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July 29, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
52:37
Episode 612 Scott Adams: Fake Outrage Trolls, Will I Apologize for my Tweet Within 48 Hours?
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
Today will be a lively one.
Oh yeah. I'll need lots of coffee for this.
I got my big cup. I hope you got your big cups too.
We're probably going to have a lot of company today.
Probably going to see a lot of company.
I've told you before how sometimes you watch the news and sometimes you become part of the news.
It's weird to be me.
But most of you must appreciate weird because you're here and you know if you want to enjoy the intense pleasure of the simultaneous sip, You don't need much.
You just need to show up.
But you also need some kind of a cup or a mug or a glass.
Maybe a stein, a chalice tank, or a thermos flask, a canteen, or a vessel of some sort.
Put your favorite beverage in there.
I like coffee. And join me for the dopamine hit to get your day going.
Oh, that's good.
Dopamine. I've got a little coffee warmer now.
Makes everything better. All right.
Well, let's start out with the big news of the day.
Number one. Our first thoughts and our empathy are with the victims of the Gilroy shooting.
I would like to suggest that most of us Darn near all of us.
I'd say 97% of us.
Those of you watching, me, all of my critics, probably feel exactly the same way when there's a mass shooting.
I would think.
We probably have very similar feelings.
We're all thinking about the victims.
We're all thinking it's the worst possible thing.
We're all wishing that it doesn't happen to us.
And we're all feeling very, very bad for the people who experienced it.
I'm no different. So for those of you who are imagining some kind of weird mind reading is happening, a lot of people have imagined that although most people are normal, that I'm some kind of weird exception where I somehow have a different reaction to tragedy.
I don't. Turns out that tragedy affects normal people.
In all the ways you would expect and really hope it to.
We care. We wonder how we can help.
And then we do what we can.
It's very, very important.
Now, for those of you who are not aware of the big story of the day, well, there's two parts of it.
One involves me, but that's not the big story.
The big story, of course, is that There was a big shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, which is very close to me.
So it's just a short drive down the road, someplace I've been many times.
I've been to Gilroy many times.
And so this shooting is close to home.
And let me give you some background of what happened with my little controversy on the internet today.
Started yesterday. So I was watching the news coverage, and I was struck by how little the news organizations knew about what was happening.
They were trying to find some witnesses to talk to, to inform the public.
Now, I believe that the public shares the feeling that there's a legitimate public need to know about these tragedies.
My first choice, if I were the king, and I could decide how tragedies were covered, my first choice is that there would be some kind of a standard where there's no photos.
No photos of the witnesses, no photos of the aftermath.
No photos of the crime scene, no photos of even the location, and certainly no photos of the perpetrator.
So my first choice is that the news is covered because it's a legitimate public concern, but that we take all of the energy out of it and don't have any photos and don't name the shooter.
But still deal with it as seriously as possible.
Just don't make it exciting.
My second choice, because I think that's probably impractical, my second choice would be that we do the best job we can, we meaning anybody involved in reporting the news, whether you're a pundit or a news organization or just somebody talking about it, that we all do the best job.
So that was the spirit in which I reminded people on the internet that my startup has an app called Interface by WenHub.
In this situation, it's just one of the many ways it could be used.
It's primarily for experts to be contacted with an immediate video call.
But in this case, and in others, where there's a lot of witnesses to any kind of an event, it doesn't have to be a mass shooting, but just any kind of event.
It could be a positive event.
It just doesn't matter. That it would be a way to get a direct connection from people who have some information that the public would like to know.
And they can get on the app.
News organizations could contact them.
And now, the app allows you to set your own price to take a call.
For an application like this, where there's a mass shooting, etc., I would expect the normal way people would use it is they would set the price at zero.
So the normal situation, and I'd be surprised if it worked any other way, is somebody would either set their prices zero, or if they didn't, news organizations, for example, might say, well, I don't want to pay money because it doesn't feel right in this situation, and then they wouldn't, and then nothing would happen.
But they'd have the option.
My expectation is that if anybody was a witness, they'd probably want to get the word out.
Police are going to have trouble finding everybody, etc.
If I were talking to this person on the app, I'd say, have you talked to the police?
