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Sept. 14, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:00:36
Episode 662 Scott Adams: Join Me For Coffee and Fun News Analysis
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Time Text
Right on time.
Look at me, finally being organized after a week of naught.
Yeah, come on in here.
It's good to see all of you.
Grab a seat near the front.
We're going to have a fun time today.
Sometimes the news is just fun.
Sometimes it's horrible disasters.
Today, a few horrible disasters, but they're small ones.
Mostly, it's just fun.
So, you know what to do if you want to have the maximum enjoyment of this periscope.
It doesn't take much, very little on your part, actually, to have the peak experience of your day Which will make all the rest of the day amazing.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of Stein, a cellos, a tanker, a thermos, a glass, a canteen, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of this simultaneous sip.
Go! Oh my god, it gets better every day.
I love coffee.
Can I add grail?
Yes, I can. Grail.
All right. So the new theme song will be copper, margarita, glass, dine, a chalice, a tanker, a thermos, flask, canteen, grail, or a vessel of any kind.
Done. Now that's what I call responsive to the audience.
Beat that. You can't.
I want to talk about the Democrat debate again because it turns out it's the newsiest thing happening because it gives us something to talk about that people are still talking about.
And sometimes it takes a day or two to sink in what it is that you exactly feel about something.
Yes, I do smell my coffee.
My sense of smell returned after 12 years and it is delightful.
But talking about the debate, so there's some additional, let's say, observations and analysis coming out.
The first thing that I would say is that the top three candidates on the stage, the top polling Democrats, are completely unelectable.
And I think that fact is starting to become more obvious.
Somebody's asking if I'm going to be throwing F-bombs today.
Probably not. It's all fun today.
And so here's why I think the top three are unelectable.
Biden, do I have to even say?
I mean, I'm starting to feel, not even starting, I've been feeling for a while, actually bad.
For Biden and his situation.
And I feel bad for his family and his friends and stuff.
I think he's been, you know, somebody who's tried to be a good servant of the country.
I don't believe he's...
Yeah, I mean, you could argue whether he was or not.
But I think he's, you know, a well-meaning, good citizen, patriot kind of a guy.
And... And I feel bad because he's literally falling apart in front of the public.
Now, if you haven't seen the clip of Biden answering the question about institutional racism, I think it was, if you haven't seen his answer to that, you don't know exactly what I'm talking about.
But his answer was so mentally incompetent.
And I'm not trying to put any spin on this.
I'm trying not to speak as a pro-Trump guy, you know, saying, oh, the other side is so dumb and they do dumb things.
I'm being as clinical and trying to be as objective as possible.
Biden just doesn't have control of his faculties.
It's very obvious, and it's also obvious that the Democrats see it as clearly as you and I see it.
Everybody sees it now.
Tell me one person who will go on television, on CNN, or will go on television on MSNBC, and on the risk of their personal reputation, will say in public, they think Biden is the best choice for president.
I don't think there's a person, honestly.
I don't think you could put...
One of his advisors is Simone, somebody.
And I don't know that you could put her on CNN and have her look at the public and say, yeah, Joe Biden is definitely the right...
He's the best choice for president.
It's kind of down to no one.
Somebody says, Juan Williams.
You know, Juan's...
He's got a role he has to play.
So I think that's sort of a special case.
But I think we can all agree that Biden has no chance of being president.
Anything could happen. He could get nominated.
But he doesn't have any chance of winning.
His matchup against Trump would just be devastating.
And I would honestly just feel sorry for him.
In fact, I would say Biden is so weak...
That Trump might not even run against him, meaning that he might not even have to address him.
You just say what he's going to do for the country and say, you know, they nominated Joe.
They probably wish they hadn't.
You know what to do.
Like, I don't even think you would have to criticize him specifically.
Because it's just so obvious at this point.
Alright, then you go down to Warren, number two.
Most people assume that she would be the one to get it if Biden doesn't.
But I learned an interesting thing, which I guess I hadn't been paying attention enough to the healthcare policies.
And I read that Warren's health care proposal, and remember Warren is the one with all the plans, so the one you trust to have complete thought about policies ahead of time is Warren.
It turns out that her health care plan, and remember health care is really sort of the biggest domestic topic, her plan is to back Bernie's plan.
Explicitly. Like, actually, literally, to say she backs his plan and has actually done so.
Now, that's not very leadership-y, even if it's a good plan and even if it makes perfect sense not to have two plans that look the same.
But the trouble is that Bernie's plan for health care is why he can't get elected, in all likelihood.
So she's adopting the weakest part of Bernie, The healthcare problem.
Now, the problem with healthcare as a campaign topic is this.
Even if you had a better plan, let's say, hypothetically, that Medicare for All was a better plan for the whole country.
Now, what I mean by better is that it gives access to everybody, and it's affordable.
Right? So that would be better.
Access for everybody and affordable.
Sure, there might be some quality differences and that has to be factored in.
Maybe wait times and other things.
