Episode 798 Scott Adams: The Clearview AI app that Identifies Criminals, With David Scalzo, Plus Impeachment
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Special guest: Clearview.ai investor David Scalzo
A search engine for faces, used by law enforcement
There should be a cost for attempting to impeach and failing
Adam Schiff claims and harm to national interest
Adam Schiff and future crimes of the imagination
The challenge of cartooning with diversity
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
It's going to be amazing. Today we're going to have a special guest, which I'll introduce in a moment.
But, first things first, right?
That's right. First things first.
And I think you know what's coming up first.
We're a little low on followers for some reason.
So let me see if there's...
I think I've got a bug here.
I'm going to tweet going live.
Going live now on Parascoop.
I'm going to tweet that out because I think the notification failed or something.
Well, happy weekend and I think I know why you're here.
At least part of the reason you're here.
Yes, I do. It's because you'd like to be here for the simultaneous sip.
I usually wait for a thousand people, but is everybody watching the...
Maybe you're watching the impeachment or something.
Somebody says I didn't get a notification.
Yeah, I think there's something wrong with the notifications.
It might have something to do with having a guest on, so I don't know exactly, but we're going to find out.
Anyway, first, first, if you'd like to participate in a simultaneous sip, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Simultaneous zip. Go.
Yeah. Yeah, that's a good one.
Yep. Just as good as I thought.
Now, if technology is working, and I believe it is, I'm going to activate my guest and give you a little...
Let's see.
I'm going to pick my guest and...
We're going to be talking to David Skelso, founder and managing partner of Kiranego.
I hope I am pronouncing it correctly.
If you're wondering why, we're going to be talking to David Skelso.
It's because he's an investor in a company called Clearview AI, which is all over the news.
Front page of the New York Times, controversy everywhere.
It's the app that allows law enforcement, at the moment law enforcement is using it, to take a picture of anybody It could be a dead body, a John Doe, a person on the street that they've stopped, and it will tell the police who it is.
It will give the identification from a photograph.
Scary? We'll find out.
David, can you hear me?
I can hear you. Good morning.
How are you doing, Scott? I'm doing great.
Good morning. Now, I'm correct that you are an investor in Clearview AI, right?
But before we get started, I just want to say, you know, I'm an engineer by training.
And when you're an engineer by training, you know, there's two people in the world you have a man crush on.
One is Elon Musk and the other is Scott Adams.
So, you know, I really appreciate the fact that I'm able to be here with you today.
Well, thank you.
I did notice from your biography that you've got two degrees in engineering, engineering and then engineering management, and then you've got an MBA from a top school in the country.
So you're sort of an example of what I talk about in terms of talent stacks.
You've combined...
Different skills together so that you've just got a greater view of the world, which brings us to Clearview AI. You put money into that, your firm did.
Tell us, well first, describe what the app is doing today so that we can get a little bit of context here.
Absolutely. So there is an explosion of digital information out in the world.
More and more people are connecting to the internet and everyone or a lot of people are posting information.
It could be information on academic journals, it could be videos, it could be people doing TikToks, it could be philosophy, sports, religion, charity, everything people are putting on there.
And some of the most powerful tools for humans to Improve ourselves to give a happier, healthier life is using things like search engines like Google, for instance, to search for words and find where those certain keywords come up on the Internet.
So what Clearview does is something very similar.
You take a picture, a photo of a person, and then it directs you to links, essentially, all across the Internet, showing where that person shows up in various contexts.
So in short, it's a search engine for faces so that you can put an identification with a face.
Absolutely. Now let's talk about the social implications, but tell us where it's being used.
How many people are using it?
Who's using it? Who has access to it?
Is it the public or is it just police force?
Yeah, so right now it's a startup.
And whenever you do a startup, you know, startup 101, whether you're at Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford Business School, is you target a specific industry vertical, someone who is a super user.
And where they're using right now is law enforcement.
So there's over a thousand independent law enforcement agencies.
And so this is everything from the federal government, all the alphabet agencies, To state police departments, to county sheriffs who are elected directly by voters, to local municipal police officers.
And they're all making independent decisions to use Clearview.
Now, it's not limited to the United States, right?
Well, right now it is, but the technology is definitely powerful enough and broadly enough to be used elsewhere as well.
All right, so give us some use cases.
Tell us what crimes are solved.
Why do police like using this thing?
Well, if you think about a detective, any crime show you watch, what's the number one thing they want to do?
They want to generate leads.
Who are possible suspects?
And then they want to track them down using their skills.
And they use credit card data and cell phone data and all sorts of other information fingerprints.
So what Clearview does is it helps them generate leads more quickly.
So if you have a suspect in a human trafficking child exploitation case and you only have a photo of someone, You can use Clearview, Clearview the photo, and then it will show where that person may be on the internet, whether they have a Twitter profile or a Facebook profile or whether they're at some sort of basketball game.
And that generates leads and ideas for the police officers and detectives.