If you had anything that was useful for the police.
Most people are witnesses, but they don't really have anything that's useful for the police.
I'd say 99% of them don't really have a direct view, but they would still have a story that the public has an interest in, I would say, a legitimate interest to hear.
So that would be only a second choice.
The third choice of how to cover these things would be the way it's done now.
Which is we don't do a great job, and we don't use all the tools at our disposal, and we're sort of at the mercy of the big networks.
We don't hear anything directly.
And so that's what I was thinking.
So what I was thinking when I sent out the tweet is, hey, this would be one of those situations where this tool, Interface by WinHub, could be an asset to get the story to the people who have a legitimate...
Reason to hear about it.
This is not the first time I've done this exact thing.
It is the first time I got any pushback for it.
The first time I did it was, however long ago it was, a few months ago, when there was a helicopter that crashed on top of a building in New York City.
And there were lots of people in the building, and I thought, wouldn't it be interesting?
I think either, I think the pilot died, but there weren't any other injuries.
I'm not even sure if the pilot died, but it was maybe one person died.
And I tweeted it out, and I said, if there are any witnesses, you can use this app, and then even people could look at it.
Now, how much pushback did I get for that tweet that's largely identical to this one?
None. Zero.
I don't think, I mean, if I miss one, maybe I miss one, but I think there were zero people who complained.
Because, here's why.
There is no political interest group that is involved with helicopter crashes.
So I did exactly the same thing, saying, hey, here's a tool that you should know about right now, because right now is when it's relevant.
This is when you would use it, right now.
And nobody complained.
But, man, did people complain when I did the same thing on this.
And by the way, I do plan to do the same thing again in the future.
Now, if it's a mass shooting, I might think twice, just because of the pushback.
But the concept of reminding people that there is a tool they can use to directly connect to people, connect to media if they want to tell their story, etc., is worth reminding people, and that's when you remind them.
I'm seeing a number of people in the comments yelling, don't apologize, don't apologize.
Well, I'm getting to that. I'm getting to that.
But I hear what you're saying.
So, here was my entire thinking on the topic.
Hey, it doesn't look like the news is getting to me as quickly and as efficiently as it could.
Hey, I've got an app that could solve that.
Maybe this would be a good time to remind people.
Now people said, my God, Scott, how can you make money off of disasters?
Well, let me explain.
The typical way people would use the app for this situation, remember the app is used for all kinds of situations where anybody wants to charge for their time for a video call.
So it can work in any situation where they want to do that.
Usually it's just an expert, but it could be used as a witness or a citizen journalist, etc.
The typical way people would do it when the Let's say when the tragedy is fresh, they'd probably just be interested in getting the word out.
And so I wouldn't imagine people would charge.
And if they did, nobody has any responsibility to pay for it.
So it's just optional.
But I do imagine that there could be situations where there's a witness who's willing to talk But doesn't want to spend all day doing it.
So maybe they set their price at zero and talk to CNN. But perhaps there are lots of podcasters and pundits who would also like to get some information firsthand.
If that witness said, you know, the only way I'm going to spend my time doing this is if I can charge them, that feels legitimate to me.
That feels legitimate to me.
It doesn't feel dirty. It feels like two people.
One has something that would cost them their time.
They've already done their good service.
They've helped at the tragedy.
They've talked to the police.
They've talked to CNN and Fox News, if they ask.
So they've done their duty, but they might have some more information and there might be more people who want it.
So, is that a dirty capitalist horrible thing to make that available and to remind people it exists?
Well, many people said so, but I don't believe many of them were legitimate complaints.
Most of the complaints fell into the category of obvious trolls, which means that there are some organized campaign on top of real people who are also The organized people all use the same words.
So if you see them in my Twitter feed, if you're trying to figure out which ones are the organized trolls, they all use the words grifter and ghoul.
So mostly grifter and ghoul.
Grifter. You would think that a grifter, at the very least, would be hiding their motives.
I couldn't be more obvious about what the motive is.
It's a tool. You can use it, or not use it, but it's very appropriate to this situation.
So, I don't know how I could be more clear about it.
