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Dec. 28, 2024 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams

01:28:13

Episode 2703 CWSA 12/28/24

Find my Dilbert 2025 Calendar at: https://dilbert.com/ God's Debris: The Complete Works, Amazon https://tinyurl.com/GodsDebrisCompleteWorks Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Politics, US Infrastructure Compromised, US Infrastructure Cyber Warfare, 2FA Compromised, Deportee App, CNN Abby Phillip, Biden Crime Family Evidence, Fake News Ratings Crash, J6 Political Prisoners, J6 Class Action Lawsuit, Imminent AI AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, Elon Musk, H-1B System Abuse, Professional Organized X Trolls, Troll Wave Pattern Recognition, H-1B Muddy Thinking, Demographic Hiring, H-1B Reform, Climate Model Assumptions, Scott Adams ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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	At a better time.
	But if you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or gels, a stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
	Fill it with your favorite liquid.
	I like coffee.
	Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
	The dopamine hit of the day.
	The thing that makes everything better.
	It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
	Go.
	Oh, well, I thought it was Sunday until just recently. - Finally.
	I've been told it's Saturday.
	Do we have agreement on that?
	Today is Saturday?
	All right.
	Good.
	Good.
	We're starting out with complete agreement.
	I do not like the...
	All right.
	That's better.
	Let's fix that.
	All right.
	First of all, A minor announcement.
	I'm gonna try to use, well, two things.
	I'm gonna try to curse less in the coming year.
	I won't call it a resolution, but year-end's a good time to start.
	And if I do, I'm going to use AI to remove the curse words.
	So YouTube will first, you know, it's live streaming, so any curses will be in there, but we can quickly replace them.
	There are several AI programs that you just run the video through and it takes out the curse words.
	So we're going to play with that.
	I don't know if that'll work.
	But in theory, you should be able to get a curse-free version of everything, at least on YouTube.
	And then I suppose we can load that up to locals as well.
	All right.
	Apparently some researchers are building an AI system to talk to animals.
	And why it matters is because it could aid human knowledge of our world.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Talking to animals.
	That's good.
	But it could provide a compelling case for giving animals broader legal rights.
	So, do you want to live in that world where the animals can talk so they start pestering for broader rights?
	You know, it's bad enough that your job is being taken from somebody From another country.
	Do you want to lose your job to a ferret or a giraffe or something?
	No.
	Much worse.
	We don't want our animals to talk.
	They'll be taking our jobs.
	I'm just joking.
	They're not going to take your jobs.
	But we'll talk about that other thing.
	So, yeah.
	I want that so I can talk to my dog.
	Meanwhile, according to CBS News, homelessness jumped 18% this year.
	And they say it's, the title says, it's driven mostly by lack of affordable housing.
	How do you think they'd know that?
	So they're quite confidently claiming that homelessness is up 18%.
	Now that part they can probably just count.
	You know, it misses the people who are, you know, homeless but staying with a friend.
	But the actual outdoor homeless, they can just count it, and it's up by 18%.
	But then they go, it's mostly because of a lack of affordable housing.
	How do they know that?
	Do you believe that they did a survey of just the people who were added to the homeless to know that just the increase was mostly people who couldn't afford houses?
	Do you think they did that?
	No, I don't.
	I think they just wrote a headline that said, Homelessness is way up and also rents are high.
	Yeah, it must be because the rents are high.
	It might be, but everything we've seen historically is that when you go to this same group of people and you say, hey, I got a deal for you.
	We will subsidize your indoor living.
	You're now saved.
	You can leave the streets.
	You're not homeless anymore.
	We'll pay for it.
	And then they say, but do I have to follow your rules indoors?
	Well, I mean, you have to be like a regular person, yeah.
	So I can't be smoking meth and doing fentanyl?
	Well, we'd rather you didn't do that.
	Well, then I think I'd rather just stay outside.
	So the people who have mental problems and the people who are drug addicts They're not outdoors because there is no way to be indoors, even if somebody else pays for it.
	They're outdoors because, all things considered, they prefer it.
	So, do you think CBS News simply guessed what the reason is, or did they do a survey that they didn't mention in the article?
	Now, if they mentioned it, I didn't see it.
	So, how could you make a claim like that without referencing how you came up with it?
	So they could be right.
	I just don't think that they did any research to know if they're right.
	As you know, Trump has asked the Supreme Court to delay the start of the TikTok ban.
	Do you remember when you said to me, not you, but people said to me, that TikTok should not be banned because of free speech?
	And I said, but China can manipulate it, so that's a big risk.
	Well, how big of a risk is it?
	Well, you know, two things to say.
	Number one, if Trump gets his way, I think a conservative group of investors will buy TikTok.
	Can you imagine a world in which X is owned by Musk and, hypothetically, TikTok gets bought by some American right-leaning entity?
	That would give the political right, or at least the reasonable middle, a lot of clout, it seems like.
	And it would reduce the risk of China manipulating it.
	But is there really a risk that China, good old China, is there really a risk that they would do some sneaky thing with an online thing?
	Come on.
	Come on.
	It's China.
	Has China ever done anything that would make you suspect, hmm, if they had some weapon they could use in the cyber world, would they use it?
	Of course not.
	There's no evidence whatsoever that China has any interest in bothering us with any cyber...
	Wait, my next story is apparently China has penetrated all of our inter-telecommunications networks with a cyber attack called Salt Typhoon, and they just totally attacked our ninth US telecom company.
	Hackers have access to your private text calls and even identified the owners of targeted devices.
	So, yeah.
	Apparently, China has penetrated all of our American important infrastructure.
	Let me say it again.
	China already controls all of our digital infrastructure.
	Meaning that they can turn off anything in our country that's big and matters.
	All of it.
	And when I say they made these attacks, your common sense is telling you, oh, they made an attack and then we found it and then we got rid of them.
	You know, it's just whack-a-mole.
	But, you know, occasionally they'll get through and then you get rid of them.
	No, that's not what happened.
	What happened is China burrowed into these companies and they're there permanently.
	Meaning, we can't find them and we can't get rid of them.
	They have permanent control over all of our important networks for everything.
	Why?
	Well, Christopher Wray says that their cyber efforts are 50 to 1 bigger than us, and they're absolutely determined to own everything in the United States in terms of controlling our cyber infrastructure, and they've already done it.
	It's not a future risk.
	They already own us.
	Now, the part we don't know is, is there mutually assured destruction?
	Meaning, is America in all of China's important systems?
	Well, I hope so.
	I hope so, but I don't know.
	And I think the only thing that keeps us from a catastrophic, you know, total cyber crash that we can't recover from is that we do the same to China.
	Because we would know it was them, so we'd pay them back.
	And they can't afford that.
	So it's mutually assured destruction.