Where it's exceptionally powerful is when you're working with gangs, whether they are terrorist networks, whether they're drug cartels, whether they're mob gangs.
And where you may have an inkling of one person in the game, but you may not know the other five, six, seven people.
And so if you take a group photo then, what you can do is identify the other people or at least give you some leads.
And then, of course, our law enforcement will follow those leads and determine whether the person should be implicated or not.
Alright, leads are fun, but how many cases have been solved?
Tell us about any happy endings that we know about so far.
Well, the New York Times article specifies one where the Indiana State Police have really talked about where they busted a whole network of, unfortunately, individuals who were taking advantage of children.
And so getting those people off the street is very good.
There was another one in Florida that they talked about Where a person had a certain type of tattoo and that tattoo was able to be matched based on that.
Those are some examples.
Now what types of crimes are the ones that are most likely to be usefully solved?
Well, it's clearly the most vile crimes out there, right?
It's, you know, it's the child exploitation, the human trafficking, the domestic violence, the drug cartels, terrorists.
Those are the ones more likely to be solved.
But it's also, you know, for shoplifting, petty thieves, assault.
Subway gropers is one where...
It's used a lot where you have a grainy photo of someone that's pickpocketing on a subway.
Those are different types of things where Clearview can be used.
All right. I'm watching the audience.
The audience is going crazy in the comments because they want me to push you on the social risks.
So let's talk about that.
So accepting that I would imagine law enforcement would be drooling over this product because it allows them to identify somebody who may not want to identify themselves or might be in a situation where you're not necessarily in a conversation with them.
Can it be used to identify, let's say, a dead body that doesn't have identification?
It would do that, right? Oh, it could be helpful in that.
I've talked to paramedics and EMT people, and a lot of times what you have is someone who has had a heart attack or who has fallen ill and unconscious.
Who is this person?
Do we have any context? And so to be used with paramedics would be great.
I just saw a really good question go by in the comments.
What if somebody was an undercover cop and the bad guys got this app?
Could they find their undercover cops?
Potentially, sure. Absolutely.
Like every new technology, there's going to be the good and the bad.
Now, people are asking, where did the data come from?
Are you scraping only from public legal sources?
Do you have secret sources?
Where do you get your database of faces from?
So we have to, you know, let's start out what I talked about.
There's an explosion of digital information that people are voluntarily putting up on the internet, right?
And so there's millions of faces up there, and people have public personas on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on TikTok, on Instagram, in addition to all the other places that information's put.
For instance, almost every single work corporation out there Has a public-facing website that has the pictures of, for instance, all the lawyers in their firm or all the consultants in their firm or their leadership.
So what we do is we index all that public information and then just connect the dots, essentially, link it all together.
So it is only public sources.
Now there are other things that are public sources and that the government wants to get out.
Those informations are like the most wanted list where they, you know, we link that together.
They have the Center for Child Exploitation and Trafficking.
We link those stuff, we link those together.
But it's all publicly available information that is helpful to everyone.
I saw a story that the New Jersey Police Department decided to not use it, to ban it.
Do I have that information right?
So there was a pronouncement by one of the AGs of something to that extent.
But let's take a broader view.
You know, there's autonomous vehicles that are taking photos.
There's going to be FedEx that drones flying over our heads that are going to be taking photos.
The best thing we can do is get this technology out to everyone.
Because what it does is it increases transparency.
And when you increase transparency, you increase trust with people.
And when you have trust, you increase the opportunity of more meaningful relationships.
Now, here's what's going on in New Jersey, and this is obviously very early, so I don't want to sound too hyperbolic on how this happens.
But let's say they ban this technology and they only allow government to use this.
What's going to happen is you're going to have a two-class, you know, a Hunger Games-type society where the politicians can live in security and the rest of us wander among thieves and exploiters.
What will happen in New Jersey is more people will move to places where it's safer like North Carolina and Florida.
That is the dystopian future when it's actually banned.
If we allow it to be used freely, it creates a better society for all of us.
Let me tell you my personal stake in this in the sense that as a semi-famous person, my reality is that when I go in public, People recognize me by face quite often, especially since I've been doing the live streaming.
So pretty much everywhere I go, there's going to be somebody who recognizes me by face, but they also know, because I'm a public figure, they know something they read about me that could be bad, usually not true, something about my background, my education, my career.
So I've lived in this world 20 years ahead of the rest of you for a long time.
And so you're probably wondering, What would it be like if every time I went out in public – we're going to assume that this technology creeps into the public because it's inevitable.
Wouldn't you say it's inevitable that the public will have this tool?
Well, Peter Diamandis says there's going to be a billion internet-connected sensors in the next five years, which means we're going to know everything at any time In anywhere.
And so it is inevitable that this digital information will be out there.
So let's continue.
Yeah, so let's just complete the thought.
So if you're wondering, those of you watching this, you're wondering about yourself, right?
You're thinking, okay, what does this mean to me?