You can tell those are not words that I think necessarily the public would have just spontaneously all come up with on their own.
So most of my Twitter feed is, you ghoul, you ghoul, F off, F off, Dilbert was never funny, you unfunny C word, you're repulsive, you're vile, what the F is wrong with you.
Almost all of them fall into one of those slots, so they're all very similar.
Let me tell you my favorite. This one just came in.
So I printed off his profile, so you can see I'm not making this up.
So this gentleman had a problem with my tweet.
His name is Stephen.
His last name is Bader.
B-A-I-T-E-R. So Mr.
Bader... I had a lot to say.
He didn't seem happy about my tweet.
So Mr.
Bader was very unhappy.
I just thought I'd point that out.
Write your own jokes.
It's true. Now, here's my take on this.
As you know, I don't live in the 2D world.
In the 2D world, things are exactly like they look on the surface.
So if you live in the 2D world, what you saw here is there's a horrible tragedy.
And there's somebody who offered something that's a commercial product in the midst of it.
Therefore, evil, bad, we must attack him.
So that's the 2D world.
But that's not actually what's happening here.
Because as I told you, if that was what was happening, I would have gotten pushback on the helicopter accident as well.
I got zero. What this is about is Trump.
All of the pushback I'm getting is fueled by this intense hatred of Trump and therefore anybody who's ever said anything good about Trump.
This is about gun control and it's about people feeling helpless to be able to do something about it.
It's about them feeling angry because they can't do something about it.
And it's about them finding a target for their anger.
The target for their anger, of course, is guns and anybody who's in favor of guns, which makes them think of Republicans, which makes them think of Trump, which makes them think of anybody who has said anything good about Trump in their lifetime, which brings it to me.
Frank Luntz was one of the first people to do the showboating fake outrage.
Now, if you ask anybody that I've accused of fake outrage, they will deny it with every ounce of their being.
But it's pretty obvious that it's fake outrage.
First, because there was no outrage with the helicopter accident, which means it's about guns.
It's about guns.
It's about politics.
It's about Trump. That's what it's about.
That's where the anger is coming from.
They needed a target, and there I was.
I was a convenient target.
Frank Luntz decided to try to build his brand online.
You can put whatever ethical interpretation on that you want by calling me out in public to show how much better he is as a person.
Frank Luntz wanted the world to know that as a human being, a moral person of goodness, that he's better than me.
And so he tweeted to that effect that I'm a bad person and it was a bad thing to do.
And then he followed it up by saying, here's the only number you should call is the police if you have a tip.
Which I agree. If you have information on the crime and you're using my app, what the heck is wrong with you?
Don't use the app if you have information for the police and you haven't talked to them yet.
Do I need to tell you that?
Do I need to tell people to talk to the police before they sign up for an app?
I hope I don't.
I don't think there was anybody who didn't know that.
So when Frank showed the world that he knows that that's the first thing you do, was that really about me?
That wasn't about me.
Was that about the victims?
No. That was not about the victims.
Well, in his case, it probably wasn't even about Trump.
It was about displaying his goodness in relationship to my horrible badness.
Now, the funniest trolls are the people who don't realize that the only reason they know that this tragedy happened is because they saw it on a for-pay news platform.
Every person who knows there was a Gilroy tragedy shooting, all of them, they all heard it from a news organization That charges money, in a sense, because they make money on advertising, and the more customers who consume them, the more they can charge for advertising.
So there's no such thing in our world as a news platform that isn't making money.
They all cover it because it gets clicks, it gets eyeballs, etc.
So if you give them a pass and come after this additional tool, Simply a tool that can be used to gather the information that everybody wants in a little more efficient way.
That's all it is. It's a tool to gather some information in an efficient way.
If you're complaining about one of the tools, but not the major ones, if you're complaining about the 1% and not the 99%, well, you don't really have a credible complaint.
What you have is is what I would call sort of a lifestyle entertainment complaint.
The fake outrage is outrage that feels good to the person who has it.
The people who express their rage at me are enjoying it.
And it's pretty obvious.
Because there are a lot of things they could have spent their time on.
I don't think that they think the world is a better place by insulting me.
