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June 23, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
51:04
Episode 575 Scott Adams: Invisible Problems With Trump, Immigration Reform, Cyber Attacks on Iran
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Hello Beth and Chris and everybody else coming in here.
Andrew and Thomas, good to see you all.
All the regulars.
Jess, nice guy, Polly.
Hey, man. Good to see you.
And Erica and Bobo, it's time for your favorite part of the day, the part that gets it all going, the part that gets your body chemistry all psyched up, the thing that makes everything better for the rest of the day.
I call it coffee with Scott Adams featuring the simultaneous sip and all you need to enjoy it is a cup or a mug or a glass.
A tankard, a stein, or a chalice?
A thermos, or a flask?
A vessel of any kind.
Put your favorite liquid in there, like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure that I call the simultaneous set.
Ah, ah, shivers, shivers, I tell you.
It's that good. Alright, I'd like to start by talking about All of the problems with the Trump administration and with President Trump in particular.
Now, in the old days, when you talked about a president who had problems, you would often see a photograph of that problem.
For example, if you had a president that started a war with Iraq, let's say, You might see pictures of burning buildings and cars and dead people.
Now that's a problem.
Problem is something you can take a picture of.
But this president seems to have a lot of problems that have one quality in particular.
Have you noticed? All of President Trump's flaws, his problems, his mistakes, the horrible things he's done have one quality in common.
They're all indivisible.
Let me give you an example.
Number one, there's Russian collusion, which no matter how hard we look for it, we can't seem to find it.
Oh, we know it's there, but it's sort of invisible.
And when I say we know it's there, I mean his critics.
And then there's, of course, the obstruction of justice, which is Obstructing, but maybe he didn't, some stuff that probably didn't happen because we can't see it.
So, take a picture of some obstruction.
What's it look like?
There's nothing on the photograph.
How about all of his inner thoughts that we know are racist and misogynist and awful?
Well, I can't get a picture of his inner thoughts.
I'd like to have a photograph of that, but For some reason, I can't get hard evidence that his inner thoughts are bad, because when we ask him what he's thinking, he keeps saying good things that we like.
It's only that we can imagine his inner thoughts that there's a problem there.
Then you've got the various many, many financial crimes that he's committed, As far as we know, I mean, we don't have any evidence.
There's nothing we can look at.
There's no document, no photograph, no witness.
But I'm sure, if only we had his taxes.
Yes, yes, that's it.
If only we had his taxes, it would all come apart.
But for now, it's all kind of invisible.
We can't see it.
Then there are things, the next category of Trump flaws is all the stuff that he hasn't done yet, but you know he's gonna do, right?
He hasn't done these things, but we know he's that kind of guy who might do things.
So you got things in the future and you can't really get a photograph of the future.
So that's unfortunate because all those bad things, wouldn't you like to know about them in the future?
Then there...
I'm looking at my list.
Wait. Oh, yes.
Then there's the category of things that we imagine he said that he didn't say.
Because we can't get a video or an audio of those things, so we don't have the physical evidence that But we're sure we heard it.
For example, we're sure we heard him call neo-Nazis fine people, but when we go to the video or the transcript, it says the opposite, if you read the whole transcript.
If you read only part of it, it does look like that.
But if you read the whole transcript, it isn't there.
So you have this other category of things that we're sure he said, but we can't find the video of it.
Can't find the transcript.
But here's my favorite one.
So all of those things, I think you would agree that all those things you can't hold in your hand, you can't take a photograph of it, can't find a document.
But man, there must be a lot of stuff.
It's just all invisible.
But here's my new favorite thing.
He's changing the environmental restrictions on, I guess, a variety of different ways.
And that will create invisible pollutants That will kill people that we can't identify by name.
Now, let me say first of all, it might be entirely true.
And if it is, maybe we should do something different.
But is it a coincidence that all of the problems that this president is being accused of, they all have the same quality that they're invisible?