	The cyber warfare has reached a level where the only thing that keeps you from doing the biggest of the attacks, where they really try to take down the network, the only thing keeping it from happening is that we do it to them.
	That's it.
	We don't have any defense against it.
	So there's that.
	China, of course, denies involvement.
	But here's what one expert said.
	Apparently, there's some new updated guidance from the Department of Homeland Security that just has one little scary line in it that says they discourage companies from using two-part authentication by text.
	You know when you're signing up for something and it says, we'll text your phone to make sure it's really you?
	The Department of Homeland Security says that's not safe because your text messages are being read by China.
	So, two-party authentication is not safe.
	Now, that should tell you everything you know.
	If China can read all of your text messages and have some kind of control over your second-party authentication, they're into everything.
	There wouldn't be any exception, I don't think.
	So there's that.
	That's according to the AP News and Fox.
	Mexico built an app for the potential deportees in this country.
	So if you're a Mexican, Non-American citizen and you're at risk of being deported.
	Mexico wanted to give you an app so that as soon as you found out you were going to get arrested, if you knew in advance, you could push a button and it would warn at least your family, but it would warn other people.
	As the Amuse account on X points out, that might be one thing they didn't think about.
	Apparently, this app gives the American government the ability to find all of the non-citizens, because you can just figure out who has the app, and then you can figure out their location and just go pick them up.
	Now, I'm not sure I have the whole story.
	It might be that it's not that simple.
	But don't you believe our government could, with some legal authority, figure out, you know, where any kind of phone made by an American company, you know, what the app is and what the GPS is?
	So I don't know that this is completely true.
	So there might be a little more to it that I don't know.
	But if it's true, it would be funny that the Mexican government created an app that the United States used to find all the illegal people.
	Anyway, Jonathan totally points out that the media is, as he says, struggling to ignore the corruption of the Biden scandal by insisting there's no evidence.
	I saw this live when it happened, and I just shook my head.
	So Abby Phillip on CNN, who's a promoter of the Fine People Hoax, if you want to know who she is, if I tell you she's a big promoter of the Fine People Hoax, That's everything you need to know.
	But she said the other day, maybe yesterday, I'm still waiting to see the proof of Joe Biden enriching himself.
	I take it that his brothers and son perhaps made some money, blah, blah, blah.
	And Jonathan Turley's I'm informing us that if you enrich your family members, that's still the crime family, right?
	If Joe Biden did something that made his brother and his son rich, or just made money, that's still the same crime.
	It doesn't matter if he personally got it, but he also personally got it.
	If you ask me, this is the most well-documented series of events in America.
	We know exactly what Hunter Biden did.
	We know who Joe met with.
	We know when.
	We know the entire flow of money from, you know, let's say, dark Chinese sources right through the shell accounts and right into Joe Biden's pocket.
	We know all of it.
	The only reason that we're sort of ignoring it is that there are people like Abby Phillip who want to pretend That somehow there's nothing there.
	But they have to do that because they also pretended they couldn't tell that he had dementia.
	So imagine the situation with the fake news that they're just being beaten up like crazy, just getting beaten up for hiding the fact that Biden was obviously not mentally capable.
	And now, they're also hiding the fact that the Biden crime family was not just a thing.
	It's the most well-documented thing we've ever seen ever.
	It's so well-documented.
	So if they have to admit that they intentionally ignored all the solid evidence of the Biden crime family, that's on top of ignoring the other massively obvious thing that he had, mental decline.
	So I can see why they dig in and not have a second thing.
	But how are they doing?
	Let's see.
	How are their ratings?
	Let's see.
	The AP reports, and the Gateway Pundit was talking about this, that MSNBC was down 54% from pre-election.
	CNN is down 45% from pre-election.
	So I think that's just telling you that people got all they needed from the election stuff, and then when the election was over, they had less interest, so they watched less news, right?
	That makes sense.
	You know, you're all interested before the election.
	That's when all the fighting over who's going to win.
	But then when it's over, well, it's just Christmas and moving on to other things.
	So it completely makes sense that temporarily, you know, temporarily there'd be a little lull in their ratings, right?
	So while CNN was down 45% and MSNBC was down 54%, obviously over at Fox News they would also be Up 13%.
	Up 13%.
	Who's saying this?
	Oh, Neera?
	Yeah.
	So, people are mad at me because I agreed with somebody who had other opinions I don't agree with.
	Does that make sense?
	Is it okay if I agree with one thing and disagree with other things?
	Apparently that's not allowed, right?
	You have to just be in a team, and you have to act stupid.
	So if I have to be stupid to be part of a team, I don't want to be on the team.
	If I can be smart and be on the team, I'll do it, if it's a good team.
	All right, so I think that maybe the decline in MSNBC and CNN... Could be partly because they're negative, meaning that all they're talking about is the end of the world because Trump won.
	And if you go to Fox News, they're literally talking about the golden age and how everything's going to be fixed pretty soon.
	Which would you rather watch?
	Everything's bad or everything's good?
	I think there's a reason that Fox News is doing well.
	But secondly, once the dust settled, you could see that the Fox News pundits were largely correct in their predictions, that Trump had the better ideas and it looked like he was going to win.
	And then you would look at the MSNBC and CNN reporting and the pundits and you'd say, were all of them wrong?
	Or were they lying?
	Or were they all wrong?
	But you would certainly know by now that if you got your knowledge about the world from two of those sources, that two of those sources were completely wrong about everything.
	So maybe people noticed.
	Maybe that's why the ratings are down.
	Anyway, the Gateway Pundit says that the January 6th political prisoners are going to launch a $50 billion class action lawsuit against the Department of Justice.
	And here's one sentence from that report.
	Gateway Pundit is reporting on that.
	According to Federal Watchdog, the plaintiffs were, quote, hunted down like animals by the FBI for peacefully protesting.
	Hunted.
	Hmm.
	So...
	I'd like to point out, as often as possible, that in 2020, before the election, I said that if Biden won, Republicans would be hunted.
	Can I take a victory lap?
	I was mercifully mocked.
	My post on that was taken and put into the media, in a number of left-wing things, just to laugh at it.
	Just to laugh at me.
	They never said, here are the reasons why you might be wrong.
	They just mocked me for saying that Republicans would be hunted.
	And then they were.
	Not every Republican, obviously.
	That wouldn't have been possible.
	But if the January 6th prisoners actually won this class action, and I'm thinking they would have a low chance of winning, are there any lawyers here who could weigh in on this?
	Are you a lawyer who could say, huh, I think they have a chance to get that, or is it more of a sort of a Hail Mary, they're not really going to win that?
	What do you think?
	I don't know.
	But if they do win, they're going to get reparations.
	They're going to get reparations.
	And what happens to the black Americans who are looking for slavery reparations if 1,500 largely white Americans get paid reparations for January 6th?