You know, what would happen to me?
How would it feel? What's life like if every time I went out, anybody who saw my face could know also my biography?
And the answer is, that's my life.
That's exactly my life.
Every time I go outside, people recognize me, I don't recognize them, and they know my whole biography, and they can treat me differently if they choose to.
I'm sure some people discriminate against me because they think, oh, he said good things about the president that one time.
I've got to be mean to him.
So I've lived in that world, and I've got to tell you, it doesn't make much difference.
So here's the weird thing about it.
If I could snap my fingers and change it, And make all of my privacy come back, I don't know if I'd care.
Believe it or not, if you had asked me would I choose this, I probably would have said, no, I want my privacy.
Because that's everybody's first reaction, right?
There's nobody who wants to give up privacy if you ask them.
But nobody asked me, I just lost my privacy because of my life choices.
And it didn't make any difference.
I can tell you, I go through life and it makes absolutely no difference.
Now, if, let's say I had a criminal record, would it make a difference to me if people I interacted with knew I had a criminal record but I paid my time, I'm clean with society?
What do you say about that world where somebody who really has paid their debt Follow the rules, but now it's going to follow them around in a way that it couldn't have before.
What about that person?
What do you say to that? Yeah, so the question is whether information should be hidden from people, and then the second part is whether it's relevant to decision-making or being left alone.
And so we're against discrimination.
It's very simple. So we have laws in this country, for instance, that have statues of limitations.
For instance... Let me stop you right there.
Nobody cares about the laws.
In the real world, people are going to react the way they react, and they don't give a fuck about the law.
So, you know, people are either going to kick you out of the restaurant or not or give you bad service and dirty looks or not hire you but they won't say it's because of your criminal record.
Although, what is the law on that?
Is the current law that if you have a criminal record you have to disclose it or you can choose not to?
What is the law on that? Well, I'm not an expert in here, and it very much depends on context.
Let's say you're applying for a job.
If you're applying for a job, can the employer ask that question?
I don't know what the current law is on that.
Have an initiative called Ban the Box where they want to make it illegal for employers to ask that question because they want to encourage people who have had felonies or prison sentences and have reformed to be able to be on a level playing field and get hired based on their skills and initiative rather than being discriminated against because they have to disclose something that may have happened a long time ago ago.
What if their crime was, let's say, a sex crime?
Let's say they had raped somebody.
Don't you think that the other...
I'm putting this on you like you have to solve all of the world's moral and ethical dilemmas, but would the employees of that company have a right to know that somebody who had a history of, let's say, sexual assault, which is unique, it's not like anything else, should they have a right to know that?
But hey, Scott, I'll just say these are very complex issues that a lot of people need to think about, but I'll put it this way.
You know, based on your writing, that humans are biased, right?
That we take information and we filter it through our own lens and decide how to interact.
So the question is, do we hide what people concede, we try to manipulate their bias so they act a certain way, or do you give them all the information, all the data points, so that they can have a better sense of how they want to make a decision?
And we're of the belief that transparency is better for everyone than trying to manipulate people by hiding information.
So let me do what I always caution people to do, which is to show both sides, because typically these conversations, somebody's an advocate for one thing or the other, so they're just going to say the costs or just going to say the benefits.
So if I could list the benefits, it would be massive improvement, I mean really substantial improvement in law enforcement, Catching people who need to get caught.
So that would be one benefit.
Another benefit would be more information.
People would simply have better, more information, deeper information about other people.
That could protect the people who get the information.
It could be bad for the person who's Whose privacy has been given up, because they might want to hide some things until later, but it's certainly good for the person who's getting the information.
That person has benefited at somebody else's expense.
And you make this point, which is fascinating, and I'm trying to think, throughout human history, can anybody come up with an example where more transparency was worse?
I think the worst case scenario, which you hinted at, is that when somebody has full privacy and somebody does not, that's your very worst situation, especially if the people who have the privacy are the government and the people who do not are the citizens.
That's horrible. But it's also just as bad if your neighbor knows everything about you, but you don't know anything about your neighbor.
So this is the sort of tool that sort of just opens Pandora's box and allows all of us to know way too much about each other.
And I've long predicted, in writing, I have predicted this a number of times, that partial privacy is the worst situation, where somebody has it and somebody doesn't.
The best situation, which we may never get to, people will resist because it's just natural to resist it, is where we all know enough about each other that we no longer give a shit about each other's flaws.
And I know that's a hard concept to hold, but if you actually know a lot about another person, and you know all their flaws, and they know a lot about you, and they also know your flaws, and they still say, hey, Scott, you want to go to lunch?
I am so cool with that person.
I'm as cool with that person as you could possibly be, because I know you, you know me.
If you're cool with me, and I'm cool with you, I'm going to understand you're a human being.
We've all messed up.
This is in part why I have the 20-year rule and the 48-hour rule about forgiving people's past behaviors.