Sure! There might be more people dying in a statistical sense, but why is it that you can't get a name for the person who died who wouldn't have died otherwise?
It's a statistical thing.
I can't get a picture of it.
Show me the driver's license of somebody who died because of it.
You can't. Now, I'm not saying that CO2 and the pollutants that may be increased because of various...
Relaxation of rules.
I can't say that it's good to relax those rules.
How the heck would I know?
But I just think it's interesting that all of the President's flaws are invisible, including the ones that science supports.
Even science says, trust us, we can see this stuff because we're scientists.
We've got models and we've got statistics and we've got microscopes and we've got We've got machines and ways to measure things.
We've got chemistry. You can't see it.
Sure, you can't see it.
But trust us. There are other people who can totally see the problem.
But again, I don't mean to make light of any...
If there are problems with the environment, I would say.
If it turned out there were real problems with the environment and real people who know how to measure this stuff say that there's more bad than good in it, Well, I'll listen to that argument, but at the moment, it's hard to trust anybody.
So this next thing is just as funny.
So the President, as you know, famously was planning an attack on Iran in retaliation for the drone being taken out, and then he changed his mind before the attack was executed.
And then people said, well, It's a good thing you did that because we didn't want to do something disproportionate.
Now there are reports that the President authorized cyber attacks against the Iranian spy group that was associated with taking down the drone.
Now, what's funny about that?
Have you seen a picture of our cyber attack?
Nope. You can't get a picture of a cyber attack.
Have you seen interviews with the Iranians who are saying, darn, they attacked our stuff.
Our computers aren't working.
No, I haven't seen that.
Have you seen the documents that demonstrate there was a cyber attack?
No. So, was there a cyber attack?
Was there really a cyber attack?
Maybe. I'm not saying there wasn't.
I'm just saying that now, instead of all these invisible problems that the president has, there's this new category of invisible solutions.
And one of these invisible solutions, apparently, we may have done something like a cyber attack against a group that may or may not actually exist.
And that cyber attack may or may not have actually changed something or done something or made an impact.
Maybe. But I haven't seen a photograph of any of this.
I haven't seen a witness. I'm not so sure that there's a cyber attack going on.
So there could be no better indication that we're approaching or in some kind of golden age That I think historians will look back at with more clarity because they won't have all the personalities to worry about.
Time will go by. But if we're arguing about invisible flaws with a president who may be attacking another country in an invisible way that shows no evidence that we can actually observe directly or indirectly, we're in a pretty good place.
All our problems and even our solutions are invisible lately.
Here's a...
I want to run an idea past you.
I want you to hold in your mind a picture of Eric Swalwell.
Make a mental picture of Eric Swalwell, okay?
Got it? Now, next to the mental picture of Eric Swalwell, just hold it in your mind, Eric Swalwell, there he is.
Now make another mental picture, side by side, of Amy Klobuchar.
Is it my imagination, or does Eric Swalwell look like Amy Klobuchar with a different haircut?
I'm just going to put that out there.
It doesn't mean anything. All right.
So Pelosi...
Speaker Pelosi tweeted that she wants to get going on comprehensive immigration reform because the president has delayed apparently by two weeks the rounding up of people who fall into some special category of being in the country illegally.
I think it's people who skipped court appearances and stuff.
And so she's saying, yeah, let's get going with comprehensive immigration reform.
To which I say, I'm glad we got two weeks to get that done.
How long should it take?
One week? One week, right?
Because we know all the parts.
It's not like there's a big mystery of what do people want to do?
What are the potential solutions?
We sort of know what all that looks like.
Either we just want to do it or not do it.
And it seems to me that I'm speculating now because I think it's too early to say, but what it looks like is that if you go back in time not too far, President Trump was saying, hey, I want to round up people and deport them, you know, in various times and various different plans and various statements.
And it was generally thought that that was way over the line.
In other words, most of the country said, don't do that, don't do that, don't do that.