	It's not going to make everybody happy.
	It would make me happy.
	I'd be very happy if they got what they asked for.
	I wouldn't want to pay for it.
	I guess I'd be the one paying for it, as well as taxpayers.
	So I don't want to pay for it.
	But if you ask me, do they deserve compensation?
	I would say yes.
	Yes, I do.
	So the question of, do they deserve compensation from the government?
	Hell yes.
	Just as much as the Japanese-American citizens who were rounded up under FDR. Yes.
	Yes and yes.
	I think that if several generations went by, I probably would say, I think you need to let that go.
	So just so I'm being consistent.
	There is sometimes time matters.
	These people are in the middle of their lives.
	So I think reparations are appropriate.
	So Elon Musk predicts that we'll have AGI sooner than other people.
	He said AGI is artificial general intelligence.
	What we have now is just AI that's sort of pattern recognition, AI. The general intelligence would be smarter than people.
	And Elon said one could debate whether it'll be smarter than any human by the end of next year or if it'll take two or three years.
	But it won't be more than five.
	He obviously knows a lot more than I do and most of you do on AI and what's possible and what they're working on.
	But to the best of my knowledge, nobody has any kind of breakthrough or technology that would even put you on the path to AGI.
	So what I don't know is if you just kept doing the large language models and maybe you tweak it a little bit, do they ever get to the point where they're as good as AGI?
	Or is that a completely different architecture and chips and everything else?
	And nobody's invented it, so it's not like we're 1% of the way there because we don't even know how to get there.
	So I'm not going to bet against Elon Musk on AI.
	Is that fair?
	more.
	But I also don't see any way that this is going to happen.
	And I'm trying to square this with what Naval predicts, that AI will never be smarter than collectively humans, I guess.
	I don't think I'm expressing his opinion quite right, but I'd love to know if they're on the same page.
	I guess that's a better way to say it.
	Because I've been commonsensically, which means I don't have deep knowledge of the field, but commonsensically I can't see how we'll get to computers being smarter than humans in ways that we care about.
	Certainly it'll know more and it'll operate faster and it'll find patterns faster.
	So it'll do all the things that computers can do faster than humans.
	So that's obvious.
	But will it be able to reason the way we do?
	Because Even humans can't agree what that would look like.
	In a few minutes, I'm going to talk about what happened with the debate about foreign workers.
	And the one thing you should take away from it is if AGI weighed into that argument, what would its opinion be?
	Just think about it.
	If AGI, this advanced general intelligence, artificial, if it weighed into that argument, which viewpoint would it take?
	And then if it took a viewpoint, would the people on the other side say, well, yeah, darn, I thought I had a good point.
	But now the artificial general intelligence, which is so much smarter than me, It has told me that my views on this topic are wrong, so I guess I'll change my mind, because the AJS is just so much smarter.
	In no world can that happen.
	In the human world, the people who are on the other side from whatever the AGI says will say, you better fix that AGI. And by the way, did you tweak that thing just to give you what you wanted?
	I don't even believe that's AGI. I think you've got your finger on the scale.
	I think AGI is fake.
	I don't even think it's real.
	I think you're saying it's AGI, but you're really telling it what to say so that you can blame the AGI instead of the people behind who programmed it.
	You frauds.
	I want you all dead and in jail.
	That's how the real world works.
	Do you see some world in which AGI is going to wade into one of these important, important issues, and then we're all going to say, oh, yeah, well, I hadn't thought about it that way, but now that I see how much smarter you are, yeah.
	If you can watch the debate about engineers and engineering, and you see Elon Musk's view of Far more complete than almost any of our views.
	Definitely knows more than we do about not only the foreign worker situation, partly because he was one, and certainly knows about what their fate is and how soon before they're replaced by AI, etc.
	If you disagree with Elon Musk, just think how different that would be if you were just disagreeing with AGI. It'd be the same.
	It'd be exactly the same.
	If you plop Elon Musk into the middle of a national debate in which he knows more than you do and he's way smarter than you, most of you.
	He's way smarter than me, right?
	If he's way smarter and he knows more than I do about the topic, shouldn't I just agree with him?
	If it were AGI, would I just say, oh, well, you know more than I do.
	I'll just agree with you.
	I don't think it works that way.
	If you can't trust somebody who is way smarter than you and way more well-informed, why would you ever trust AGI? So it might be technically possible that AGI could be way smarter than humans.
	We will never know it because we will argue that it must be flawed.
	Do any of you remember when GPS in your car was brand new and it would tell you to go somewhere and you would argue with it?
	That's the wrong way.
	Sometimes you were right.
	It would be like that.
	Anyway, let's talk about the big brouhaha, of which I think I caused a lot of it yesterday.
	I'll tell you all the things that I know to be true, and then I'm going to ask you some provocative questions so that you can think deeper about the subject of foreign workers in the United States.
	Now, let me just give you...
	Let me tell you how the news talked about it.
	So Kelly Rismond writing for The Independent...
	He said that, Musk says, the hateful, unrepentant racists must be removed from a Republican Party.
	Now, he did say that.
	The hateful, unrepentant racists must be removed.
	How would you remove anybody from a party that anybody can sign up for?
	So, I don't know that that's not really a thing, is it?
	How would you remove anybody from your party?
	I don't know what that means.
	But let me interpret it.
	I'm going to use my reading comprehension to sort out what it must mean.
	What it must mean is we who are not in that small group should not tolerate them or give them oxygen, I suppose.
	That seems fair.
	Then the report says that Scott Adams, creator of the comics for Dilbert, chimed in.
	Chimed in?
	Why is it that everybody else is just giving their opinion, but I'm chiming in?
	Am I not to be taken seriously?
	I'm just a chimer-inner?
	Hey, can I be more than that?
	So, whenever I get introduced as the comic strip guy, and then they say I'm involved in any kind of important question, they always assume that I'm bringing only my cartooning experience to the question, and I chimed in.
	So, chimed in.
	So, Kelly Risman, don't appreciate that language.
	Anyway, not that it bothers me, really, one way or the other.
	It's just the word you wouldn't use for anybody else.
	I don't think you would say, Elon Musk chimed in, right?
	You wouldn't say that.
	You would just say he had an opinion.
	Okay.
	And what I said was, in a post, I said that the MAGA Republicans are taking a page from Democrats on how to lose elections while feeling good about themselves, which I did.
	And then Elon commented on that, and he said, yes, and those contemptible fools must be removed from the Republican Party root and stem.
	Those contemptible fools.
	And then a lot of Republicans, or they might have been paid trolls, I can't tell, pretended that they heard what he said differently than what he said.
	So when he talked about those contemptible fools, a whole bunch of people said he's calling everybody in MAGA a contemptible fool, which of course he isn't.
	And anybody with an IQ over 80 knows it.
