So, I'm playing with this distinction, because I don't know if it holds well.
But just keep that in your mind, that if the government takes over private companies, that's a 100% failure track.
That's Venezuela.
But when the government helps private companies make money, which would be the Trump administration, They're getting rid of some regulations.
They're lowering the tax rates.
They're doing things that boost productivity of the private companies.
In the healthcare area, they're creating more visibility of pricing.
So if your government is actively boosting private companies, but not trying to take them over, that's pretty healthy.
That's what we're seeing, and that's partly why the economy is doing so well.
Once you've made that money, you have a secondary decision about what kind of distribution, sharing, tax rates, social programs make sense for all people involved.
Because we're all better off if the people who are most vulnerable are taken care of.
So I'm not saying...
That universal healthcare and social security and all those things are all good all the time and that there's nothing to worry about them because they can be expensive, they can get out of control, they can have their own problems.
However, it does seem like a useful distinction if government gets involved before the money's made Or if government gets involved after the money's made and they're helping to distribute it in a way that helps everybody.
That's the difference. So good socialism versus bad socialism, but I'd rather just not use the word socialism.
I would like to call out Shepard Smith of Fox News.
Now, when you hear that name, I know I just triggered a bunch of you, because Shepard Smith tends to be, let's say, the least supportive of President Trump on Fox News.
But I gotta tell you, I saw a performance by Shep Smith the other day that was so freaking...
I guess there are probably Emmys or Peabody's or something.
What is the award that news people get?
Because I would like to sort of publicly nominate him for that.
If you saw this, you probably were as impressed as I was.
So it was the news, however many days ago, in which there was a helicopter that went down in the Hudson.
Now, that happened at Shepard Smith's hour, or however long he has.
But during his time on the air, that happened.
Now, he spent probably more than half an hour talking without a script In front of this big screen of a gigantic image, probably from a drone or a helicopter, of the scene of the rescue,
etc. And I watched him riff for an hour and describe with word pictures the entire scene, the background, the context.
He described the tunnels.
He described what things look like, how it worked, how the people flowed.
And for half an hour, he held court in front of this very well-produced set.
And by the way, kudos to whoever produces that segment, because the visuals were A+. It's the best visuals you've ever seen from any kind of a disaster site.
The video was great.
They were zooming in.
They were zooming out. It was just great.
But watching him do that performance without a script It was amazing.
It was probably the best news performance, if performance is the right word, I hate to use that word, probably the best news presentation that I've ever seen for an extended period.
So kudos to him. I know you've got your problems with his not liking Trump as much as you would like, but for pure talent, That was jaw-dropping.
I was just riveted.
And by the way, it also reminded me of what online education is going to look like.
When you saw Shepard Smith talking about this news event, and the visuals were just, you know, a whole wall of visuals, and they were the perfect ones, and he was the perfect presenter.
He had the knowledge, he just had the whole package.
It told you what online education could become if it ever gets there.
Right now it's just the same boring teacher that you would have if you went in person and they're just blah blah blah on video.
But if you could combine that level of visual spectacular excellence that Fox News did for that segment at the same time that you don't have a regular teacher but just the best teacher you could have.
Someone who can really just light up the centers of your brain and make you not be able to turn it off.
Those people exist.
They're just rare. Shepard Smith is apparently one of them.
And specifically, if you ever get a chance to see that on replay...
Watch how he talks in visual terms.
I mean, he just took you right into a story, and you just lived there for the whole time he was talking.
It was great. All right, that's enough about him.
Let's see if I covered everything I wanted to do.
I think I did.
Oh, let's talk about...
AOC and the Freedom Caucus have something to agree on.
The Freedom Caucus being a very conservative group, and AOC being whatever is the direct opposite.
Apparently they agree on the question of mass facial recognition in public.
They don't like it.
So the far left and the, I don't know how far right they are, but let's say the right, Does not like companies and governments being able to do facial recognition of everybody all the time in public.
Here's my opinion on that.
Doesn't matter. It's going to happen anyway.
I completely understand why people don't want it.
It's a strong argument.
It's an argument that the left and the right agree with.
I completely understand why people don't want it.
It restricts your freedom.
It's giving up rights, in a sense.
You have some expectation of privacy, even in public.
And when I mean privacy in public, I mean that you're anonymous when you're walking through the crowd.
I don't think there's even the slightest chance that we won't have universal facial recognition.
I just don't see any chance it's not gonna happen.
Because if you have a security camera, that security footage is going somewhere.
Maybe it's local, but probably more and more it's gonna be in the cloud.
So once that video reaches the cloud, is there really gonna be a law that says I can't run another piece of software against my own beta?
Why not? Why would it be illegal for me, a private company, with a camera that's on my front door?
Why would it be illegal to take that video, which is legal, and then once I've taken the video, I own it.
I own the video.
I can run other software against that video.
Can you tell me that you could actually pass a law that would tell me what software I could run against my own data?
Keep in mind that my intentions are not to create any information that becomes public outside my company.
I'm just looking at my own data.
You can't tell me that could ever be illegal.
And if you can't get rid of all the video cameras, I just don't see how you can enforce such a thing.