So that all has to be factored in.
But let's say, hypothetically, you could make a case That, on average, Medicare for All was a better system.
Bernie actually says it'll save money.
Let's say, economists, this is just hypothetical.
I'm not telling you this is true.
I'm just saying, hypothetically, if you could imagine Medicare for All being unambiguously better for the country in general, it still wouldn't work as a campaign thing.
Here's why. The people who have private health insurance through their companies And are happy with it, are going to vote against anybody who wants to change that.
So you have too many people who are above average in healthcare who would be brought down to the average.
The people who are below healthcare, in other words, they don't have any or it's too expensive, might be brought up to a better average.
All of those people could be reasonably Could be reasonably expected to have a preference for the person who would bring them from no healthcare up to having some healthcare.
Reasonable, right? But all of the people above the line, many of them Democrats, don't have a single chance of voting for the thing that takes away their good healthcare.
They work for a big company.
They've got coverage.
All they're doing is taking their good healthcare, taking all their advantages away, bringing them down to the average, and taking their money Their money, after they were brought down in the quality of their healthcare, they still have to take some extra money and give it to the people below the average to bring them up to the average.
So, you can't win with Medicare for All as your campaign central theme, because the people above the average are going to know what's going on, and they're going to say, you know, I can vote for my self-interest.
Our system not only allows that, it kind of encourages it.
We're allowed to vote for what's good for me.
I'm a voter. I'll just vote for what's good for me.
That's our system. We all agree that's the system.
So with that, healthcare for all just can't win.
So Warren is not competitive because she's not going to back off on that.
That's sort of central to the whole deal.
Then you go down to Bernie, and Bernie's...
The funniest comment I saw about Bernie, which sort of captured it all for me, was I guess it was...
I think it was Abby Huntsman said this on The View.
Here's her quote. She said, quote, Bernie looked like he crawled out of a garbage can last night.
Nailed it! That's the more clever version of what I was saying on Periscope.
Which is that you can't discount the look of it all.
People want their president to represent them, not just militarily, economically, not just politically, but them.
You want your president to be a reflection in some way of you.
And Bernie does that worse than anybody because he's such a bad visual That you say to yourself, ah, I kind of like his policies maybe, but I don't want him representing me.
He's not my brand.
He looks like he crawled out of the garbage can, as Huntsman said.
And then he was all red and screechy and boring with his statistics.
So his popularity is capped.
He can't possibly win, also because of the socialist policies.
So what do you do when your top three people really can't win?
Maybe there's still some Democrats who are thinking, well, maybe Elizabeth Warren can pull it through.
But I'll bet that belief will fade over time as well.
At the moment, they still have the polls in their favor, because the polls are very artificial now.
Because when you're really polling against President Trump, you're not really comparing the two candidates at this point in the process.
What you're really saying is, you know, do you want Trump to be president?
It's sort of just that.
And then people are saying, no, I'm anti-Trump.
But until he gets a specific target to demolish, you have no idea what the polls are going to end up.
We have no information until Trump is over the target site and starts opening the bombardier doors.
Uh, So, if you've got your top three, are sort of clearly unelectable, and I think that's a view that, honestly, I think the Democrats already share, at least the people with money.
Don't you think? Give me some feedback here.
Do you think that the Democrats already know That the top three polling Democrats have no chance of winning.
Do you think they know that?
Because I think they do.
It feels like it's obvious now.
So that takes you down to number four.
So number four in the polls is Harris.
Harris is one of the worst campaigners I think I've ever seen.
Now, I remind you that a little over a year ago, I predicted her as the nominee, the nominee who would go on to lose to Trump.
Now, I'm going to stick with my prediction, because the prediction always depended on the people polling ahead of her to fail, and we're watching that happening right now.
Am I right? We are watching the top three fail, and that was the prediction.
The prediction was the ones above her would fail.
So, I looked at an analysis by Joe Navarro.
He's an expert on body language.
I recommend him, one of his books, in my list of persuasion reading.
So if you Google the persuasion reading list, you'll see Joe Navarro's book on body language.
And he and I, we've had some conversations on Twitter, just brief, I would say disagreements, on some body language stuff.
So I would say he's definitely the expert compared to me, but I'm not too bad myself.
I'm more of an advanced hobbyist on body language where he's literally a published expert.
Here's what he says about...
So you went through the body language of the various groups, and let me give you some of his takeaways.
So his main takeaway is that leadership body language would look like this.
So your arms would be wide, and it would be slow, you know, smooth motions.
You say, blah, blah, blah, so those of you who can see me, I know that if you're listening to it, you don't know what I'm doing.
But imagining I'm putting my arms out wide, and I'm moving them smoothly and not too quickly.
So that's what Joe Navarro says is more typically a leadership look.
Do you remember Bill Clinton?
He used to do the thumb, and he'd be like, duh, duh.
The thumb gave him a little space.
Basically, the more space you take up and the less frenetic you look, the less jerky you look.