That that would be too cruel to people who had been, you know, illegal immigrants but had become good citizens and lived good lives otherwise.
That that was too far.
And it did seem like that.
But is it my imagination or has all of the ugliness with the, whatever you want to call them, the detention centers, all of the ugliness with the...
The caravans, the number of people coming over is in my imagination or has all of that ugliness which sort of made the president look right because he was trying to decrease incentives to come here but outside of his control the laws of this nation actually create great incentives to come here and as those incentives were causing more and more people to come here It seemed as if the president was being proven right.
It also seems that even though Democrats like to use the detention centers at the border as a club to beat the president, I also think that everyone who uses that as a club against the president also understands that the reason these people are coming in the first place is that our laws are broken.
Which is what the President has been saying the whole time.
So it feels to me like the President's latest threat to start rounding people up, which I think was a more limited roundup, limited to those people who had gone through some processing and promised to come back, but then skipped out on their court dates, I guess. I think that's the situation, or something similar to it.
It seems to me that the public has sort of felt a shift on this.
It seems to me that the public now understands that there isn't any way to just keep going the way we're going.
In other words, it's obvious now that the current set of laws, it's obvious, is just going to bring in so many people that whatever we build in terms of humane Processing centers, detention centers, no matter what we throw at it, it will just attract more people until it's overwhelmed again.
So for example, if you could snap your fingers and double the resources, double the funding at the border, how long would that last?
Because people would find out, look, those bad detention centers where they didn't have a blanket for everybody and the kids were not taken care of and You know, there was no air conditioning.
They fixed all that.
Now they got these great tents with air conditioning.
Kids get free blankets and food.
It's better than the way we were living before.
I can't wait to get to one of those detention centers.
So the one thing that Democrats consistently get wrong, and it's weird because I don't see anybody calling them out for this specifically.
What Democrats consistently get wrong is incentive.
It seems like every single policy bad idea that Democrats have have the same problem.
It's not even a different problem.
Everyone ignores the humans act like human beings.
The Democrats, to their credit, to their credit, Democrats and people on the left appear to exhibit more empathy, at least exhibit.
I don't know if they feel more empathy.
I have no reason to believe that.
Their inner thoughts are different from anybody else's.
But at least outwardly, they express more empathy for the people who are in the worst situations.
I respect that.
I want to live in a world where people have great empathy for people who are in trouble.
That's the world you want to live in.
But the problem is, that's a goal.
Having a good outcome for everybody is a goal.
But goals are not very effective compared to systems.
I talk about this all the time.
The best thing you can do sometimes is have the best system, and then the outcome is whatever the outcome is, but it's the best system you could come up with.
The alternative doesn't work, whereas you have a goal, and you say, the goal is everybody is treated humanely.
But the moment you start that goal, and even if you get success toward that goal, The system is broken.
So the goal breaks the system.
As soon as you say the goal is to treat everybody who comes into the country illegally, treat them really well, you get more of them until you run out of money or the system is overwhelmed.
Republicans consistently get the system right.
Capitalism is better than socialism, at least in the extreme sense, not in the specific individual cases of healthcare, etc., necessarily.
So, look for that.
Democrats continuously have good goals, but Republicans have systems that recognize people operate on incentives.
I haven't seen, correct me if I'm wrong, have you seen any Republicans say what I just said as directly as I just said it?
Has anybody ever told that message that way?
Because whenever I say this, I feel as though I don't get any pushback.
I don't get any pushback.
Somebody says, yes, Dan Crenshaw said this.
Reagan did. Oh, you know, I'm not aware of that, but Reagan might have.
If he did, that was pretty smart.
Somebody says Republicans say it all the time.
You know, I don't think they say it as succinctly as I said it.
And it matters how you say it and how effectively you say it.
So if you were to say, and it's very effective to say that your opposition, let's say you're Republican and your opposition is Democrats, it's very effective to praise them For doing something that, at least on the conceptual level, is praiseworthy, and then at the same time say, but this isn't effective.