I don't think they think, well, I'll go make the world a better place, I'll save those victims, I'll comfort the people in pain.
No, there's none of that.
I mean, they had those options.
Every one of the people who spent some time coming after me with their fake outrage on behalf of other people, every one of them could have been doing something useful instead.
They could have. They could have started a GoFundMe for the victims.
They could have found out how to donate money.
They could have gotten involved with, I don't know, whatever they thought would make the problem better.
But instead, they chose the only thing that makes them as bad as they imagine I am.
How many people who came to my Twitter feed to simply call me names, I mean vulgar names, I'm not offended because I'm a public figure and I get called vulgar names every five seconds.
So it's not about me, but just talking about the people who took time to go insult me personally.
Now there were some people who expressed great disappointment with the action.
I would say that's a reasonable thing to say.
I think it's fairly reasonable for somebody who doesn't have all the information to look at the situation and say, wait, short of having all the information, I'm bothered by this action.
If somebody says that, I'm going to listen to them.
I don't mind somebody criticizing an activity.
Or a decision. Part of the way you learn how to do things better is by listening to people say, hey, you did this thing, it looks like a pretty dumb idea to me, maybe you should do something differently next time.
I generally like that kind of feedback.
I kind of like it.
But the people who just came to literally insult me to make me feel bad, what is their claim to a higher moral plane?
What I did was make available a tool that people could use for no charge and there's no potential income for me.
And by the way, just to size it, the way Interface by WinHub works is if people charge, which I wouldn't expect them to do in this situation, but if they did and they charge cash instead of the cryptocurrency, we take a 20% cut,
I think. And so if you imagine that the worldwide greatest The amount of money that WenHub could have made, if everything went the way I imagined it could have, and a few people used the app, what do you think would be my total potential best-case revenue?
Somewhere in the $5 to $10 range.
Five to ten dollars.
In all likelihood, that would be the most it could make, and then only in the most unusual situation, which is the person who was on there wanted to charge for it.
Because I wouldn't expect that.
I would expect they would say, no, I just want to tell my story.
But they could if they wanted to.
So, I wonder if the talk of socialism has ruined an entire generation of people who don't understand that the news is a for-profit business.
Do you imagine that the news is not for-profit?
The people who said that nobody should make a profit on disaster literally watched the for-profit news to learn about it.
So I don't think there's a lot of consistency going on.
But I'm typically not the person who criticizes people for hypocrisy because that's a weak claim.
The hypocrisy claim is just the weakest comeback.
The only reason I mention it is because the more realistic...
Framing of what's happening is that people are angry about the shooting and they need an outlet for that.
And since they're already worked up about politics, they see me and they say, wait a minute, I think he's associated with that guy we don't like who's orange.
So let's all pile on him.
Here's an interesting thing.
In the context of...
Oh...
So let me make sure that I got my major things covered here.
All right, so here's a few more things.
People are going to treat this as a gun problem.
And you could certainly imagine, you know, you could imagine it being a gun problem.
But as conservatives will say, it's not about the guns.
It's about the people.
Well in this case, I think that's more true than in other situations.
I think in this case, this is just classic mental illness.
And we do have a massive mental illness problem.
It's the problem with our cities.
It's the problem with Los Angeles and the homelessness.
As Dr. Drew so effectively described the other day on Periscope, and he's described on national media as well recently, that we think there's a homelessness problem, but it's really a mental health and drug addiction problem.
Likewise, these mass shootings, and probably this one, I assume we're going to find out, that it's a young man who had some mental health challenges.
And while if you could stop all guns, maybe that would reduce the amount of this, it's probably more productive to see this as a mental health problem.
I think that would be more productive.
And... I saw a statistic, somebody said that I think it was around 95% of mass shooters, at least the recent ones, have no father figure.
So something like, I think it was 95% or 97% or something like that, have no father figure.
And so the implication of that is people say, well, it must be that having no father figure Leads to mass shooter situations.
To which I say, maybe.
Maybe. If the correlation is that strong, you have to take it seriously, but you have to ask more questions.
Here's the question you have to ask.
Why is the father gone?
Well, the father might be gone because the father had some mental problems of his own.