The more leaderly you look.
If you look at Trump, he does the hands out like this, and he does some of this.
So Trump does take up some space as well.
But let's get to Harris.
You've already heard my criticism of her physical demeanor on stage.
And you heard me say that she looked jumpy.
Literally, it seemed like her shoulders were going up and down when she talked, and it made her look unleaderly because she was jerky.
I watched it again just this morning, the video clip, and there was something happening.
That she needs to correct.
So here's some free advice for Kamala Harris.
If you look at it again, you'll see that she was wearing sort of a shiny blouse underneath their blazer.
The blouse was a little just rumpled by just the position that she was standing or a jacket or something.
The rumples on her blouse were exaggeratedly jumping up and down Because she was moving a little.
So the little bit she was moving when she was talking, you could see her shoulders sort of going up and down, caused this whole ocean of motion on her blouse.
And she's got to change her blouse.
I mean, actually get a different material and design of a blouse because it made her look less leaderly.
You know, that's not the sort of thing she could have possibly seen coming, so I wouldn't call it a mistake in the sense that she should have seen it as a problem, because nobody would have seen that as a problem.
Now, Joe DiMaro made the following comment, that she kept her elbows too close to her body when she spoke.
And I had not picked up on that, but he's totally right.
The elbows in and the jerk emotions are totally non-leadership body language.
And you know how I kept telling you that she's terrible at this?
When I said she's terrible at it, did you ever hear me say that her words are bad?
No. I'm saying she's one of the worst campaign, you know, public campaigners I've ever seen, and I've never once said that the words are wrong.
The words that she uses are good enough.
You know, you could argue that whether they're the best in the world or not, but they're totally good enough.
Her ideas are good enough.
She's medium enough.
You know, she's close enough to the center of the Democrats that she's better than the top three.
Now remember, I'm not telling you that you should agree with her words or her thoughts or her policies.
I'm saying that as a Democrat running for president, they're pretty solid.
They're not great, but they're at least Hillary Clinton solid, wouldn't you say?
They're at least as good as Hillary was, which was pretty good.
You know, Hillary wasn't a great campaigner, but she had enough to get To win the popular vote, so that's good enough.
But when you combine Harris' laughing at her own jokes, a huge problem.
Let's be honest, the laughing at her own jokes will prevent her from being president.
It will prevent her from getting the nomination.
If she can stop two things, and here's the trick, they're both easy.
They're both easy.
First thing she has to stop is laughing at her own jokes.
She can do that.
Now, that might not be easy.
She might not be able to do it like in a day, but pretty much people can learn to stop laughing at their own jokes.
She just has to know it's a big deal.
I don't know that anybody close to her is telling her, Kamala, I don't want to ruin your enthusiasm, but when you laugh at your own jokes, You look like more of a dork than a leader.
Stopping laughing at your own jokes is probably one of the easier things you could do if it became a priority.
So I think the only thing that keeps her from discontinuing that terrible public tick is that nobody has told her honestly how it looks.
So if there's anybody in her campaign who wants to clip out this part of the video and give it to her, you will increase her effectiveness about 20% in one day.
You can show her 30 seconds of what I'm saying, and her effectiveness would go up 20% in one day.
Because I guarantee you she can do it.
She just needs somebody to be honest with her and say, don't do that anymore.
Like zero times. There are no times you should do that.
Secondly, the body language.
The body language is really easy to change.
I know that because over my lifetime of public presentations and speeches and various public appearances, I have learned to intentionally modify my body language until it's my normal body language now.
I don't have what I would call normal body language.
I have a trained body language, at least for public purposes.
So you've noticed even when I talk on interviews, even when I'm here on video, have you noticed how much hand motion I do?
I wasn't born to that, but I also don't think about it when I'm doing it.
I'm thinking about it now because I'm talking about it.
But normally, if you see me waving my hands around, it's not a conscious thought.
It's now just what I've trained myself automatically to do.
Now, the training is easy.
You just tell yourself, larger motions are better, smaller motions are tight to your body, and jerky motions are bad.
You have to practice it.
And it might not be the first day that you can do it, but by the third day you can.
It's not that hard.
It's really not hard to simply open up.
You open up your chest.
You put on a more serious demeanor.
You learn to get your emotions right.
And I would say that Kamala Harris, if she corrected two things, number one, We're laughing at our own jokes, and maybe not even try so hard to tell jokes.
I would love to see her same witticisms, I haven't seen a list of them, but I would love to see her same level of witticisms delivered with a wry smile, you know, understanding that it's the audience who should be laughing, not her, just to see if it works, because I don't know if she can deliver the joke, and if she can't deliver, she should just avoid it.
All right, so...
At this point, after this last debate, I would say that Harris's odds of getting the nomination are the highest they've ever been.
And she's a terrible campaigner.
Think about that. She's notably bad.
At her public appearances and I still think she has the best chance of getting nominated as of today.
Now that could change because it's sort of a straight-line prediction that says the top three are unelectable.