	But in these internet fights, we always pretend that if anybody says there are three people in your group who did something wrong, why are you saying every person in my group did something wrong?
	All right.
	So there should be a word, there should be like a label for that so that you could dismiss people who do that.
	Probably half of all the people who thought they were debating with me yesterday were pretending they couldn't tell the difference Between saying some members of the group are unaligned, according to somebody's opinion, versus all members of the group are defective.
	How many of you thought that Elon Musk was talking about MAGA in general when he made any of his comments?
	Now, I know my audience is keyed in, and they know that he wasn't talking about them.
	But so many people just pretended.
	I think Laura Loomer might have been one of them.
	It was ridiculous.
	So, that's also a Democrat thing.
	So, Republicans are sort of taking a page out of the Democrat playbook of, you know, losing but feeling good.
	Now, what I mean by losing but feeling good is that the question, there were, I think, at least three separate conversations and people were conflating them so they could make irrational criticisms of other people.
	So that would be me like saying, oh, you like sunny weather, do you?
	But you also like toasters.
	So, I mean, all right, never mind.
	So then when Elon Musk clarified in a follow-up post that when he said contemptible fools, he was referring to, quote, those in the Republican Party who are hateful, unrepentant racists.
	They will absolutely be the downfall of the Republican Party if they are not removed.
	Now, the first thing you need to know Is that the conversation on X was just flooded with professional or organized trolls.
	The professional and organized trolls sometimes might be Democrats sending people to cause trouble.
	Might be somebody in the Republican Party who's got something to prove.
	But they were obvious trolls, and they were the ones who were most racist.
	So the first thing you need to know is that a lot of the people pretending to be MAGA-oriented racists probably could have been fake.
	They could have been sent by somebody to make the MAGA people fight with each other and look bad.
	There are definitely...
	Some members of the Republican mega world that some of us would call racist.
	That's obviously true.
	And Democrats as well and independents as well.
	Basically every group in America.
	And no exceptions.
	Every group has its racists in it.
	So that's not the question.
	The question is whether the people we were seeing yesterday represented anything but trolls.
	And I don't know.
	I actually don't know If even one of the really negative comments that I got yesterday were real.
	But when I posted that people should be aware that a lot of what looks like disagreement online, it literally just paid trolls trying to make it look like there's disagreement online.
	Now, when I said that, I didn't have proof because I was just doing pattern recognition.
	And somebody asked me, how can you tell somebody who's a troll, Scott?
	I can tell, and I'm not going to tell you how in public.
	Because if I told you, they would change.
	Because it wouldn't be hard to not look like a troll.
	They just don't know that they're looking like trolls.
	So once you notice the pattern, you can go, oh, I see what's going on.
	So I noticed the pattern because I've been in this before.
	So in 2016, I was massively attacked by paid trolls.
	Later, we learned who paid them and that they were organized and that they did go after people like me.
	So it seemed like I was just maybe imagining it in 2016, but it was confirmed.
	It was exactly what I thought.
	And since then, there have been other waves of trolls, and now I recognize them.
	I go, oh, it's one of those.
	I got it.
	So to my comment that the trolls might be making it look like there's more of a disagreement than there is...
	Elon Musk weighed in and said that, yes, they had detected massive organized trolls and that they were, quote, nuking them.
	All right, so let me talk to this guy in all caps.
	We are not fake.
	We are not racist.
	We want all immigration stoked.
	And all these systems, stop pretending you don't know what is going on.
	Now, I'm going to use you as exhibit A of the idiots online.
	Do you think that I have pretended that I don't understand that the H-1B system and the related systems are being gamed and that they're not giving us what we want?
	I say it out loud and I say it often, but if you just saw one post that I made and it didn't happen to have that topic included, you might say to yourself, why doesn't he understand that the real issue is that the current system is broken?
	Let me say this as clearly as I possibly can.
	I'm pretty sure everybody knows the current system is broken.
	I have not yet met one person who was unaware of that.
	It's not me.
	I'm not aware of that.
	I'm not unaware that the system is broken.
	It's the most common things people are saying.
	So when you were screaming at me in the comments in all caps, had you done some research to figure out what my opinion was?
	Or did you think that if I was talking about A, I'd never heard of B? Because sometimes you can talk about things without mentioning everything else in the world.
	Sometimes you can just talk about the thing that you're interested in, and other people can talk about the things they're interested in, and they might be related, but I don't really need to talk about everything when I talk about one thing.
	So let me talk about one thing and show you how this works.
	Here's some of the things that we know for sure, and then I'm going to tell you some things we don't know for sure.
	We know for sure that if you have a system, and we don't, And we don't.
	We don't have a system.
	We do not have a system.
	But if we did, that could get us the top 0.01 engineers, and that's it, just that, that we would be a much stronger country.
	We'd be safer.
	We'd have more money.
	And the total number of 0.01 engineers that would enter the country would be so small It would have no impact on the average person getting a job or anybody else because they would literally be filling positions that nobody could fill because you run out of the.01 top engineers pretty quickly.
	Now, that can be true as a universal statement that's common sense and obvious to everyone, that the top.01% Now, if you're wondering how much of a difference that makes, I think 51% of the top billion-dollar startups were foreign-born people.
	So if you get the top people, they just nail it and kill it, and everybody gets more jobs, and the country gets stronger.
	We can pay for a stronger military, and we're all safer.
	It's also true that if you look at the history of the United States, and by the way, if you want to jump in and yell at me, Because I've not yet gotten to your pet point.
	Just give me a minute.
	Just give me a minute.
	I'll try to hit your point.
	But if I talk about A, it doesn't mean I don't know B exists.
	Let's try to learn that.
	If you can learn that lesson, that would go a long way.
	Talking about A doesn't mean you don't care or don't know about B, okay?
	So A, in this case, is that if you could...
	Find a system that only got you the top 0.01% of engineers.
	You would be the superpower forever, and you'd be in good shape.
	B is do we have a system that can do that?
	Nope.
	No.
	Now, I'm no expert on it, so I'll take the word of all the people who seem to be close to it, who seem to agree on this point.
	Are you okay with that?
	Do you mind if I say that if we could do it, it would be the best thing we could do?
	We do not have a mechanism that does it.
	In fact, it does the opposite and brings in lots of people who probably are competing with American jobs.
	So which part do you disagree with?
	Can both of those be true?
	So most of my conversation was because it was bugging me that people didn't understand how much horsepower a top 0.01% engineer can bring to a situation.
	I don't think people have a good understanding that the leverage in that is just off the charts.
	It's not like bringing in just people who are good at their job.
	That's a whole different conversation.
	So that's the first thing you need to know.
	And then Grumpy Dad showed me the messy thinking.
	So I want to just read his comments, and you'll see how the two things, the A and the B, get conflated into one thing.
	All right?