It's good that you think that way, but it's not a good system.
It's very effective.
So I think a Republican who said, you know, Democrats have excellent goals.
Their goals are so good that I share them.
I would like to see great outcomes for everybody.
I'd like to see poverty eliminated.
I'd like to see the best health care at the lowest cost.
I like every goal that Democrats have.
What they don't have is a system to get there.
We have systems.
We don't know we can get all the way to where these goals are, but we know that the system is going to get the closest.
And if you don't account for human incentives, you don't have a good system.
Now, if I ran for president and I said what I just said, I don't think I would lose.
I mean, I think I could run for president today and say what I just said, and people would just say, oh crap, that makes sense.
Because people don't want to give up their goals, and they don't want to be told they're wrong for having them, because they know damn well they're right.
They know that this empathy, this feeling for their You know, other human beings is biologically right, morally right, ethically right.
They know they're right.
They just don't know how to get there.
And I think it's important to acknowledge their rightness, because it's very right.
It's as right as you can get.
You know, wanting to be good to other people is the ultimate right.
Nothing is more right than that.
So arguing against it, even indirectly, without mentioning it specifically, Even indirectly arguing against that is weak.
Alright. I don't think there's much going on today.
Am I right? I think that I'm going to have to take some questions.
Because otherwise, we would be done too early.
Somebody says, you're boring.
Well, lucky for you, you got blocked.
And you don't have to listen to it anymore.
Yay. Did you see the video, I think I just tweeted it, of Joe Biden confused about what state he's in and then get all confused about some numbers?
I mean, he seemed lost and old and like he doesn't have any chance.
So I think... I'm going to take some questions in a minute if anybody wants to come in to ask me a question.
But let me review the Democrat challengers.
Number one, Joe Biden leading in the polls, I say, does not have a chance of getting the nomination.
So my prediction is Joe Biden, no chance of getting nominated.
Because it seems to me that even his own team can tell That he doesn't have the goods.
And I think that the more they see him, the more that will be obvious.
There's not a chance he's going to make it.
Next, Bernie.
I don't think Bernie has support in the entire group.
I think Bernie will not be the nominee, in part because even Democrats are saying he's too old.
That brings us to Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren...
Is reasonably solid in terms of all the boring stuff.
She's a pretty good lawyer.
She's a pretty good academic.
She's a pretty good senator.
But she's not charismatic.
She does seem to be getting better, though.
I would say that the last few clips I've seen of her, she seems to have found a way to get out of, let's say, her angry bookish mode.
Before, I would say she seems bookish, academic, bookish, and sort of angry.
It's not really a good look.
She's sort of shifting her image to be a little bit more, let's say, substantive.
I would say someone who's done her homework, someone who's the adult in the room kind of thing, and she's adding some She's adding a little energy to her presentation.
She better get her energy up.
But I just don't know if she has enough stuff.
She just doesn't have the charisma.
I mean, she's got seriously bad charisma.
So, who's the sleeping horse?
When we saw that clip of...
Of Buttigieg being totally schooled by the Black Lives Matter crowd, I think that ended any chance he had.
Because if he were to become the nominee, all Trump would have to do is run that one little loop of that one video where he's acting weak in front of just regular citizens, and you won't be able to imagine him as a president.
So I don't think he has a chance.
So that brings us to Kamala.
Kamala Harris, she's playing rope-a-dope, it seems like.
Correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like the Kamala Harris thing is that she's trying to run sort of a strong fourth.
Doesn't it look like that?
She's trying to be the person who's left.
After Biden flames out, Bernie doesn't look feasible, and Elizabeth Warren doesn't look like she could win.
So I think it's going to be Warren and Kamala Harris in the end, and I think those two are going to be battling it out for the final position.
And then the Democrats are going to ask themselves, take a sip, take a sip.
Who has a better chance of winning?
So if you said to yourself, okay, there are only two Democrats in contention.