She's terrible, but terrible is still better than unelectable and her two biggest problems are easily fixed.
Somebody just has to tell her to do it.
Somebody she trusts.
All right, so let's talk about Healthcare.
I had this question. I'm going to go to the board for a moment.
Excuse me for the bad image you're going to see.
Here's more of a question than a point.
I was trying to rank in my mind, as an ignorant consumer of news, which healthcare plans, in a very general sense, are the ones that are likely to be the least expensive?
And I have a preliminary opinion, and so I want to see if I can give some fact checking.
So here's the thing.
Our current system, you can see at the top, and Medicare for All are two that you could argue one is more expensive than the other, and people do.
Now, the problem is that it's apples and oranges.
Our current system is more expensive for some types of people, but of course it doesn't cover everybody.
So the savings come from not covering everybody.
If you want to cover everybody, Bernie says that doing so will be so efficient, you can actually save money overall.
But he's talking overall.
He is not hiding the fact that some people will pay more money.
And some people will get free health care and not pay any money.
So you'll argue all day long about these two things.
All right, which one is saving money?
But really, it's apples and oranges.
They both save money, but in different ways for different people.
So it's sort of an unsolvable dilemma of which one saves money.
Because we don't really know.
We're not smart enough. Economists will disagree.
And some people will pay more.
Some people will pay less either way.
But here's my curiosity.
The third plan is sort of, I think a few Democrats are pushing this, Kamala's one, some kind of competitive situation where everybody can get covered through the Medicare for All if they want it.
They just have to take it.
But at the same time, you can keep your private plan and then those would compete.
So you'd have competitors competing on cost, etc.
So here's my question.
How is it that healthcare is the biggest deal in the country, policy-wise, and you and I don't really know what any of it would cost, even in a ranking sense.
It's one thing if you don't know if it's going to cost you $15 trillion or $30 trillion.
That's a big deal.
$15 trillion is a big deal.
But you could still make the decision If you could at least rank them, right?
You wouldn't have to know which one's 15 trillion, which one's 30 trillion, if you knew for sure which ones were the most expensive and the least expensive.
Because then you would do whatever you could do.
You take the least expensive, this still gets you everything you need.
And you would know you made the right choice, even if you could not estimate with any kind of accuracy, as long as you could rank them.
So why can't we rank them?
Why are we at this point and the news business has failed us so much that you and I and consumers in this country can't even tell which is the most expensive?
Give us a little hand here.
We need some help.
All right. Did you see that nearly every state's attorney's generals are going after the big tech companies, I think Facebook and Google, for antitrust?
Did y'all see that story? I don't think it got enough play in the news, but just think about that.
Almost every state's Attorney General, so that's Democrats, Republicans.
We finally found something that everybody agrees on, that Google and Facebook might have too much power, monopoly power in particular.
So that's happening.
Let's keep our eyes on that.
The other thing Kamala made news for is that she noted that in a three-hour Democrat debate, the ABC hosts didn't ask one question about abortion.
Think about that.
It was three hours, ten Democrats talking mostly to their base, not once mentioned female reproductive rights.
It didn't even come up.
Are you kidding me? Now, maybe ABC would defend that by saying they're basically all on the same side.
Which actually wouldn't be a terrible response.
Because ABC could say, yeah, but you're sort of all on the same side.
There's not much to debate on that.
Which might be the case. The other thing that Joe Navarro said is that Andrew Yang's choice to not wear a tie is unambiguously a mistake.
Do you agree? I'd love to see your opinions.
Give me your opinion in the comments.
Hey, Kitten. In the comments, say, do you think that Yang not wearing a tie, was that a good move or a mistake?
I'm looking at your comments now.
So, I'm seeing...
A difference. So people are on both sides.
Let me tell you why this is easy.
Ready? It's easy to know whether this is a mistake or it's good.
Here it is. Who's going to vote for him because he didn't wear a tie?
How many votes do you get for being tireless?
None, right? There's not a single voter who's going to say, you know, I don't like his policies.
But man, I love that fact he doesn't wear a tie because I don't wear a tie.
None. Not wearing a tie earns you zero.
Zero. How many votes might he lose by not looking as presidential according to some voters who may be a minority?
There might not be many of them.
But do you think there's anybody out there who's saying, I don't know, I like my president to look like a president.
I'm a traditionalist, and I think that matters.
Some. The answer is some.
So here's why it's an unambiguous mistake.
This one's easy. It's a no-brainer.
Even I would wear a tie in that situation.
I would wear a tie. Nobody is more anti-neck-tie than the guy who draws Dilbert, right?
The first thing I did when I left corporate America is I took all of my neckties and literally threw them in the trash and said to myself, I am never going to wear a necktie again.
Now, of course, I lied because when I visited the White House, I bought a necktie.
Maybe I kept one around for emergencies, but I ended up buying a necktie to visit the White House, just out of respect.
But even I, the most anti-necktie person you will ever meet in your life, Saw that as just a clear mistake.