I'm a real big proponent of judging people by who they are right now, not judging people by that thing they did that follows them around forever.
And I feel like we all have to get to that place, and this may force us there, because if you think about it, you wouldn't like anybody if you knew all of their mistakes.
You wouldn't like anybody.
It would be the end of friendships, the end of hiring, the end of marriage, everything.
But if you all know that the other is just as flawed as you are, different flaws, but it just exposes your humanity, you say, I think I'm okay with that.
By the way, just tying everything back to President Trump because we do that, I think the fact that all of his, let's say his personal life peculiarities, some would say their flaws, are so known that we're kind of comfortable with them.
There's something about knowing people's flaws that allows you to get past them.
It's the not knowing that can be kind of scary.
Given all that, what is the biggest pushback?
What do you think society is going to gel around to say, because you know there's going to be pushback.
What do you think they're going to focus on as the thing that's the big expense of this?
Well, I think the biggest complication is when people say the word privacy, it's really split into two things, anonymity and autonomy, or can you be hidden and can you be free?
And those can be separated.
Being hidden, maybe everyone knows everything about you, but the most important thing is, is just leave me alone.
And that's the complication, and that's where we need to work as a society.
I'm figuring out what the rules are about being hidden, which I think is being eliminated by technology, and being left alone, which I think as a government, as a society, we come together and figure out what the rules of engagement are.
You know, we're always afraid of the unknown.
And one of the things I like to point out is, if you could rewind to 20 years ago, And I said to any one of you, how would you feel if you lost all of your privacy about where you go and what you buy?
You know, all of your transactions and all of your physical location.
What if that was all knowable or known?
How would you feel? And most people would say, my God, I could not live in that world.
But we live in that world.
We live in a world where all of our transactions, many of us have our DNA already on some database.
I do. My DNA is in several databases, I would think.
And it doesn't really make much difference.
I still wake up, drink my coffee, have my Periscope, and unless I'm committing a crime and somebody's looking for me, it makes no difference.
So I think we're approaching a time when crime might just go away, because we would give up so much privacy, not to every single person, but at least to the government and law enforcement, should they want to check.
And I'm looking for the costs.
You know, I keep looking for the tragic...
societal costs of either me who has no privacy when I go outside people know who I am and the government knows everything I buy and everything they can probably tell everything I browse all of it and it doesn't seem to make any difference in my life now I don't know how unique that is I guess if I were involved in criminal activity it might make a pretty big difference but I'm not so I think for most of you you would be More afraid than you need to be.
It's just natural to be afraid of the unknown, and it's natural to be afraid of giving up any kind of privacy.
But what would you say is the most valid argument by the people who say, hey, there's some costs coming at us, some societal costs?
What is their best argument on the other side?
I'd like to ask this to see how unbiased you are.
Yeah, I think the best argument is always about historical data.
You know, what happens if someone accused me of something I didn't do or was found innocent?
What happens if it's a long time in the past?
Is that information readily available?
Should it be available? What friction is there?
And then who controls the past, right?
Who decides whether data can be erased or not shown?
And who shows, you know, who decides what can be shown?
And that...
Is a very difficult question to answer and there's a cost to doing it both ways.
There's a cost to letting people see everything that happened in the past and there's a cost to allowing some group to manipulate the past about what can be shown.
It's not an easy answer for that one.
So I'm seeing some good questions going by here in the comments.
People are saying, what if you're not a multi-millionaire?
I assume that's directed at me and pointing out that I don't have as much to lose.
So I would imagine if you were trying to get a foothold in life, get a job after some bad situation in your past, that would be pretty devastating.
But how do you see that evolving?
Do you think there's some people who will just be just totally left by the side of the road by this kind of technology because just nobody will interact with them because of something they did in the past?
So I have three teenagers and they upload hundreds of photos every week and they're interacting with hundreds of friends in Instagram and TikTok and Snap.
And it's interesting that they realize most of this stuff is transitory and even dumb.
And they do allow their friends to evolve and change positions.
And they're still friends with them, kind of like what you said, is that they can be authentic and vulnerable.
And out there without having long-term biases against these friends.
And the other thing that people need to understand is most people don't give a crap about you or all your flaws.
They really don't. I mean, I think we all like to have this huge ego that I am so important and that if anyone knows that I did something wrong 10 years ago, they're going to care.
Most people don't care.
And if someone does care, find a different friend.
It's very simple. Let me give you two other filters to look through.
Certainly that's one of the most important things that people don't care about you so much.
But let's say everybody knew that you were a furry.
I'm just making this up.
Let's say they knew that you like to dress up in animal costumes.
Sure. Now your neighbors would immediately say, I don't know if I can let the kids come over there anymore because you like to dress up in animal costumes.
But here's the thing people never think about.
All of the other people who dress up in animal costumes would also be able to identify you.
And next thing you know, your life is ten times better because you don't care too much about your neighbor who doesn't like your habit.
You just met a hundred friends that you're hanging out with and they all have the same interests.