One is Kamala Harris and one is Elizabeth Warren.
Which of those two, which of the two seems like more electable?
Well, let's go down the list.
Both are women.
Good. Both are young enough so that they're not Bernie or Biden.
Good. That's a tie.
Both of them are senators.
Good. Still a tie.
Both of them are lawyers.
Still a tie. Both of them are smart.
Still a tie.
Both of them have policies.
Probably Elizabeth Warren has more completed policies.
But what is the public going to care about?
Well, they're not going to care that much about the completeness of somebody's policies because they know anything that gets run through Congress turns into a different thing anyway.
So I don't think that Elizabeth Warren's complete and admirable, I would say, command of the topics, I don't think that's going to count too much for voters.
So I'm going to say That's more of a nothing.
There won't be enough of a difference between Warren and Harris for somebody to say, I'll take the one who has more complete policies.
Because you figure Kamala Harris is a serious person.
She's smart. She has advisors.
She'll have complete policies too at some point.
Somebody says Elizabeth Warren is 70, but still young enough.
Given... Given our times.
And she looks good. If Elizabeth Warren is 70, she's in really good shape, wouldn't you say?
I mean, health-wise, she looks younger than 70, for sure.
I'll talk about Andrew Yang in a second.
Let me just quickly say that I'm still trying to connect with Andrew Yang's staff to get him booked on the show.
And maybe after that, we'll have a better idea.
But at the moment, I think that Andrew Yang is a little bit too idea-focused.
His ideas are really interesting.
That's why I want to talk to him.
That's why you're going to enjoy it when I do.
But I don't know if he has the gravitas.
I don't know that Andrew Yang has yet demonstrated the energy, the power, the charisma...
The seriousness that we just imagine when we see a president.
He seems young and interesting, smart.
He's got all kinds of great qualities, but maybe they're 2024 qualities, if you know what I mean.
It may not be 2020 qualities.
Time isn't quite right. Tulsi, I don't know if she'll make a run, but right now she's not making much of a dent in the polls.
So anyway, getting back to Harris versus Warren.
Which I think it'll come down to when you get closer to the primary votes.
It looks to me like they're going to be essentially a tie except for one thing.
Can somebody tell me what is the tiebreaker between Harris and Warren?
What will be the tiebreaker?
I will take a sip while I look at the comments and you tell me.
What would be the tiebreaker?
All right, I'm looking on...
There's a little delay in your comments.
Yes, race.
That is correct. Kamala has the person of color thing going for her, whereas Warren has the I tried to be a Native American and it didn't work out thing going for her.
So the tiebreaker is authenticity.
The tiebreaker is authenticity, right?
I would say that Warren has everything except that, because the Native American thing is the smallest problem in the world.
I mean, personally, and I think I've said this before, but if anybody hasn't heard it, I had exactly the same situation as Elizabeth Warren.
The kids in my family, you know, we three kids were told many times that we were descended from Native American.
I knew her name.
Her name was Elizabeth. That was sort of her, you know, anglicized name.
I knew what tribe she was with, and I knew approximately when this person was in our family tree.
And I grew up being told I was Native American.
I had a 23andMe test.
Turns out I am zero Native American.
Zero. So, and then I found out that there are a lot of people who have had exactly the same situation.
So apparently when I grew up and when Elizabeth Warren was growing up, I guess it was really popular to say that your family had some Native American blood.
I mean, when I said it, I was bragging.
Any time I ever said it, I never thought I was admitting some bad thing in my past.
I always thought it was an advantage.
So I'd be bragging.
Yeah, I got some American Indian.
How about you? Oh, you don't have any?
I'm so sorry.
I don't know what happened to you.
There were a lot of great Native Americans here and your family didn't really nothing.
Not once you slept with a Native American.
Well, you really ought to try it, because they're top shelf.
I don't know if that's true, but I imagine it might be.
So, back to Elizabeth Warren.