	So Grumpy Dad on X says, the first major misstep of what Scott would call the internet dads, and that would include me, the bring in the 1% and the H-1B fraud issue are the same.
	You can't make the meritocracy argument until there is a level playing field.
	They led to the wrong argument.
	Okay?
	So the internet dads, I was watching them operate all yesterday.
	Some of them were not fully informed on some of the issues.
	As they weighed in, Other people who are better informed, correct them, add things.
	And then you watch people start modifying their opinions based on new information that we're getting, extra context.
	But the internet dads, basically the smart people on the internet who are not being paid for their opinion, which includes, let's call them the internet moms as well, or just men and women.
	Well, I don't think any of them are confused that there are two topics.
	When Grumpy Dad says they must be treated as one topic, I say that's just muddy thinking.
	It's muddy thinking.
	To say that you can't say it's a good idea to have the.01, and also it's a good idea to fix the broken system.
	To me, that's clean thinking.
	But if you say you have to treat it as one thing, I say, well, that's messy.
	I get what he's saying.
	I obviously understand it.
	He's saying basically the priority is to fix the H-1B. And I don't disagree with that.
	I'm not even in that conversation.
	If you think that's a priority, all right.
	We'll talk about that more, but I'm not disagreeing.
	I'm just saying they're separate conversations.
	But related, of course.
	And ironically, a lot of my critics yesterday weighed in, as Grumpy Dad did, to tell me that I don't understand that the goal and the system are different things.
	Now, those of you who have been with me for a while, just try to grasp the irony of that.
	I'm literally the most famous person in the world for saying that goals and systems are different and that the system is more important than the goal.
	And my critics said, I don't think you understand that the goal and the system are different in this case.
	No.
	I've written books on the goal of the system are different.
	I've also written books saying the system's the important thing.
	If you get the system right, well then maybe your goal or something like it is likely to happen.
	If you're starting with a goal and you don't have a system, then you don't have anything.
	I'm literally world famous for that point of view.
	And all day long, people are saying, I don't think you understand that the goal and the system are different.
	Yes, I understand it.
	I get it.
	All right.
	So here's the things that I would say that nobody who is well-informed would disagree with.
	That if you could, and we can't in our current system, get the top engineers, we'd be better off.
	Is there anybody who thinks that's not true?
	Does anybody want to argue at just that point?
	I want to see in the comments.
	Is there a pushback to the question, if you could do it without affecting anything else, and you had a way to get the top engineers, would we be better off?
	Now, there were a few people who said no.
	I think Jesse Kelly was one of them.
	So the second thing that happened in this debate is it was a reason for people who had old scores to settle to say bad things about their enemies.
	So a cat turd came after me, and I think maybe Jesse Kelly said something dumb.
	And you'd have to know there's some bad blood there.
	Now, I consider both of those guys idiots.
	So if I can be blunt, Katter's an idiot.
	He doesn't get things right.
	He got a whole Crenshaw thing wrong about his stock trading.
	No, about his donations.
	So he had all the context wrong, and he goes after Crenshaw, and Crenshaw had to basically flame him on Christmas Day because he got everything wrong.
	Katter's an idiot.
	He's very entertaining.
	So if you're watching it for the entertainment show, Yeah, why not?
	But he's not smart and his takes are not good.
	And Jesse Kelly argued that literally nobody should come into the country because it's like the Titanic is sinking.
	You know, why would you throw another glass of water at the Titanic?
	Now, you know what I say about analogies, right?
	You use an analogy when there's no argument.
	Nobody uses an analogy if they have a reason, like an argument with reason.
	So if you tell me that your argument is that Titanic can't handle a glass of water, I'm not going to take anything you say seriously.
	That's just an idiot.
	So taking care of the idiots on the internet, that's sort of a side controversy.
	So let's see.
	And then Elon said, more to confuse things, he said that we wouldn't be a great country without H-1B visas.
	And basically, you wouldn't have people like him and a lot of the success we have.
	Now, did people say there, oh, wait a minute, Scott.
	I thought you were talking about the 0.01% of engineers.
	Now he's talking about H-1B visas, and that's like just workers in general mostly.
	So did I get that wrong?
	No.
	Again, reading comprehension is very important.
	When Elon says we wouldn't be a great country without H-1B visas, is he talking about the future or the past?
	That's the past.
	He's saying that the way we got here is with H-1B visas.
	Is he correct?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	He's correct in terms of the GDP. And the big companies that got created and how we can fund our military.
	Is it true that Americans lost some jobs because of the H-1B visas?
	I assume so.
	I assume so.
	Here's what people who are not good at analysis often get wrong.
	What has been true up until now doesn't need to be true in the future because things change.
	So I told you yesterday that my opinion of how many people should be let in with their valuable skills has changed since Biden's term.
	Before Biden, I would have said, hey, anybody who's additive, Bring them in.
	You know, and additive meaning they had some skill, they could pay their taxes, they could, you know, their kids would do well in school and become productive citizens.
	So to me, it seemed like business as usual.
	Let in anybody who can add and make sure you don't let in anybody who's going to be a drag on the system.
	But, after watching 25 million illegal people come in recently and Biden opening the borders, I think the history no longer informs what you should do.
	At this point, given especially that MAGA had a very strong opinion about immigration and won, it wouldn't matter what my opinion was.
	So if my opinion was, yeah, we should just take everybody who looks like they could add, but MAGA won, and MAGA definitely doesn't want that because they don't want these people competing with American jobs, I would say, yeah, MAGA should get what they want because that's what winning is.
	That's the whole point.
	So it wouldn't matter even if I thought that.
	We're not living in the past.
	It can be true that the H-1B visas made us the strong country we are at the cost of some number of American jobs, which is important.
	But it's also true that we don't have to look to that to figure out what to do going forward.
	I think the safe thing is that we're always better with the.01 top engineers.
	Are we better off if we bring in an optometrist?
	The optometrist will just take the job from an American optometrist, maybe.
	I don't know.
	So it's a different question from what it used to be.
	And when Elon makes big comments about things, you're going to have to add your reading comprehension to know what he's really saying.
	All right.
	There's also the...
	Then the...
	There's so many elements to this.
	The other thing you need to know is that this is probably a short-term conversation, because nearly all the jobs we're talking about in which a foreign worker would take an American job, those are all going to be gone in 18 months.
	So the job goes from the American to the Indian, and And then the Indian job will go to the AI, guaranteed.
	So it's not like India permanently took the jobs.
	There was only 18 months left of those jobs.
	So we were at the end of the cycle for anybody who could have those kind of jobs that AI is going to easily take.
	So you have to put it in context.
	It's still important.
	But it's important for maybe 18 months.
	We have a much bigger problem with AI than we do with foreign workers.