So the first thing is, if you're the only person they know has some weird, you know, or let's say unusual, I'm not even going to call it weird, let's say non-standard practice, you can find all the other people like you.
And suddenly, life's actually better, not worse.
The second thing is, I'm going to give you this real life example.
My late stepson, when he was 18 or so, I got him one of the greatest jobs you could ever have, which is a job at a DJ company.
He was going to be an apprentice to be a DJ, kind of a cool life, etc.
He lasted one week on the job because somebody sent his boss a picture of somebody else who had taken a photo and put it on Snapchat in which he was in a room with some marijuana paraphernalia.
And the boss, quite reasonably, I don't disagree with the boss at all, said, I don't want any employees who have this kind of a picture on social media, and he fired him.
It was a great job, lasted one week and got fired.
Now, imagine if he also knew what was happening with his other employees.
What he would have found is he would have had to fire his whole damn staff.
Only one of them got caught.
Every one of them did something.
That would be roughly equivalent to this level of bad behavior, if you can call it that.
I would say that probably my stepson would have kept his job if your technology was ubiquitous.
I would agree with you. What did the boss do when he was in college and high school?
Because remember, the boss did not fire him for his behavior.
He fired him for being caught in his behavior.
It was very specific. It wasn't anything moral or ethical or anything.
He just said, that's not the reputation I want associated with my company because we deal with the public.
He would have soon found out that was pretty standard with all of his employees, I think.
All right, so give us some wrap-up here.
I've got a few more topics I want to share with my peeps.
So, look, I know on your show you talk a lot about America and great.
And the reason why America is the greatest and the most prosperous is because of our Bill of Rights.
And the First Amendment rights says we do not have to be hidden to be free.
We do not have to be hidden to say what we want, to share ideas, to share information, and to be with people.
And so if we just embrace that and understand that, that's why we're the greatest.
We don't need anonymity.
We can be free because of those Bill of Rights.
And Clearview helps us You know, make a happier, healthier, safer place.
I would even go so far as that it might help even race relations because you're going to start seeing people for what they do instead of your first impression.
No problem. And where can they find you on Twitter?
At Scalzo underscore David.
All right. Thank you so much for joining us, and we're going to talk about some other topics, and I'll talk to you later.
All right. That was fun.
This topic fascinates the heck out of me because it's going to change everything, but let's talk about some other stuff.
Let's talk about impeachment and Adam Schiff and all that stuff.
Scott Jennings wrote an interesting piece for CNN in which he notes that Adam Schiff is essentially doing Putin's work because if what we were worried about It's that Russia was trying to undermine trust in our system, and that's what we're worried about, right?
We're worried about those pesky Russians interfering with our elections and undermining our faith in our own system.
And as Scott Jennings points out, is there anybody who's eroding faith in our system faster than Adam Schiff?
I mean, that's all he's doing.
So we can't really care about eroding faith in our system If we're all engaged in doing exactly that, even just watching it, you're part of that.
As Joel Pollack pointed out, the Democrats are literally obstructing their own election because the Democrats, by forcing this impeachment vote, have taken several of the people running for president as Democrats off the field.
They basically are ceding Iowa To the people who are not already employed, Joe Biden and Buttigieg.
It turns out that being unemployed just turns into a big advantage for running for president if you're a Democrat.
I don't think we can claim that there's any kind of moral superiority going on with any of this impeachment stuff because everybody involved is doing nothing but chasing their own political gain.
You know in lawsuits how if you sue somebody, and I don't know if this works in every case, but if you sue somebody and it turns out that you're wrong and the other party wins, they can often, if not always, I don't know how this works, but they can often recoup their legal fees.
In other words, there should be a cost to impeaching and failing.
You feel me? If you impeach and win, then the side that starts the impeachment wins, politically and every other way, I guess.
But what if they try to impeach and fail?
What if they fail? Should there be any blowback, any cost to that?
And I think maybe there should be.
Because Tucker Carlson always says this, and I swear, I probably heard Tucker Carlson say this for a solid year, because it's one of those things he says regularly.
And every time I shook my head and I said to myself, Tucker, Tucker, that's crazy.
You know, I agree with a lot of stuff you say, but that's crazy.
And here's what he says. He says that every time the Democrats accuse the Republicans of doing something, it's because they themselves are doing it.
And I thought to myself, there's no logical reason that's true, and I haven't really noticed it.
And it's sort of a crazy thing to say.
And then I started paying attention.
And I don't know what causes it.
I don't know if there's a cause and effect.
I don't know if it's a perceptual thing.
But damn, it's consistent.
We're watching it again.
It is just time after time after time.
It is exactly that.
The Democrats are complaining that Trump has put our system at risk by degrading its trust and integrity.
But it's what they're doing.
They're spending 12 hours a day eroding our trust in our system.
They've actually just destroyed part of the Constitution while we were watching.
You know that part of the Constitution that said impeachment was a real solemn thing?