So, I would say that Elizabeth Warren's error, if you want to call it that, about thinking she was Native American, and claiming that as part of her heritage, etc., and then finding out it wasn't such a big deal, is slightly embarrassing.
Totally unimportant, totally not disqualifying from public life, totally should be the most trivial thing we think of, except she would be running against this guy, his name is Donald Trump.
Under that condition only, that little problem, that tiny little problem of that Native American thing is probably disqualifying.
Because what Trump will do with her is he will make her look like a race of fraud.
And I don't know if there's anything that looks worse than that on the left.
I mean, I'm sure there are worse things, but it's pretty bad.
Kamala Harris, what's the worst thing that people say about her?
I won't even wait for the answer.
The worst thing that people say about Kamala Harris...
Is that she once had an affair with Willie Brown, who was, I guess, married at the time or something.
I really don't even care. Here's how much I care about that.
Not. And keep in mind, she would be running against Trump.
If you're running against Trump, the fact that you made some, you know, questionable decisions with your love life is not going to look like a big problem, if you know what I mean.
So remember your contrast.
If she were running against Pence, well, maybe Pence could make something out of that.
Or maybe Pence supporters could make something out of it, because he's the most loyal guy.
He plays by the book.
He's very Bible-ready.
Maybe then.
But if you're running against Trump, Nobody's going to be able to take you out because of your love life.
Somebody saying, heels up Harris, that is completely useless criticism.
When you say stuff like that, like, oh, she's heels up, or she only got where she is because of Willie Brown, just know when you're saying it, it's just for you.
Because there's nobody laughing about it.
It's not really that funny.
It's not interesting.
It doesn't mean anything. It won't hurt her in the long run.
It doesn't have any value.
So if you want to say Heels Up Harris and you want to make fun of her love life from years ago, go ahead.
But it's just for you.
It's just for you. It doesn't make any impact on the world and shouldn't.
So here's my bottom line.
I think Bernie and...
And Biden will disappear from the top two.
I think that Harris and Warren will become the ones that matter because Buttigieg sort of eliminated himself with that little video clip recently.
I think Andrew Yang is interesting but doesn't quite have the gravitas yet.
Check back.
Maybe he does something, works on some cause.
Maybe he makes a difference in some kind of social program or something.
Then 2024 is going to look really interesting for Andrew Yang.
And I would take a look at him.
I would give him a serious look, honestly.
Just for being different and not being...
I think he's more...
He would pay more attention to the science and he would be a little more interesting than a regular president.
Beto has no chance.
Here's why Beto has no chance.
Every time...
If a male Democrat supported Beto, he would be called a Beto male.
A Beto male.
And even though it's just a joke and it's a dumb play on words, it's kind of going to hit home a little bit too much.
Yeah, I saw Bill Maher.
So here's my bottom line, and then I'll talk about Bill Maher.
Bottom line is that it's going to be Warren and Harris...
Who will emerge? And between the two, Warren will probably have a distinct advantage until she doesn't.
Because once the Biden and Bernie votes start getting allocated away from them, they have to go somewhere.
And those votes probably are going to go between Warren and Harris eventually.
And Harris has the slight advantage on having, you know, Two groups in the bag, you know, women and people of color.
All right. Let's talk about...
I was watching Bill Maher from real time, and I feel as if there's a subtle change happening.
It's too early to say, and I'm not a mind reader, so I don't want to try to read his mind.
But I saw Bill Maher trying to school Democrats...
On the fact that calling these detention centers concentration camps was going too far and that it's going to be a problem.
So in other words, even Bill Maher is saying this whole Hitler comparison, Holocaust, concentration camp thing, you're just shooting yourselves in the foot.
It's not hurting Trump.
It's not rational. Nobody has a better idea about what to do there.
So in a way, you saw Bill Maher, not directly, certainly not directly, but feeling himself pulled toward the Trumpian way of thinking grudgingly.
And by that I mean...
The problem at the border is a real problem that nobody has a good, real solution to.
I think he sees that.