All right, so Navarro's right.
Yang made an error.
It did give him maybe a little attention, but it probably didn't pay for itself in terms of votes.
Is it Jamel Hill?
I hope I have the right name right.
There's an African-American, I think she was a sports commentator.
I may have some of the facts wrong here, but what she said was so provocative, I want to quote it.
So I think it was Jamel Hill, fact check me on that, who said something along the lines of, and I'm paraphrasing, that the reason that Biden has so much respect from the black voters is that black voters...
They don't think he's qualified, but they think he's the only one that white voters will vote for.
Now, I laughed when I read that because, first of all, I don't have a sense of it myself because she's talking about the black community and I'm not going to pretend I can get in other people's heads.
But does that ring true to you?
Because I'd never heard it quite expressed this way.
And the reason I laughed is because it was a novel way to look at it.
So my first reaction was not that I agree or disagree, just that it was novel.
And so I automatically liked it just for that.
But do you think it's true?
That black voters have no love for Biden whatsoever, but they just think he's the only one that white people will vote for, so they want a winner against Trump.
Maybe. Maybe.
I like it as a thought.
I don't know if it's true. This is the tell.
That explains everything about our environment right now.
Every once in a while, there'll be some small thing that happens.
That even though it's a small thing, it sort of describes your entire reality for a moment, at least the political reality.
And it's this. And again, if you didn't watch Joe Biden's answer to the legacy of slavery question, you don't quite appreciate what I'm going to say.
But he was completely incoherent and babbling, and it was clear he didn't have control of his mental faculties.
I'm going to say that I think we can pass through the opinion on that and state that as fact.
I think that's fair, because I think the Democrats are seeing the same thing at this point.
And despite that, he's the leader in the polling, and despite completely breaking down, mentally, in public, a complete mental breakdown, a complete mental failure to even be able to form sentences in public, what is it that...
That his own team is saying disqualifies him.
They're saying he's disqualified because of his old-timey reference to, you know, playing the record player in black households to teach them more language skills.
In other words, complete mental incompetence, here's the funny part, complete and obvious and total mental incompetence did not disqualify Biden from being their choice for president.
But his comment about a record player, which they can interpret as vaguely racist, which it wasn't, I'll get back to that.
That's enough to disqualify him.
So, complete mental incompetence in public doesn't disqualify you from being the Democratic candidate.
But saying something that wasn't racist, but they can interpret as racist, is disqualifying.
Now, the reason I say it wasn't racist is because Joe Biden is not a racist.
End of story. Say whatever you want to say about him.
Say he's mentally incompetent.
I just did. Say you don't want him to be your president.
Say all of his policies are bad.
Say he did good or bad things with China or the Ukraine or whatever rumor you want to come out.
Say he sniffs people's hairs too much.
Say anything bad you want to say about Biden, but let's be honest.
He's not a racist.
He's an old guy. He's an old guy who speaks a certain way, and maybe he should update that.
But he's not a racist!
Still, that's going to be enough to take him out.
All right. Oh, here's the most provocative thing that you probably didn't notice.
There was one point where Biden said that nonviolent criminals should not go to jail.
Now, shouldn't that have been like the major headline and everybody talking about that?
But here's the thing. Nobody's quite sure if he really meant it.
Are you? Because it could have just misspoken.
I mean, given his mental frailty, I don't know if he meant it.
Your first reaction when you hear, hey, maybe nonviolent criminals should not even go to jail, I thought, are you kidding me?
So, you know, Bernie Madoff destroyed, you know, how many families completely, millions of dollars, fraud for years, every bit of it intentional.
You tell me that guy doesn't go to jail?
Are you kidding me?
And then on top of that, we see Felicity Huffman actually is going to get a little jail time, 14 days, and then a whole bunch of community service for her violating some crimes related to getting her daughter into college.
Very white-collar crimes where the victim, per se, exists in a conceptual sense but not a specific person, or at least one we can identify.
So I'm lucky if these two stories and I had the following thought.
What if Biden's right?
And here's why.
What if Biden's ahead of his time?
What if Biden actually maybe heard somebody come up with a decent explanation of why we could actually...
Have a jail-free punishment for nonviolent crimes.
I'm going to make the case for it.
Here's the case. Number one, don't count the Bernie Madoffs.
So if we were to say, let's create a policy where nonviolent crimes don't go to jail.
Just deal with me on a hypothetical level.
It's a thought experiment.
I'm not proposing it.
I know some of you get confused.
This is not a proposal.
We're thinking through it.
And here's what's changed.
Jail takes away all of your freedom, and it takes away all of your privacy.
And that's what's bad about it.
No privacy, no freedom.
Now, what is different about 2019 compared to all the years before 2019?
And it's sort of a gradual thing, so it's not suddenly 2019.
But what's different is that today...
Today...
We can take away your privacy without taking you to jail.
Think about it. You don't have to go to jail To have all of your privacy removed.