They just took a real, solemn tool, probably one of the most important, maybe the most important, it could be the most important part of the Constitution, that there's a way to remove the top person.
And they've degraded it.
They've turned it into a joke.
You can't make a cleaner argument that they're doing actively at this moment the thing they're accusing somebody of doing.
You've never seen a cleaner example of that.
I wish I could tell Why?
When Tucker says it, it makes me think that it's actually a strategy.
He doesn't say that, but it feels like a strategy even if it isn't, just the way it plays out.
I ask you this.
If Schiff's claim is that the only reason that Trump did what he did with Ukraine asking them for the investigation, the claim is that the only reason it was done It was for his personal political benefit, the only reason.
Now, that borders on crazy because there's obviously something to be worried about if your next president might have some blackmail material or some corruption entanglement, anything that's a problem over in Ukraine.
So obviously there's a little bit of interest or should be, but what is the standard For how much a decision by a government official, how much of it is politically motivated, in other words, personally beneficial, versus good for the country?
What if it's 90-10?
What if it's 90% for their own good and 10% for the public?
Can they be impeached?
What if it's 99-1?
What if 1% of it It's for the public good.
Yeah, it's good for the public too, in some trivial way, but 99% of it is just for me personally.
Is that the standard?
50-50? What if it's 49-51?
The point is, there is no rational, logical way to make a standard for how much, you know, what percentage of the reason is personal versus what percentage of the reason is good for the public.
Certainly, with this Biden and Burisma situation, it is trivially easy to show that there's some national interest.
You could argue how big that national interest is, but I don't think you can argue it exists.
It clearly exists.
Let me prove it to you.
Let me prove that there's some national interest in the Burisma-Biden thing.
This is an absolute proof, right?
I'm a citizen of the United States.
I have an interest in knowing what happened with Burisma and Biden.
I'm not lying. Absolutely, honestly, I'm interested in knowing that because I think it could be important.
If I had to guess, probably not that much, but I'm interested.
I would like to eliminate that as a risk.
Now, can it be said that there's a national interest?
Yes, I just proved it.
I proved that one out of 360 million Americans is legitimately interested in that question.
Would it matter if there are two of me?
Does it make a difference if there are a million people like me?
At what point can you say you've satisfied the question of national interest?
Because I'm part of the nation.
I just said I had an interest.
So there's some percentage This certainly has an interest.
So my point is you could not create a standard where you're trying to parse out what percentage is national interest and what percentage is personal.
And that's the entire case.
Their entire case is that that's a standard which they can recognize and act on.
And it can't be done.
It is rationally, logically impossible to parse those out.
Now, did our founders know that to be the case?
Yes, they did.
They designed a system in which those decisions of what percentage was personal and what percentage was for the nation, they designed a system where that doesn't matter.
Does not matter.
Because you can vote and you can change it to...
Lawyers just said mind reading.
Is there somebody...
I would love this to be true.
I just saw in the comments, and I assume that that means that the impeachment defense has started.
Are you talking about officially as part of the defense?
Did they blame Schiff and their side of mind reading?
Is that what happened? I'll have to check on that, but it looks like somebody's saying that.
We'll look for confirmation there.
Anyway, so it's a standard that can't be enforced, which is what percentage was for your own good.
Let me ask you this.
There are two things that people say just like it's certainly true, and it could be, but I'm going to push back on both of them.
One is that Russia wants to undermine the trust in our system.
So that's one claim. Another claim is that China has this strategy of something called total war, in which it's not just military, but they're in a current war with the United States, goes this line of thinking, in which they are trying every possible avenue to damage the United States and lessen us for their own benefit.
And that total war would include everything from spying and stealing intellectual property, sending us fentanyl, you name it.
It's like everything, messing with our elections, just everything.
It's all on the table.
So the two claims are that Russia and China are two biggest rivals in terms of military prowess, that they're engaged in a current war with us.
I say, I'm not convinced.
I'm not convinced.
Now, I do believe that all the things we talk about are probably relatively true.
Russia probably hacks us.
China does all the things that it's been said, but do they have some kind of a comprehensive plan or strategy that starts at the top?
It only counts if it's the leaders of the country who want to do this.
Are the leaders of the country saying to themselves, if I can degrade trust in the United States by 20%, Russia's GDP will go up?
What? How do they connect the dots?
Can somebody explain to me what a rational Putin or a rational President Xi, what would they actually be thinking in which this would be smart?
Because I can't think of it.
Now, if they were really dumb people, then you could explain it.
You'd say, oh, they're so dumb, they think they're going to put the United States on a business with their clever tricks, and then once we're on a business, they'll take over, and they'll have all our resources, and then they'll be richer or something.
Do you think they're thinking that?
I mean, it doesn't pass any kind of a sniff test.
We are clearly in a world of abundance.
Meaning that we don't really have shortages of stuff.
We just have systems that are not optimized to get that stuff to the right people in some cases.