He must see that the Democrats, all they have is calling it Hitler stuff, but they're not offering anything better, and that that's not a solution for success.
Bill Maher talked about that, and then looking at the things he has left to criticize Trump, they start looking just personal.
I think they do have some personal history that wasn't good.
So what's left seems like jokes and exaggerations and hyperbole.
But it doesn't look that on policy there's that much of a difference anymore.
Still a difference, but the difference went from it looked like Trump is a monster who's going to destroy the world to something more narrow.
Do not be surprised if Bill Maher actually ends up...
I'm not going to predict this, so this is not a prediction, but I'll say don't be surprised.
There's a non-zero chance That Bill Maher could support Trump in the election against whoever he's running against.
Depends who he's running against, of course.
But I could see it happening.
I would give it a solid...
I'm going to give it a 20% chance.
I'll give it a 20% chance that Bill Maher will say, damn it, I still believe everything I've said about this president.
I still believe...
All of this is suboptimal.
I still believe it has all these problems.
I'm not ignoring them all.
I still want to do more with climate change.
I still have all these problems, but he's still better than the alternative.
There's a 20% chance he's going to say that.
And other people as well, I think.
All right. Let's take a call, just because I said I would.
Let's go to the callers.
I'm going to favor people who have some kind of a profile picture.
The blank ones.
Hello, caller. Hello.
Do you have a question for me?
Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about the socialism versus capitalism thing.
Okay. I think there's a reframing of that that will make it a lot more persuasive.
Because I remember you saying that the socialism versus capitalism thing, it's not persuasive the way that argument is not persuading anyone, and I agree with you.
I think you have to reframe it as monopolies versus decentralization.
Because the left, they're against monopolies, but they don't see a government monopoly as bad.
And that's exactly what socialism is.
It's like a government in charge of monopoly.
Yeah, I see your point.
That's pretty good because what people have been saying before is centralization versus decentralization and that has no persuasive power.
Too conceptual. But when you said what you added to this was monopoly...
Versus some decentralized kind of thing.
When you say monopoly, I get that instantly.
I'm like, oh, monopoly.
That's always bad. In this case, it's a government monopoly.
That's pretty good. I'm not sure it's enough, but I like where you're going with that.
The thinking is solid on that.
Let me take another run at it.
I think you should diversify human beings.
And let me say more about that.
Capitalism diversifies the natural evil of human beings.
Because you can have a lot of evil people, but as long as there's some good ones making some good companies and stuff that are honest, the good stuff will rise.
So capitalism works pretty well that way.
But if you don't diversify your evil...
You could end up with a centralized situation in which a few evil people are in charge.
So in everything, you should diversify.
If you're investing, you should diversify because you can't tell which companies are going to be good.
I often say if you have the option, you should try to diversify your bosses.
Having one boss is the worst thing in the world.
Having lots of customers who are effectively your boss, let's say you work for yourself, maybe this is an analogy.
What would you rather do?
Have one boss who could turn out to be the worst boss you ever had?
That's what socialism looks like, centralizing.
Or lots of customers, and any one of those customers can have a bad day and be mad at you, but it doesn't hurt you that much.
It's just one customer.
So I like where you're going there.
I don't think my idea is quite there, but I think you moved it along.
So thank you for that. You're welcome.
Thanks. All right.
That was interesting.
Let's go to Colleen.
Colleen, can you hear me?
Colleen, can you hear me?
Hi, do you have a question?
When you first brought up the whole shadow banning thing and about your followers, I have to admit I was a little skeptical because I had never experienced that and I thought well people may just think that they were, you know.
But when I experienced the other day a true shadow banning where you post a comment and on your page it's posted, Twitter Then hides it.
And so in the upcoming election, moving forward, actual arguments on issues are now being hidden from the public.
So when people see tweet not available, you assume it's a blocked person.
But now I know that's not the case.
How can we draw more attention to this and get...
I mean, 2020 could be...