And if the father had some mental problems, and they're often genetic, and got passed on, you wouldn't expect the mother to want to stay with the man with mental problems.
So there might be a correlation that is very well established, but it might not be exactly the way you think it is.
It might not be the lack of parents or the lack of a father specifically.
It might be that if you have a defective father, let's say he's got a mental problem, the odds of passing that on to a child are pretty good.
Pretty good. Now on top of that, Having a tougher situation because you probably have less money and maybe you get teased more and you don't have anybody to help you through the teasing and that sort of thing, the bullying especially.
So I could see how it could work both ways.
There could be some correlation without causation, but I could definitely see there could be some causation.
I just don't know how to tease out, you know, what percent is what.
So, at the same time, we're watching this interesting situation play out with Elijah Cummings in Baltimore.
So, of course, the president is being taken out of context and his critics who want to be mad and they want to exhibit fake outrage because, as you know, it feels good.
That fake outrage feels good.
They are illegitimately claiming that the president uses the word infestation to refer to people.
Now, of course, it didn't take long for somebody to produce videos of Obama referring to crime infestation in the inner cities.
So it turns out it's just a word people use because it's the right word.
And most of the outrage, and the fake outrage especially, seemed to center on the fact that the president was calling people vermin.
But he wasn't.
He was calling the vermin vermin.
He was calling, yeah, the actual insects and rats the problem.
And he was on the side of the people.
Saying that they should be served better.
That's what he said. Of course, the critics turned it into he called them rats and vermin.
Here's where I'm going with this.
So after my provocative tweet and the pushback, how many people do you think called me a maggot?
So that's the funny play on words.
So M-A-G-A for MAGA, Make America Great Again, when people see it, they say, aha, I will call you a maggot.
And they call all the people who support the president maggots.
How many times have you seen that on social media, where the Trump supporters are literally compared to maggots?
All the time.
Almost every day.
I would say I probably see it every day.
Now, is that acceptable?
No. But it's not, you know, it's certainly far worse than what the president did.
Which is worse?
Calling everybody who voted for the president or supports him literally a maggot?
Or the president says those poor people should not have so many rats and insects around.
Can somebody do something about that, please?
Which one of those is the bad one?
I don't even think that's close, is it?
Seems like that's not even close to me.
All right. By the way, speaking of tragedies, the next time there's an earthquake or a hurricane, there's another app that WenHub makes that I probably will tweet about.
Because again, it's completely useful in that situation.
The other app is called Approach.
It allows you to find people.
Let's say you want to find several family members who got separated.
You just send a link from the app to the family members, you know, just anybody who have their phone number, or you can send it by email to.
And anybody who clicks the link, you can see each other on the map, and then you can find each other.
Now, would it be ghoulish of me to remind the public during one of those disasters that this is a tool?
And again, I make zero.
It's a free app.
It doesn't cost anything to use.
Would it be ghoulish for me to tell people there's a useful application?
I don't know, but I guess I'll find out because I probably will tweet that.
So it will be my process to tweet the application's usefulness when there's a situation that is useful.
And I know people complain, but it's still useful.
Do you know the Gelman effect?
It's called the Gelman amnesia effect.
Now, the Gelman amnesia effect, I've talked about it before, and it refers to the fact that if you happen to be an expert on a specific topic, and then you see the news cover that topic, you can tell because you're an expert that they got it all wrong.
But you also know that the regular public can't tell.
To them, it looks real. You just happen to be an expert, so you can tell it's wrong.
Now, that's also true if the news does a story about you.
So this happens to me a lot.
There'll be a lot of news coverage about me, and I can tell when it's wrong.
Watch the fake news that gets produced about me in the next 24 hours.
Now, I already got a contact from The Daily Beast.
Somebody at The Daily Beast asked for a contact on Twitter today.
I did not comply because I'm not going to do an interview for the Daily Beast.
But I think I can depend on the Daily Beast to write a fake news story just full of errors.
They will describe the app wrong.
They'll probably say I make money from advertising on the app, which I don't.
But will they complain about this Periscope?
Because they should, right? I'm doing a Periscope, talking about the tragedy, and when this Periscope gets downloaded, it will eventually make it onto YouTube, and it will be monetized, along with every other person who is talking about the news.