But we don't really have a shortage of anything.
And so when you move from a world in which you have shortages of stuff, and maybe you need a war.
Because if you don't have food, you don't have resources, maybe you need a war.
But if everybody can get everything they want, which is our current world, If they play their systems right and they work their economy right, what reason do we have to be anything like an enemy to China or anything like an enemy to Russia and vice versa?
There simply is no reason.
There isn't. It seems to me that somebody like a President Trump could change the frame on this.
Let me suggest a frame.
I believe that the United States, Russia and China have a common enemy.
Maybe more than one.
And the common enemy is anything that disrupts the system.
In other words, anything that could put any one of the three of us out of business is something that all three of us probably ought to fight against.
For example, how about a major pandemic?
Wouldn't we be on the same side?
I think so. Don't you think Russia and the United States are going to fight as hard as we can?
To help China stop this latest coronavirus thing?
I think we will. We've got a common enemy.
There's no such thing as one side wins in this thing.
What about climate change?
Now, some of you say it's a hoax, blah, blah, blah, but you can at least agree that you want cleaner environment and cheaper energy.
Don't we have a common interest there to make sure the planet doesn't get destroyed?
Don't we have a common interest in making sure that a terrorist state doesn't attack any one of us?
Don't we have a common interest in that?
What if aliens attack?
We definitely have a common interest there.
My point is that we should reframe what Russia, China, and US care about.
We should be on the same team.
Instead of spending all our money and wasting it being enemies of each other, Why don't we find some common enemies?
Some we can fight on the same team for, because there's just no strategic advantage to being enemies and picking in each other like this, if it's happening.
Some of it may be fake news.
I would also like to know, what is it the United States is doing to Russia and doing to China that we, the public, don't know about?
Are we poking them just as hard as they're poking us?
And what's our reason? Has anybody ever told us our reason?
Is it revenge?
Is it to make sure they don't poke us so hard?
We'll poke you if you poke us, so that's how we keep you in check.
What's the reason? Maybe there's a good one.
I'm not even saying there's no reason.
I just feel like I should know it.
As a citizen of this country, can somebody explain to me why the countries that absolutely should be on our team Fighting with us as hard as they can against common challenges, why are we at each other?
It just doesn't make any sense.
I think maybe that'll change.
Maybe we'll rethink that.
Let's talk about Schiff a little more.
He's talking about future crimes of the imagination.
Schiff wants to get rid of President Trump, according to his eloquent speeches that he's been giving.
To the Senate, he wants to get rid of President Trump, not so much because of what he's done, because what he's done has no measurable impact.
So everything he's done so far, or is alleged to do, everything that Schiff and team alleges President Trump has done, if you added it all together, you couldn't fill a tablespoon.
There's no measurable Negative in anything the President has already done.
And so, the Democrats, knowing that there's no measurable damage at all, are trying to make the case that it's the future.
Somebody says, you're kidding.
No, I'm not kidding.
Do you see any measurable harm that has come from the President's actions?
Nobody's even alleging any.
Nobody has made the case.
Nobody has said, we lost this money, we lost this deal.
We got attacked.
None. There's zero alleged cost.
They have to make the case that this president is just going to get worse.
We're going to encourage him.
We're going to be encouraging this president to future unspecified bad behavior.
What could be less American?
Is there anything less American than trying to remove somebody from a job For the future potential problems?
I don't think the country is going to buy that, but maybe they will.
This is how Schiff argues it.
He said, quote, Can you have the least bit of confidence, talk about Trump, that he'll stand up and protect our national interest over his own?
You know you can't, which makes him dangerous to this country.
Really? You don't trust?
That the president, who will be watched more than anybody has ever been watched, including when he made the phone call, he had all kinds of witnesses, and he released the transcript.
It's the most transparent presidency you've ever had in your life.
He has already lost all of his privacy, essentially.
So, are any of you worried about The President doing something so purely personal that it would damage the country?
Because I don't think he has any incentive for that.
What incentive does the President have to do a bad job as President?
Let me frame it that way to show you how ridiculous it is.
Schiff is arguing that in the future, the President would be in a position In which he would choose, he would rationally choose, according to Schiff, what is good for Trump personally and is bad for the country.
Can you see any imaginary world in which President Trump could even imagine a situation where doing the worst job you could do as a president would benefit him personally?
Because he would allegedly be doing this selfish thing.
What kind of world is that?
The president is watched all the time.
If he did something that was purely for him and had no benefit whatsoever, not even one that you could argue, that would be terrible for his legacy.
Why would he do that? It doesn't make any sense.
The funniest thing about it was when Schiff was getting choked up with emotion.
And all of the Schiff lovers on CNN and other networks were saying that his presentation was emotional and passionate.
And they were saying that that was a positive because he was so passionate and emotional.
And I looked at it and all I saw was a bad actor trying to act like he was emotionally distraught.
Did any of that look genuine?
Yeah, he almost cried.