	And then in the middle of that is the fact that your ordinary, not top 0.01% engineers, your ordinary people, if they were white and they were male, they were being discriminated against and they didn't get any jobs.
	The other issue, which is obviously something I care about, and The other issue that people pointed out is that if you hire enough people from one demographic group and they get into management, that they start hiring only people in their own demographic group.
	Now, the examples given were people had a bunch of Indian and Indian American people got into management and then they noticed, hey, they're just hiring more Indian people now.
	Is that a real thing?
	I assume so, because that would be universally true.
	If you had a lot of black people in management, do you think that they would hire more black employees than some other group?
	Probably.
	Probably.
	Normal.
	If you had anybody of any demographic group in charge, LGBTQ, you name it, women, Let's say most of them were women in management.
	Do you think that they would hire more women than a group that didn't have mostly women in management?
	It's not good.
	It's discrimination.
	But it's also universal.
	So it's not just that the Indians are getting into management and squeezing out the white people.
	It's everybody whose management is squeezing out everybody else except white males.
	White males try to squeeze out white males because that's how they get ahead.
	We get ahead by eating our own.
	Unfortunately, that's the only way we get ahead.
	So it's universally true.
	Anyway, did you know that...
	Oh, and then we're also conflating the hiring of Indian workers and foreign workers in general with the issue of offshoring, which is separate.
	All right, so here's my questions for you.
	So my take on the H-1B visas and how to fix immigration in general is that we need to get a team of somewhat independent economists Who will tell us what's best for us and who the winners and losers would be with any given change to our immigration stature.
	So, here are questions that I can't answer, and I have a background in economics, but I want to see if you can.
	If you can't answer these questions, Spoiler, you will not be able to answer these questions.
	But if you can't answer these questions, then consider the certainty with which you hold your opinion.
	Consider the certainty, all right?
	If you nail these questions, which you will not because they're impossible, then you should have a firm, confident opinion.
	But if you can't get them, Maybe you should just say, I'm not so sure.
	All right?
	Question number one.
	Would we be better, America, under the current situation?
	We bring in foreign workers at lower wages, in many cases, than American workers.
	Lower wages.
	And subsequently, because the wages are lower, it helps the industries that are hiring them to be more successful.
	And then the stockholders of those companies have more money, and then they spend it.
	And because there's more money in the system, people can invest in new businesses and startups and create jobs.
	So if you bring in foreign workers, and before you get mad at me, this isn't the only question.
	So you'll get a question that you like in a moment.
	So low wages...
	It gives you more successful companies, which gives you a better economy.
	A better economy gives you a stronger military and protects the country.
	The cost of that, though, would be American workers would be displaced because they would be replaced by some number of low-cost foreign workers, but it wouldn't be everybody.
	It would be certain industries, certain kind of jobs.
	And then those people would be, by necessity, trained for other jobs.
	Right?
	So that's one world.
	So the one world, I guess that would be the current world, right?
	So we bring in the low-cost foreign workers, gives the company some better chance to succeed, but it's at the cost of American workers.
	All right, so that's one situation.
	Now compare that Compare that with the opposite, that we don't bring any low-cost employees in, and we just keep American workers.
	So what would that do to your costs for goods?
	It would increase them.
	So you'd have a job, but everything would cost more, and probably a lot more, because labor is a big part of everything.
	So you've got a job, But there's way more higher costs.
	Is that good for you or bad for you?
	It's good for you.
	It's way better to have a job than it is to have prices that are perfectly low like you like.
	You'd rather be employed.
	So if you're the worker who loses the job, it's definitely better for you to keep the job, even if it means that some prices are higher.
	But the prices are higher means that your companies will eventually go out of business, Because if they're competing against international companies, they might hire the low-cost employees and then out-compete you.
	So if you protect the employees' profits, you probably cripple the business and in the long run, go out of business.
	Now, is that better?
	So what I'm suggesting is That even the top economists could not answer these questions.
	Is the country in general better off when there's pressure on employees who are not competitive in the world market have to leave and build skills to make them competitive?
	It's a dog-eat-dog cruel, and I'm not recommending it, I'm just asking.
	Is that better?
	The answer is, you can't tell.
	Because would you rather be an unemployed person in a vibrant and growing economy or an employed person in a constipated and dying economy?
	Which would you prefer?
	In the short run, you'd prefer to be employed.
	In the long run, you're way better off being unemployed in a vibrant, growing economy because you can learn some new skills and then jump into the vibrant economy and do better than you were doing before.
	So, to what degree do these abusive H-1B situations, which bring in these cheaper workers, to what degree do they hurt you in the short run?
	They're terrible in the short run because Americans lose jobs, and I don't like that.
	But do Americans lose jobs in the long run, or do they retool and get better jobs?
	Well, I would argue that America has been doing pretty substantial immigration since its founding.
	And while immigration has gone up pretty consistently, so have the number of jobs.
	Now, does that surprise you?
	So for every...
	Well, maybe the Depression was different or something.
	But generally speaking, immigration goes up And the economy in general goes up and the number of jobs go up at the same time.
	And that's not a coincidence because we're bringing in lots of people to add more vitality to the thing.
	So here's the thing.
	If you're a high-level economist and you're disagreeing with how I'm setting this up, well, you've got a good point because you're a high-level economist and I'm not.
	I just studied economics.
	If you're not an economist and you have a strong opinion which of those two things is better for America, not just the worker in the short run, we can all agree that in the short run the worker is just getting screwed.
	No argument about that.
	But does it put a productive pressure on the people who got screwed?
	Productive means they say, damn it, I guess I need a new skill.
	And they go out and learn a new skill and get a new job.
	I don't know.
	See, the point is that if I don't know, and I've studied a little bit of economics, if you studied no economics, you probably should be less confident than I am.
	I'm not confident that I know the answer to these questions.
	I could tell you where my bias would be, but I'm not confident I know the answer.
	If you're confident that you know America's better off if we don't bring in people who are additive, I don't know where you would get that, because it's not in any data and it's not supported by any experts that I'm aware of.
	But it's a very common opinion.
	So, here's what I think.
	Given that we don't know the answer to that question, There's a theoretical question, which is, which way should we go?
	But I would argue that that question may have been answered, because the voters said, this is how we want it.
	They said, we don't want foreign workers.
	I still think we'd be smart to take the 0.01% engineers.
	But if you say, we don't want anybody else, just those 0.01% engineers, I would say, you might be right, you might be wrong.
	But one thing I know for sure is that you had a process and you chose.
	So you might be right, you might be wrong, but we are a country that allowed you to compete on this issue, and you won.
	You won.
	So if the way it goes is that we tighten up all immigration so there's no foreign workers, it raises prices in the United States, my prices go up, I'm okay with that, if you are.
	I mean, it's what you voted for, and I live in a country where I respect that.