So, why is nobody complaining about my Periscope?
No reason. There's no reason.
It's exactly the same situation.
There's an entire industry of people who depend on clicks and eyeballs and attention who profit from tragedies.
If I had a vote, it would all go away, including my part of it.
Keep in mind that for WenHub, this specific application of hearing news from an event, either good or bad event, that application is trivially small.
It doesn't make any difference to me financially.
None. It doesn't make any difference to the company.
Even if it were used a lot for that, it would still be so small.
It would be vanishingly, trivially, under $100 of value probably in a year.
But that's the one that people decided to complain about, and not all the ones that are making real money.
So somebody's asking in the comments, so why promote it?
The reason that I mention it during the exact time that people would most likely find value in it is that's when people would find value in it.
That's exactly when they need to know about it.
So I'm letting people who might want that information and people who might want to provide it Know that they exist and that there's a way to connect.
And by the way, the app allows the connection to be anonymous, so there may be situations where people want to report stuff but don't want anybody to know who they are because no personal information is exchanged.
All right. Let's talk about the 48-hour rule.
I'm the creator of the 48-hour rule, and it says this.
If somebody says something in public or even in private that is provocative and makes people very upset, they have 48 hours to clarify or apologize or both.
Now, if there's just a misunderstanding, then maybe a simple clarification would be in order.
And if somebody's actually offended, Then maybe an apology is in order.
And, you know, every situation is a little bit different.
So here's my take on this situation.
I don't consider the people who are complaining to be genuine, meaning that they will tell you that they are outraged.
What they're really doing is sort of a lifestyle.
It's not the real kind of outrage where you've done anything that's actually wrong.
And if they saw it in context, it's just a tool that augments your news gathering that's already happening.
Right. And if you imagine that I have bad intentions, well, there's something wrong with you.
What bad intentions do I have?
And for those of you saying, Scott, you grifter, you're using this to get attention for your app.
Obviously, yes.
That's one of the things.
It's not the only thing. It gets attention for the app, which is useful for the public.
That's not really a crime to inform people about something that might be useful to them.
So I don't apologize about telling people there's a useful tool that would be good in this situation.
No apology needed for that.
I will clarify, since the tweet doesn't give a lot of information, I will clarify that it was never intended, that even in the best case scenario, there was no scenario in which it could make money directly off of the tragedy.
It doesn't work that way.
There wouldn't be enough traffic.
At most, somebody would connect with a news producer, and the news producer would say, hey, let's take it offline.
So it might be a $10 phone call.
We might make $2 if somebody did it.
And who knows if anybody will.
So that's my clarification.
Now, let's talk about an apology.
If there's anybody who's actually in the victim group, in other words, people who attended the actual Gilroy Garlic Festival, and if they found this offensive, I apologize. So I apologize to anybody who was directly part of the event and the terror that happened there, or any of their family members who were offended.
Now I think That there's an argument you should not be offended, but since I do not intend to offend anybody, and there are people who are real victims and really affected in the most horrible ways you can imagine, I don't mean to pile on.
So as trying to be a decent human being, as best I can, if any people who are the legitimate victims and or associated with them, family or whatever, if any of them were offended by this, you have my unrestricted apology.
Certainly never intended to do that.
But for those of you who are trolls, who are just...
Getting your rocks off on attacking me because it's just part of your political fun.
Well, you don't really earn an apology and you're not the offended class.
You're just the outrage tourists.
So to the people who are just tourists and would like to come in and express their outrage, no apology needed, no apology offered.
Now, somebody says, please move on.
There's nothing else happening.
Move on to what?
Yeah, so Frank Luntz...
Let me tell you a Frank Luntz story.
I met Frank Luntz years ago when we both coincidentally were giving a speech at some billionaire's event.
And the billionaire event organizer put us in the same car to the airport.
So I was in the same car with Frank.
I don't think he knew who I was, but I remember leaving the car thinking, man, that guy's...
I don't like that guy.
And it was just this weird, I don't know, vibe that he just seemed unlikable.
And we didn't have any bad interaction or anything.
We just had some casual, just friendly, how you doing sort of stuff.