Now, you also are going to have the problem that everybody with a smartphone, everybody who someday has glasses that are recording everything, Pretty soon, everything's going to be recorded all the time.
Your self-driving cars are going to have cameras 360, so if you're anywhere near a car, you're going to be on video, and a lot of just walking down a sidewalk in the future will probably put you on video of every car that drives by.
Now, they don't necessarily have to save that data, but they could.
So just like privacy in general, do you remember when we were talking about, it seems years ago now, when we were talking about, gee, someday the government will have the ability to monitor all of our communications.
And people said, we will stop that.
We're never going to let the government monitor all of our communications.
And what do we have now?
Well, we live in a world in which the government monitors all of our conversations.
Now, that doesn't mean there's somebody literally watching you when you're talking.
It means that they have access to it if they want it.
Most of us are boring, so they don't care about it, but they certainly can.
There's nothing to stop them from getting literally every conversation you've ever made electronically.
They know exactly where you've been if you had your smartphone with you, and you did.
Of course you had your smartphone with you.
So they know everywhere you've been.
They know everything you've purchased.
And they know everything you've said if they care to.
Now let me ask you this.
How is your life worse?
In what ways is your life worse because the government has all that information?
There might be reasons.
I'm not saying there are no reasons.
I'm just saying that whatever you were afraid of...
Those are probably valid fears, but now that we know what the situation looks like, at least at the moment, things could get worse any day.
But at the moment, we have somebody saying in the comments, did you notice that terrorism almost went away?
We hear stories of people being caught all the time.
You know, people being entrapped and people trying to buy explosives from an FBI informant.
But if you notice that every time there's a serious threat that looks like a big plot, I'm not talking about the lone gunman.
They're still hard to find.
But anybody who had a big plot to blow something up, don't they always end up talking to an FBI undercover person who's trying to sell them something?
It feels like the FBI gets inserted Every time.
So, does our complete police state lack of privacy help us?
Or does it hurt us?
Well, has anybody here personally been injured by this lack of privacy?
I'm sure there have been.
Like, it's a big world with lots of stuff happening, so I'm sure there's somebody who's been injured by the government having complete knowledge of its citizens.
Probably. I don't know how I have been injured.
I just know that I feel safer because there's less terrorism.
Now, I had predicted years ago Many years ago, that the increase in terrorism would result in a complete lack of privacy.
I think we're here.
And I said that that complete lack of privacy would actually be a solution to terrorism.
It might have its own problems, but it would be an actual complete answer to terrorism.
And I think we're seeing a situation where it looks like it's a fairly complete answer to terrorism.
So we'll see.
But anyway, the facial recognition thing, I think, is going to go the same way.
There will be honest, smart people who will fight as hard as they can to stop it.
There will be very good arguments for why we shouldn't have it.
We will be outraged.
There will be possibly protests in the streets.
And that is going to happen anyway.
And after it happens, your life will get better, not worse.
Because here's the thing that people always forget in the United States.
In the United States, if a dictator wanted to grab power, We know where they live.
There's so much lack of privacy that we're going to know a lot about our leaders.
In fact, one of the biggest problems in the world right now is that we know too much about our leaders.
Because if you know too much, there's always something to complain about.
There's always something you think, well, I better look into that.
If I didn't know about that, I wouldn't worry about it.
But the fact that I do know about it, well, I better dig deeper.
So you're seeing that with Trump especially.
So my prediction is this.
You will have an even more complete lack of privacy about what you're doing and where you are.
And that 10 years from now, there will be complete facial recognition everywhere.
Probably our DNA will be used in ways that you never thought and information about you.
And that, here's the strange part, and you'll be happier.
That's my prediction. That you will be happier As your privacy decreases, your happiness will improve.
The exception would be people who voluntarily put things on social media are going to be way less happy because people put bad things on social media and it kills their life.
So that part's going to be totally bad.
But those are also voluntarily things people do voluntarily.
All right. I understand that So-called American ISIS guy, John Walker Lind.
He was a captured Islamic militant who at age 20 went over to Afghanistan to join the Taliban to fight against the United States.
So it's an American citizen who literally joined the Taliban and fought against the United States.
He got a 20-year sentence and got out early.
Now, I ask you, Is that the right punishment for somebody who actually joined an enemy service to kill Americans?
That feels like not enough.
I mean, I'm all for the First Step program and rehabilitating people, but shouldn't there be some different kind of treatment for people Who literally joined the other side to fight against you and destroy your country and kill your people?
I'm thinking the death penalty wouldn't be too much, but at the very least, life in prison.
Now, I'm not going to call for any violence, and nobody here should hear it that way, but I'll put it in the form of a question.
How in the world can this guy survive In this country.
I don't know if he can, if he has the, does he have the freedom to just leave the country or is he still under some kind of, you know, justice system restrictions?
Because if he doesn't leave the country and people figure out who he is, I assume he'll change his name and try to go into hiding, but it's not going to work because, you know, facial recognition.
He's not going to be able to hide.
I don't know how he survives and lives out his days in a country with so many guns and so many bad opinions about people like him.
I feel like he may not be so happy being led into prison.
Things might not go his way.
All right. That's all I got for now.
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