	So even if I'm kind of leaning in the direction of, you know, I'm not so sure you're exactly right about this in the long run, I'd still say you earned your right to try it your way.
	Let me see if there's an analog.
	Let's see if this teaches us anything.
	Now, analogies, of course, don't make arguments, but let's see if it deepens your understanding.
	In your view, are unions in the United States good or bad?
	Let's see in the comments.
	How many of you think that unions helped the United States, and how many think it hurt?
	The answer is it depends.
	There are certainly industries such as telecom where there's a strong union and yet still strong profitability.
	So strong union, good wages, strong profitability, good for the country.
	Everybody wins, right?
	But are there other industries?
	Let's say the car industry.
	I know Musk has fought against some unionization.
	Others have too.
	Amazon, I think.
	Does every...
	Well, let me make this distinction.
	If you have a company that's almost a monopoly, like telecom is, because there's a limit to how much spectrum is available, So telecom companies are kind of close to being monopolies.
	You know, they own their spectrum and nobody else can use it, etc.
	So if you have huge margins, then you can afford to have strong unions and strong employees.
	Everybody wins.
	If you have small margins, such as what you might see in Amazon or, let's say, the grocery business, then it wouldn't take much of a Union increase in wages to put you out of business.
	So I would say that unions are good if you've got a giant margin, and they're bad if you're so close to the margin that your entire company will go underwater if you pay people union wages.
	So it depends.
	And I think that's how you should look at the foreign worker thing, too.
	There just have to be situations where everybody's better off, like an individual company or industry.
	Let's say agriculture.
	I do think it would be really hard to get Americans to fill some kinds of jobs.
	Are we better off if we just say, all right, let the foreign workers pick the fruit?
	They want to, we don't want to.
	So there are probably situations in which For pockets of the country, we'd rather have some foreign workers temporarily for some specific things.
	And there are other places where guaranteed it's bad for American workers and we're not getting enough from it.
	So, if you wanted to say, forget all that nuance.
	This country is for Americans.
	Well, that's what you got.
	You voted for that and you got it.
	I respect that.
	So I won't argue against it.
	I'll just tell you, I don't know if economists would be on the same side.
	So, one way or the other.
	Anyway, there's a...
	Did I cover all that?
	So, here's just my summary of that.
	I did not see anybody online who disagreed with me.
	So, I debated people angrily all day.
	I didn't see anybody disagree...
	I saw people who imagined I was talking about H-1B visas being great, which I didn't, and they were mad.
	I saw people who didn't understand that the.01% of top engineers wouldn't add enough to the country to make any difference to employment.
	But I didn't see anybody who said, I understand your argument, and I disagree.
	I didn't see it.
	The only ones I saw were the unrepentant racists who said, you can't add one more brown person to America.
	And I don't know how many of them were idiots and how many of them were trolls.
	I don't know.
	But on another topic, climate change dispatch, Kenneth Richard is writing, there's a new study that since 2013, that all the warming comes from increased absorbed solar radiation, not CO2. So the idea here is that we've been looking at CO2 and it wasn't really the thing that was driving anything.
	Now, I don't know if that's true, because I can't look at a scientific study and know if it's true.
	What I do know is that when you read through it, just get a sense of the complexity in figuring out what the climate is doing.
	So I'm going to read you some words that I don't understand and you won't either.
	Just to get a sense of the assumptions that go into climate models, right?
	So a new study published in Journal of Science contends that the decrease in cloud albedo, whatever the hell that is, and the consequent increase in ASR, whatever the hell that is, or absorbed solar radiation—oh, I guess that's what ASR is—blah, blah, blah, these numbers, blah, blah, blah, I don't understand— According to Era 5, I don't know what it is, and Cirrus, I don't know what it is, respectively, explains the warming over the Earth's last decade.
	Anyway, the point is...
	That the total number of assumptions that go into climate models is just through the roof.
	You can't have lots of assumptions and also complexity and also a model that's telling you what the future is.
	It is so far from something humans can accomplish that someday we're going to laugh that we had all these climate models and we believed that they were telling us something.
	Now, I don't know what's true or not true about climate change.
	I do know the models are bullshit.
	That much I know for sure.
	All right.
	There's a study, a study find, says the hidden power of words, how language influences reality.
	So depending on the words you use to describe a thing, it will change how you react to it and what you see as your reality.
	I think they could have saved some money on that study because it's exactly what everybody already knows.
	You know, usually I say you should have just asked Scott.
	This is one of those studies where I think you could have asked anybody.
	A random stranger on the street, we're thinking of spending a bunch of money on a study, but I just want to see if maybe you know the answer.
	Do you think that the words you use to describe things change how people think about them?
	And the random person on the street, let's say he's a homeless person and he's deeply on drugs.
	Pretty sure he does.
	Pretty sure he does.
	Really, you could have asked anybody.
	Nobody would have gotten that wrong.
	All right.
	Of course, we love to talk about this topic of how Democrats have more mental illness than Republicans, and by a lot.
	Now, it's funny if you talk about politics, because then you can say, oh, the reason you disagree with me is that you have mental illness.
	Maybe that's some of it.
	But just imagine these two frames.
	If the only thing you knew about Democrats and Republicans was the following thing, which one would you predict would be sad and have mental problems?
	One group Believes that identity politics means that your future is doomed to whatever your identity allows.
	And there'll be discrimination.
	Can't really do much about it because your identity.
	Versus the people who say that merit is what matters.
	You can always learn new skills and try harder and you'll do fine.
	So one group thinks that you're doomed because of your identity.
	And the other group says, nobody's doomed.
	You just have to do the right things and it's obvious and we'll tell you what to do.
	And everybody who succeeded did the same thing.
	And if you just do what everybody does, you'll probably be fine.
	One of those is very optimistic.
	You'll be fine.
	The other one is doom.
	Oh, you were born in this ethnic group?
	Oh, I guess there's nothing that will ever go right for you.
	Oh, we'll have to change the law to make you survive.
	And then, of course, there's the looking at the world versus looking at yourself all the time.
	That also is a big factor in how sad or crazy you are.
	Alright.
	What is racist about wanting a white country?
	Really?
	What is racist about wanting a white country?
	Did you actually write that?
	Here's what you mean to say.
	You didn't say it, but I'm going to interpret what you meant to say.
	Racism isn't always bad.
	See, that's what people don't want to say in public.
	If you're discriminating against somebody for their race or some immutable thing or religion or sexual preference for job offers or romance or friendship or club entry or anything, that's all bad.
	I don't like any of that.
	But are there any situations in which race is a factor in a way that we all agree, oh, that makes sense?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	When it comes to large group groups, Well, let me put it this way.
	This is my favorite example.
	If you're a young black family and you're trying to decide where to move, what city to move to, would you find it safer to move to a place that has at least a good Solid, you know, 20% black population, so you'd find lots of people who are like you and, you know, would understand you and, you know, would be more likely to invite you to do something if you think that's how it works.