But I came away thinking I just didn't like him, which is very unusual.
I can't tell you It would be hard for me to even name another time that's happened, but it was a real strong feeling I had.
Maybe I was seeing the future.
Since then, he and I have had a number of interactions, disagreeing in a professional way on Twitter.
And I actually have appreciated those interactions.
In a few cases, he's offered some background or statistics that were either refuting me or at least challenged what I was saying.
And I always liked that stuff because it goes after the argument.
Go after the argument, I'm all on your side.
But when he decided to play the moral superiority card, that was a little further.
I couldn't really go there with him.
So I blocked them as I blocked, I don't know, dozens and dozens of people today.
So anybody who's being morally superior or is being offended for entertainment, their own entertainment, then I'm blocking them.
And most of them are, I would say 60% or more are probably professional trolls.
It looks like I got on some list for the professional trolls as I have before.
All right. That's about all I've...
I've got to say, because the shooting, of course, horrible tragedy.
I feel bad for all the victims, as I'm sure all of you do, because somebody says, wow, you apologized.
Not something Donald Trump ever does.
I disagree.
Trump Would apologize if he had done this, I think, because the people offended were actually, or at least potentially, I haven't heard from any of them, so I don't know if any of them were actually offended, but potentially.
Some of them could have been, you know, feel it was worsening things.
And Nobody feels bad about that.
Trump doesn't apologize for things that are not actually worthy of an apology or just attacking his critics, that sort of thing.
So the part I did not apologize for is whatever my critics are mad about on Twitter because those are the entertainment tourist outrage people.
They're not actually outraged in a real way.
So no apologies for them.
All right. That's about all I have to talk about.
Because the whole Baltimore thing...
By the way, look what's happening with the Baltimore thing.
I see people volunteering to help in a variety of ways.
But people don't really know what to do to help.
So let me make a suggestion.
I'm going to throw out...
I'm going to toss out a suggestion you haven't heard before.
And it's radical.
Now, I wouldn't suggest a radical idea to save the inner cities unless all of the normal ways had already been expired.
Now, I have suggested, I think maybe yesterday, that one way would be to have some kind of a Switzerland-like consulting group come in and simply run a city for a while, or maybe only run the bidding process so that the money and the graft can be controlled without the city and any kind of potential for theft.
So I've suggested that maybe there's something that's not regular politics that could come in for emergency situations.
Now, I don't think that exists, but we need a government in a box.
We need it for countries that are failing, just to get them up and running, and we need it in the United States for cities that are failing.
You need a government in a box.
Now, what I'd love to see is if the President could offer some kind of a Emergency declaration option where the city can say, okay, we don't have to declare an emergency here, but if we do, we'll have some extra flexibility, extra resources. So if they do, then the federal government could work with them to deal with their problems in some effective way.
But maybe they'd have more flexibility about what policies they can bend, what rules they can break, that sort of thing.
Because sometimes you need to break some rules Because the rules don't always keep up with the changing situation on the ground.
So that's one way to do it.
Let me give you an even more radical suggestion.
How about we build a city to relocate people who are failing in their existing cities?
Failing specifically because of mental illness, And drug addiction.
Just those two things.
Suppose you built a separate city that was just for fixing those people.
So let's say the housing is super cheap, but clean and good and respectable.
So nobody's treated like a prison, right?
It's a respectable, but low-income, low-cost kind of place.
Now, given that you're relocating people, you can put it anywhere.
So you can put it on the cheapest land in the world, You can ship in all of your experts with all their best ideas and resources, and then it's all in one place.
But most importantly, you would take these people out of their environments in which they are failing.
If you keep a drug addict in the inner city, the odds of them getting clean are pretty low.
Because they're in a horrible place, no resources to help them, there are drugs everywhere, it's just the best option.
Might as well do some drugs.
If you take them somewhere where they couldn't get drugs even if they tried, a whole extra city, somebody says Alcatraz, that's actually a really good idea, Alcatraz, because an island would be perfect, not as a prison, you know, you'd have to get rid of the prison, but the idea of a An island where people live who have the same set of problems and can't possibly work in the normal society and city, just move them.