Imagine, if you will, and this is just a mental experiment.
Imagine, if you will, that for the lesser nonviolent crimes, I still think you need a separate category for the Bernie Madoffs.
So there should be some accounting for the depth of the victims.
The more the victim...
The worse it is for the victim, then you have to take that into account.
Somebody mentioned fentanyl dealers.
These are good edge cases.
So what if there's a major fentanyl dealer who you don't know killed anybody, but could have.
You just don't know.
They were just a major fentanyl dealer.
That person, I'm in favor of the death penalty for dealing fentanyl.
So even if you can't identify the specific victim, that's my personal preference.
So let's start with the assumption that there's some nonviolent crimes which by their nature are bad enough that you should still get some jail time.
So let's all agree there can be exceptions.
But that leaves, I don't know, 75% of all nonviolent crime that you could go to jail for today That are within the realm of dispute.
Imagine your life if I gave you these two choices.
Are you ready? Choice number one, you go to jail for one year.
Because whatever you did wasn't the worst thing in the world.
It was some white-collar crime.
So your choice is go to jail for one year.
Your second choice is five years of zero privacy.
I'm just picking five to talk.
Five years of zero privacy.
Now, how you would do that...
This is another discussion.
Maybe we don't quite have the technology.
Maybe you have to wear an Apple Watch.
Maybe you have to have your cell phone with you.
Maybe all of your credit card purchases have to be public.
Maybe you have a record, so every time you pay for something, you have to pay for it with a credit card that indicates that you're under the control of the judicial system.
Now, I'm not talking shock colors.
I'm talking literally your punishment is a complete lack of privacy.
Now, let me ask you, would you consider it a punishment for you to have a complete lack of privacy?
You would, wouldn't you?
Would you? Would you want to live for five years with literally anybody being able to go online and find out where you are, what you bought, and your health records, and your financial records?
All of it. Every single bit of your entire life that can be surfaced in any way through the government involvement or commercial or anything, you give away 100% of your freedom.
Your privacy.
Now go back to Biden's comment that we should look at a way to not jail nonviolent criminals.
And then you pair it with our current ability to totally punish you while you're free.
You can be punished pretty darn pretty bad Badly.
You could be deeply punished without being in jail.
Just lose all your privacy.
Now, this is one of those things you have to think about for a while.
I'm watching the comments, by the way.
And the comments are very interesting.
Because usually when I have an idea this wild, I'm getting very strong takes on both sides.
And you know what I'm not seeing?
I'm not seeing strong takes on either side.
In other words, most of you just said to yourself some version of, holy crap, that's not the worst idea I've ever seen.
Now, if somebody is not incarcerated, what is one of the things that they can do?
Well, one of the things they can do is get a job, right?
If you were an employer and you had a choice of hiring somebody that you really couldn't know much about, they might take drugs.
They might be a criminal on the side.
You don't know much about them, but they have a good resume enough so you can hire them.
Or, let's say you could hire someone Who has exactly one crime, a white-collar crime, and now they're completely transparent.
You will know where that employee is all the time.
If they tried to steal from you, you'd know it, because you could see their bank accounts.
You could actually see their bank account, and you'd know if they stole from you.
It's like, where'd that money come from?
It would actually be, potentially, and again, this is more of a thought experiment, but it's not inconceivable That convicted small crime criminals, you know, the white colliery, nobody got to hurt kind of criminals, could become safer employees than people that you don't know much about because they have privacy.
Think about that. So now these people can get jobs.
Now, because the president has restricted immigration, we need all the employees we can get.
The president says that explicitly as part of his judicial reform.
He says that we need all the employees we can get, including people who have paid their debt.
So the people who are paying their debt could still get a job, could still work, and what's the best part?
Pay back the victims. Thank you, commenter.
Pay back the victims.
So now let's say you're a victim of a non-violent crime.
You have two choices.
One is your person goes to jail for a year.
Two, the person who victimizes you loses all of their freedom for five years and they pay you back 100%.
Which do you choose?
Which one do you choose?
I might take the money.
Now, I'm no lawyer, so I think you could still sue people, you know, to try to get your money back in civil court, right?
But if the person's in jail, and if they can never get a job again after jail, or at least a good one, you're not getting your money back.
So, I'm just gonna put that out there.
I think There's at least a 50% chance that Biden misspoke.
It didn't mean anything like that.
But especially when I saw the Felicity Huffman one, is society better off with Felicity Huffman in jail?
Well, we're better off if she's punished, right?
Imagine a Hollywood star Losing all of her privacy.
Think about it. Imagine if you personally knew where Felicity Hoffman was all the time.
You would know if she's in her bathroom.
You wouldn't be able to see her, but you'd know if she was in her bathroom.
Because you could just check her GPS anytime you want.
If you were a celebrity, How terrible would that be for everyone to know where you are?
You'd put yourself on house arrest, right?
Because you wouldn't even want to leave the house.
People wouldn't know where you are.