To me, that didn't even look slightly believable.
Now, I hope he's better at writing screenplays than he is at acting, but seriously?
Is there anybody in this country who was so stupid that they would watch those days of presentations and at the end see that little fake emotional thing and imagine that that was real?
Could anybody imagine that was real?
Oh my God! I don't think so.
I would like to defend myself from the future problems I'm going to have.
I have a crime in progress right now.
Crime against humanity.
Let's see if I can show it to you.
It's better as a visual.
So, in order to understand this, what you have to know is that After the Dilbert comics are drawn, they are sent off to my syndication company who has, I think it's a third party that they hire, and the third party adds the color.
So you can see that the strip, well, you can't see it, but let me see if I can lower the temperature on this so you can see it.
Take it way down.
And so all the characters are filled in with color.
As you can sort of see here.
So I actually don't see the colored version until it runs.
So the first time I see it colorized is when it runs on the internet and in papers.
And I was tweeting the sound today and I noticed that whoever adds the color had decided that the character who's talking to Dilbert Should display some diversity, because most of the characters are generic white people, except for Ashok, the intern.
And they decided to add a little diversity.
Now, I think to myself, good choice.
Especially when I have one of the non-regular characters.
Let's have that character as somebody who's not a generic white guy.
Show a little flavor in the strip.
That's a good idea, right? The person they decided to add the darker skinned color to is the character that I had decided to depict as an idiot.
That's right. So my decision was that the second character would be the idiot.
And Dilbert would call him out for being an idiot.
I'll read you the comic. So the character comes up behind Dilbert and says, this data can mean only one thing.
And then Dilbert says, actually, it can mean any one of about 17 things.
And then the other character says, then why can I only think of one?
And Dilber says, please don't make me answer that.
Now, of course, you may find some correlation with current events in this, but I promise you, I was not the one who decided that the dumb guy would have the darker skin.
Can we put that on the record?
Not me. All right.
So I've accidentally been turned into a racist by somebody I don't know who Decided to colorize that comic.
So there you go. The simultaneous sip did happen, but I'm sorry that some of you missed it.
Why are we using leftist framing?
Yeah, well, I'm just telling you what the public is going to say.
All right. It's all right.
No big deal. Well, those of you who say it's no big deal don't know the history that cartoonists experience.
When I introduced Ashok the intern, so if you follow the Dilbert strip, you know that the intern is named Ashok, A-S-O-K, which is the less common spelling.
It's usually A-S-H-O-K, but I knew somebody I worked with.
Who spelled it differently, A-S-O-K, so I named my character after that.
Now, Ashok was born in India, but he's an American citizen in the East Strip, and as soon as I introduced that character, what do you think happened?
That's right. The African American community attacked the newspapers and said, why is this African American character so stupid?
When all of the other characters are smarter.
Now, first of all, it wasn't and isn't an African-American character, so the basis of the complaint was wrong.
It was somebody born in India who was an American citizen.
Now, secondly, it's not the dumb character in the strip.
I make a comic strip in which all of the characters are acting dumb on different days.
Sometimes they're all acting dumb.
It's only a comic about dumb people.
That's all it is. Everybody in the comic, except Dogbird, I guess, who's not even a human, is dumb.
It's a whole comic about dumb people.
And what do I do? I introduce one character who's got browner skin, who's an Indian American, and the African American community tries to get me canceled.
We're not even talking about them in any way whatsoever.
Now, many people have asked, and actually a lot of black fans of the strip say, can you add an African-American character?
I would love to.
I would love to.
Do you think that I'm perfectly happy having a comic strip with a whole bunch of white people in it in 2020?
Absolutely not. I am not happy with that.
It isn't... Because the strip...
It's designed to mirror civilization, and it doesn't.
If you go to Silicon Valley, are you going to see a bunch of only white faces in the technical staff?
No, you are not.
You're not going to see only a bunch of white faces.
You're going to see the whole world represented there.
My strip is completely out of touch with the real world on diversity.
I would love to fix that.
Can I? No.
We don't live in a world in which I can introduce a character easily who would be an African-American regular character and have any bad flaws.
Because to make a comic character interesting, they have to have flaws.
It's the flaws that make it a comic.
Dilbert is... He's socially inept and he's a little too trusting.
He's gullible. He's got his flaws.
Alice is angry and combative and Wally's lazy and Ashok.
I tried to give Ashok the interim the least objectionable flaw.
It's the least smallest little flaw a human can have in experience because he's young.
That's it. Ashok's only flaw Is that he's not yet very experienced because he's young.
And still, I almost got canceled for that little flaw.
So imagine me introducing a black character into the strip, and I just think I'm going to have a good time.
I'm adding a little diversity, trying to give people what they want.
And the first time that black character exhibits any kind of a flaw, doesn't even matter what it is, I'm cancelled.
That's it. So that's the world we live in.
You could have your diversity, or you could have your outrage, but you can't have both.