Now, somebody says it won't work, but you didn't give a reason.
There's probably enough room in these comments that you could give a reason if you wanted to.
Somebody's saying a leper colony.
That's not a bad analogy.
The point of a leper colony is if you took lepers away from the normal population, you could concentrate whatever medical help, you could keep them from infecting other people, And it made sense, and it worked.
It actually worked.
It seems to me that we should test out some of our new technologies for building homes.
Could be 3D printed homes, could be these prefab homes, etc.
Find a cheap place in the middle of nowhere where the land costs nothing and there's access to water, you know, the basics.
And just make it really hard to get any drugs in and out of there.
You could probably do that.
So, I'll even go further.
I think it has to happen, because I think all of the other options for dealing with mental health and for drug addiction will be too little.
Even if they're effective, they'll be too little.
I think you have to relocate the people.
Now, I have a little bit of experience, and not the good kind, in that most of you know the story.
My stepson died Less than a year ago from opioid overdose, including fentanyl, which was probably the key ingredient.
And there was nothing you could do once he reached 18.
If he didn't want treatment, he didn't get it, and he was surrounded by temptations, and there was just nothing you could do.
There was no force you could put on him.
No, nothing. He could not live in society the way it was organized.
So putting that kid, he was 18 at the time, putting that 18 year old in normal society doomed him.
He could not function.
It was beyond him.
There are tons of people in that situation.
They cannot function in a normal city, in a normal environment.
So if you don't move them to a different environment, you're just waiting for them to die, and they may, they're probably, at least some of them, are going to take other people with them.
I know that when my stepson died, I had the worst set of feelings, which is, of course, the sadness for the tragedy, of course.
But on top of that, I also knew that he wouldn't be able to hurt anybody else.
And he would have.
Not intentionally.
He was a good kid in terms of, you know, he was not bad by nature.
So... But his lifestyle, I guaranteed it would have hurt somebody.
And I think that, yeah, so there's no such thing as forced rehab, at least in most states, if not all.
You can't force somebody into rehab.
That has to happen.
Now, you don't necessarily need to force people if you could say, we built this nice city.
If you go there, you're going to have a much better time than where you are.
Under those conditions, you might be able to get people to go voluntarily and maybe enough of them.
Because you don't have to eliminate crime and mental health problems from the inner cities to make a difference.
You have to reduce it a lot until the existing systems can handle it.
At the moment, they're overwhelmed.
Too much mental health, too much addiction.
There's no way that an inner city can function without stuff going on.
And then you add immigration on top of it for an extra burden.
So I say the only way this will ever get solved is by separate cities for the addicted.
Maybe you need yet another separate city for the people who have mental issues that they're trying to work through.
And that is my positive suggestion.
I would not respect any opinions.
They say you can't use a tragedy to talk about things that need to get done.
Generally, when there's one of these gun shootings, there's always a cry for gun control, and then there are other people who say, how dare you bring up gun control during a tragedy, because that's not giving the victims enough respect to let them grieve and all that.
Stop making it political.
I completely disagree.
If the problem is this dire, and the shootings are pretty darn dire, if the problem is this dire, you should bring it up any time.
And if the time you bring it up is when most people are paying attention because something just happened, that's the best time to bring it up.
Now, if you happen to be opposed to gun control, you don't want that side to win.
But from a pure, rational, what's good for society, you know, sort of generality, bringing up potential solutions when everybody has the emotional, let's say, the emotional energy and the focus on the problem is exactly the time to do it.
If that's offensive to some people, I think that's still a good trade-off.
Likewise, if I've offended anybody here, I don't think I need to apologize to the outraged tourists who just like to feel offended.
But it still was the best time to do it.
Because next time there's a situation, people might say, hey, I'd like to get my story out.
I think the public has a right to know.
There's a use for it.
I'll use this tool.
I don't think that makes the world a worse place.
But if you see my Twitter feed today, you certainly will think I made the world a worse place.
So don't be like Mr.
Bader. And complain before you know all the facts.
All right. That's all for now.
Let's see if we can put our heads together and fix these inner-city problems.
At the very least, we should be talking about tools and solutions.
At the very least.
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