They'd track you down at the grocery store.
So here's the only takeaway.
Do not rule out.
That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying it's a good idea.
Do not rule out.
That we could develop a way, using technology and privacy and things that are more modern, to actually do away with prison for non-violent crimes.
Now, also think about drug offenders.
Drug offenders need something extra.
Well, maybe they do need loss of privacy, because the loss of privacy for drug users If they were users, not dealers.
A loss of privacy, well, for either one.
If you're a dealer or a user of drugs, a loss of privacy would certainly put a crimp on your using.
Because part of the loss of privacy might be continuous drug testing.
Here's a question that I thought about.
I don't want to bring up the whole issue of guns and gun insurance, because I did that to death.
But there was one takeaway point that was worth...
Number one, somebody on Twitter told me, and I need a confirmation of this, that the state of Massachusetts is actually debating that right now, debating the The question of insurance and guns.
I don't know what that looks like, but I'll just put into your head the idea that at least some stranger on Twitter thinks that at least one state is debating at least some form of insurance and guns.
So I don't know what that looks like, but I'd like to know.
But here's my takeaway. So people said, and one of them was a lawyer, so I'm going to take it seriously, that it would never be constitutionally appropriate to force people to pay for insurance For a constitutional right, which is to own a gun. Now, I'm not a lawyer, so that statement, I can't even evaluate if that sounds reasonable or not.
But it doesn't matter to my next point.
Imagine if the model was this.
Instead of making the gun buyer buy insurance directly through an insurance company, suppose the government said this.
We'd like to impose on gun makers, just the manufacturers, A requirement for insurance, such that if one of their guns, and let's say you could limit it to maybe the ones that are the most destructive, so maybe you would make exceptions for shotguns, for example, or a revolver.
So you might have some exceptions of what the price would be for the insurance, but for the weapons that are Let's say generally agreed to be the most dangerous.
Let's say the gun makers were forced to pay a healthy insurance policy and that insurance would pay the emergency services and health care for anywhere where one of their guns was used for a crime.
Now, the first thing you might say to yourself is, hey, don't do that.
It's a bad idea. So I'm not going to deal with the question of whether it's a good or bad idea.
That's a separate conversation.
I'm going to ask specifically, would that model in which the gun manufacturers were required to have insurance on their own product, would it be unconstitutional?
Would it ever be unconstitutional to force a manufacturer to cover insurance for a product that is constitutionally valid?
Because here's the thing.
You're the consumer and you walk into the store and you buy a gun.
That gun has all kinds of costs passed along to you from the manufacturer.
The insurance cost would just be one more.
It would just be one more cost.
It doesn't feel like that would be unconstitutional.
So I'm seeing mixed agreements or mixed opinions here.
So some of you are saying it would be.
Well, let me ask you this. Would it be unconstitutional for the government to require gun sellers to collect sales tax at the point of purchase?
Is it unconstitutional to require a sales tax on a constitutional right to own a gun?
Yeah, that threw you, didn't it?
Because there is a sales tax on guns, right?
And if there's a sales tax on guns, the government is already imposing limits on your ability to buy something that's a constitutional right.
Now, I remind anybody who's new to my Periscopes, I'm strongly pro-gun, pro-Second Amendment, but I'm also willing to At least consider all of the different angles on guns.
So my willingness to consider all angles should not be misconstrued as wanting to take your gun because that's the last thing I want to do.
All right? So that's the question.
It seems to me if it's legal and constitutional to collect a sales tax on guns, it should be at least as legal To require the companies to have their own insurance, simply to cover the costs that they have some role in creating through society.
I don't think it'll ever become a law, but who knows.
Here's some good news.
Apparently the United States killed Bin Laden's son, one of them.
I don't know how many of Bin Laden's sons we've killed so far, but I'm kind of happy there are a lot of them.
My first thought when I heard that we killed Bin Laden's son, doesn't he have a whole bunch of sons?
Like a dozen or something.
I don't know what the number is, but it was a big number.
And the beauty of this is we can keep killing Bin Laden's sons like once a year for years.
It's like, hey, we killed Bin Laden's son again.
Didn't we just do that? Oh, it's another one.
It's another one. The next year, we got Bin Laden's son.
Which one? I think we're up to 23 now.
And normally I would not feel happy about killing somebody, except it's Bin Laden's son, and he was a terrorist.
And so I'm totally happy about killing that guy.
I don't know how I could ever feel bad about that.
All right. Here's an interesting contrast.
Somebody was saying in the news that the Democratic field, the candidates, are the weakest field of candidates of all time.
And I would agree with that.
It is the weakest field of candidates of all time.
Here's the fun fact to compare to it.
Do you remember when Trump ran for president and there were all those Republicans running against him?
What was the most common thing you heard about the field of Republicans running for president?
What you heard was, consistently, it's the strongest group of candidates you've ever seen.
So when Trump won, he beat the strongest field of candidates on his own team.
And I actually agree with that.