Well, I think there are a few things that at least we have some hope on.
Number one is the Trump administration seems to be aware of the problem.
So that's a big deal, right?
I believe that there are enough of them in the administration, including Trump, Who understand that social media has at least the ability, whether they execute it or not, they have the ability to determine the election and thwart the will of the people and make the system less credible.
But what do they do about it?
I would say that the minimum they should do about it between now and election day is, it seems like the most accessible thing would be to have some kind of an algorithm court.
So some kind of a judge or judges who are the only ones who can see the algorithms but they have enough technical wherewithal or they're working with people who do That they can look at the algorithm and say, okay, at least I, the judge, understands it.
I get that I can't tell the public because if the public knows the algorithm, they can game the system.
So that's a problem.
But if the judge is the only one who knows, that's compatible with our normal justice system.
Judges and the legal system and your lawyer can know things that the public doesn't know.
We're used to that.
So that would probably solve...
The public's trust issue.
And it's something I think you could do relatively quickly.
You know, if you decided tomorrow to form algorithm courts, it'd probably take you six months to figure out how to do it right and get somebody in place and get somebody who's at least starting to look at the algorithms.
And that would give you, you know, a good year before the election.
But if you don't do that, here's the problem.
Even if...
I don't know how likely this is, but even if all the social media companies said, look, we're not going to put our finger on the scale.
Hey, everybody, you know, don't do anything that would change this election.
We don't want to take that risk because someday somebody's going to know we did it.
That'll be terrible for us.
It's bad for the country. Don't do it.
Even then, people are going to think they did it.
And that is terrible for the credibility of the system.
Part of what makes America work Not part of.
The biggest thing that makes America work is credibility.
Because we don't trust other humans, and we don't trust companies, and we don't trust any politician necessarily, but we trust that we live in a system that catches most of the bad behavior.
Not all of it, but we do a pretty good job of reining in the bad behavior.
And if you have a system where the voters can't tell If their vote made a difference or if they were influenced by social media, that's no longer a stable system.
And I think we're at the beginning of the point where the public will say, it doesn't even matter if I vote because it's not up to me.
It's up to five people who determine the algorithms.
So I think some kind of a special judge, special court would be the quickest way to get somebody who we have a little credibility In place to at least get some visibility on this stuff.
I think that would be important. Alright, thank you.
Thank you. I'm optimistic that something could happen there, by the way.
Alright, let's talk to Mark.
Mark, are you there? You have a question for me, Mark?
I see them requiring any working person To get a W-2 or a 1099 miscellaneous if they're a contractor or something.
Yet when government gives out money, they don't give people a 1099-gov.
And my view is that, you know, I have to file a 1099 miscellaneous on somebody if I give them $600 a year.
You know people are getting $600 a month.
And so if people saw and were reported with their 1099-gov, they would be able to determine what the median income is from the government, which is something that's invisible right now because every county, every city, every state, every federal which is something that's invisible right now because every county, every city, every state, every federal government program gives money
And as soon as that median level was reported, if we had that as a basic tax deduction for every person of every age because they're giving it to families too, then every time government decided to give more money away, they would raise the amount of money in the pie that they could they would raise the amount of money in the pie that they could It would be like self-regulating.
Okay, that's too complicated for me, but looking at the comments, it looks like people are loving this idea.
I'm going to say that sounds like a good idea to people, but it was a little more complicated than I want to talk about today.
I actually have an example of...
Shadow banning.
I explained it in a book, which you cannot search for on Amazon by the title, but it is still there.
Well, that's ironic.
I knew you might object. What's the title of the book?
We Republicans.
Okay. All right. Thanks for that.
You're not a real senator, are you?
No. I ran against John Cornyn as a writing candidate.
But, you know, he had $10 million to fight me off, and all I did was buy a new hat and spurs.
All right. All right.
Thank you, Mark.
All right. I think that's enough for now.
And I'm going to sign off now, and you are going to have a terrific day.
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