That was a strong field of candidates.
Now, there was nobody there who was a superstar like Trump, you know, in terms of his ability to move the public.
But they were all strong.
Every one of those people, I could have seen as president, some better than others, but they were all president enough.
In fact, there wasn't one person on that stage I think that's true.
I don't think there was one person on that stage that I would have worried too much about becoming president.
I might have disagreed with their policies and such, but I wouldn't be panicked by it.
And then you look at the Democrat group, and even the Democrats are saying, this might be the worst field of candidates we've ever run.
So they're going to run The worst field of candidates, and pick the best of the worst, to run against the person who beat, just absolutely destroyed, the strongest slate of candidates in the history of the United States.
How does that look as a matchup?
That's pretty funny. All right.
I think that's all I wanted to talk about today.
Did I cover everything?
Is there anything else you wanted to hear about?
Oh yeah, the drones. I forgot about that.
So in Yemen, the Houthis, the ethnic Houthis, I think I'm saying that right, are in a war with the ethnic group that is nominally the government there.
And you've got Saudi Arabia backing the government, you've got Iran allegedly, although they deny it, but they're backing the Houthi rebels.
Just so you got the visual, there's Saudi Arabia.
Imagine this big country, Saudi Arabia.
And then along its lower border, its main or only southern neighbor is Yemen.
So Saudi Arabia has a strong interest in Yemen not being an Iranian proxy because it's right on their border.
It's a pretty dangerous situation if they become that.
So they've, of course, been backing the government so that they can have their person in charge of Yemen.
So the Houthis, who are this scrappy rebel group that I don't know too much about, managed to launch a fairly, well, substantial, not fairly substantial, a substantial drone attack against Saudi oil refinery, I think. It was an oil facility.
And pretty much It destroyed the thing.
I mean, if you based it on the pictures, it looked like a lot of it was on fire.
And so the first thing I don't know is what kind of drones were they?
Were they the big kind of drones that are like airplanes?
Or were they the hobby-sized drones that they've weaponized to the point that even a bunch of hobby-sized drones can take out an oil refinery?
So somebody says it was a big drone.
Yeah, so we'll wait to find out.
Now, obviously, if they were big drones, they came from Iran, right?
If the Houthis used big military drones, they came from Iran, and Iran and Saudi Arabia are now at war.
Now, they may not use those words, but if those were full-size military ones, the Houthis didn't make them themselves.
Is it Houthis? Somebody's saying?
Somebody is trying to correct my pronunciation, and that might be the case.
So we have to wait to find out what's the deal with these drones.
But even if they're not full-size military drones, it seems unlikely that anyone but Iran was helping them.
So, and I wonder about this, because if Iran is doing any of this stuff to try to improve their negotiating position, it's certainly a bad play.
So we'll see.
Anyway, we'll wait on that.
I remember 15 years ago or so I made the prediction that the terrorists would all be using drones and that they're coming to this country.
So that attack on the oil refinery, you should expect To see some of those in the United States in the next, I don't know, five to ten years at least.
It could be a year. So you're going to see swarm attacks, terrorist attacks in this country as soon as somebody can put the resources together.
Because all the science is there and they know it works at this point.
And how hard could it be to smuggle drones into the country?
It feels like that would be the easiest thing because you could take the drones apart and just, you know, ship the parts in different combinations just through FedEx and nobody's going to look at some little single, you know, component and think that that's a problem.
So it feels like It just feels like there's nothing you can do to stop it.
It would take 50 years before we had drone jamming technology in every large gathering in the United States in every facility.
It just seems like it's not going to happen.
Locally shut off the GPS.
I don't know if shutting off the GPS is going to work anymore because my guess is that the drones either have or will soon have the ability to use Google satellite to navigate.
If you have access to satellite pictures just from Google and you can do sort of pattern recognition, you should be able to Tell your drone, even a little hobby drone that you buy on Amazon, if it can already do this, maybe it can.
It should be able to just look down, know where it starts from, so as long as it knows where it starts from, it can look at the ground and just follow the roads.
It should be able to follow the roads, right?
I don't see any way that that's not completely doable.
So, even GPS can't stop them.
Somebody says Gen 4 is safe from drones.
Relatively. So Gen 4, nuclear technology, and that's an umbrella term for a number of competing technologies.
We don't know which one will be the good one yet.
But their deal is that if they lose power, They close down safely.
The older and current models of nuclear power, if they lose power for an extended time and the backup power isn't enough, then they start melting down and it's a big problem.
So the Gen 4 are built opposite of that, where losing power makes them safer instead of less safe.
So the answer is yes.
A drone attack on a Gen 4 plant For that reason alone would be far safer because power loss is your big risk.
And then depending on the size of the drone, could it or could it not penetrate anything that's got anything nuclear on the inside?
And I guess that's just a size of drone question.
All right, that's all I got now.
And I am going to talk to you all tomorrow.
Have a great day. Oh, and buy my book, Loser Think.
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