	Probably.
	Now, suppose I said, do you want to pick the city that is known to have the highest KKK population in it?
	And they're all white.
	Would you pick that?
	No.
	No.
	Would it be racist?
	Would it be racist to say, I don't want to live in that all-white place because there's a whole bunch of KKK people in there?
	Well, yes.
	It'd be a little racist.
	Would it be wrong?
	Would it be wrong for a black family not to live where there's 20% KKK? No.
	That would be completely reasonable.
	So, we conflate individual discrimination against a person, which is probably bad all the time.
	It's not good for the person doing it or the person who gets it done to them, with any kind of group dynamics, which definitely make a difference.
	If you were a white person and you were looking for a job, would you apply to a company that had no white people in management?
	I wouldn't, because it doesn't look like a good bet.
	But would that be racist?
	Yes, of course it would.
	You're making a decision based on race.
	So the first thing we have to learn to grow up is that racism against individuals is not the same topic as racism to protect yourself from statistical harm.
	It's just not the same conversation.
	Anyway, so I think what happened with the MAGA dust-up and Elon Musk and me should come out productive, right?
	If we are true to our beliefs, we will say, hey, that was a good fight.
	We all got smarter.
	How many of you learned something about the foreign worker debate that you didn't know until this week?
	I did.
	I learned some things.
	I wasn't wrong about anything.
	Because there were things that I didn't know about that I didn't weigh in and have an opinion on.
	And then when I got informed, I said, oh, I agree with you.
	Once I was informed, I said I wasn't talking about that.
	I wasn't ever talking about H-1B. But if all the people who know about it say it's a problem going forward, I take that as information.
	I incorporate it.
	But I don't believe I've disagreed with anybody except the people who say that adding one more brown person to the country, even if it's Einstein, Brown-Einstein, is bad.
	That's just not a sensible worldview.
	Tahoe says, the election means no more...
	Okay, now, did that comment address any useful thing?
	So let me ask the question.
	If you knew you could get the.01 engineers, would you say yes to them?
	If you knew that nobody else would come in?
	And I understand that's not the current situation.
	So let me ask the question in the comments.
	If you knew, and we don't know this, but hypothetically if we did, that you could limit it to just the top.01, and it's from everywhere, it's not just India, right?
	It's from everywhere.
	Would you say yes to that?
	How many would say no to that?
	Because I think if you say no to that, I mean, that's just pure racism, and it's not one that makes sense.
	I've even told you that, so we've got to know.
	So there's some people that say adding one Einstein who could change the economy and improve the world would be a mistake if he's brown.
	But so far only the jester has said that.
	Right.
	All right.
	So it looks like my audience is on the same page.
	So I'm trying to find, is there anything that anybody disagrees with me, except the question of whether or not it's bad to add even one extra person who's not American?
	It's still racism, even if it applies to Norwegians.
	Yeah, that's fair.
	Until what?
	So I think here's what I think is the central lever on this conversation.
	Let me see if I can capture the feel of the room.
	The feel of the room is if you start talking about the.01 engineers, you think you're talking about that, but necessarily, because of our bad way we do everything, it opens the door to mass immigration that you didn't want.
	Is that correct?
	Have I captured all of your views that you should lead with, our systems are broken?
	And then if you say, if we could fix them, it would be great if we brought in the.01.
	But if you start with bringing the.01, it looks like you skipped the more important question, which is, wait a minute, wait a minute.
	How are you bringing in that.01?
	Are you using the same broken system that will bring in a million people that we don't want?
	All right.
	So this is a problem with social media.
	So if you see me comment on, you know, one element of an argument, you might make assumptions about what else I'm believing, but that's always dangerous.
	So I think, here's what I think.
	Bottom line, I think this was all positive.
	I think this was all positive.
	I think that most of the racism that Elon and I were responding to online, most of it might be trolls.
	And the rest of it, it was some small minority of people that are just something we have to deal with.
	What's this?
	Okay.
	Then some people thought that Elon insulted all of MAGA, which never happened.
	So a lot of it is thinking that he said something he didn't say.
	In my case, thinking I said something I didn't say or believe something I didn't say.
	But when you look at what people actually said, I think we're basically on the same page.
	There's probably more complete agreement on this question than almost any question in America right now.
	But we've pretended that It was something else.
	And what I feel from that was that the energy from that conversation was from the people who have the H-1B issues.
	And I think we all heard it.
	So if you were in that conversation, you definitely heard, we don't like the H-1B, it's being abused, it's taking our jobs.
	Got it.
	Got it.
	I never disagreed.
	I wasn't up to speed.
	And when I wasn't, I didn't talk about it.
	But now I'm up to speed.
	Now, I saw somebody smart, I won't name names, say, oh, but the H-1B system is different from the system we used to bring in those.01 engineers.
	Now, they are different systems.
	But I'm also informed that all of the systems are abused.
	So if they're all abused, it doesn't matter that the top engineer system is a different system than H-1B.
	They both need to be changed.
	Now do the NFL.
	Well, the NFL, I think, is a pure meritocracy.
	Why are we complaining about that?
	We shouldn't be importing anyone, so you would be opposed to bringing in the person who could create the next billion-dollar unicorn and create 10,000 jobs for American workers because that one guy is taking nobody's job.
	See, Yeah, I think we all agree.
	Alright.
	Anything other than one system is corrupt?
	Well, maybe everything that reaches a certain size is corrupt.
	My take is that you can have non-corruption With really, really small things, such as, you know, two people getting married and not lying to each other.
	It can happen.
	But as soon as you get to something big, like the entire finance field, that's always corrupt.
	Healthcare, always corrupt.
	Big food, corrupt.
	Big pharma, corrupt.
	Big oil, corrupt.
	So when you reach a certain size, it's 100% problematic.
	There might be some exceptions.
	I'm thinking of something that would be like, you know, one of Elon Musk's companies.
	They may not be a totally corrupt organization.
	But generally speaking, everything big morphs into something bad.
	All right.
	So here's your bonus question for the day.
	You ready for this?
	What would be better for America, the American system, to have no restrictions, let's say no regulations, and total freedom?
	Or strong guardrails so that there's freedom, but it's freedom within the guardrails.
	Do you prefer a no guardrails free-for-all and that freedom gets you the best life for everybody?
	Or do you believe that the guardrails are necessary because there are too many bad elements in the world that would take advantage of them?
	So, in the comments, I want to see you pick between these two.
	Complete freedom, no guardrails, or freedom within guardrails.
	Which one do you prefer?
	Total freedom.
	Laissez-faire.
	Is that total freedom?
	Yeah.
	Well, I would argue this.
	The legal system puts lots of guardrails on what you can do within capitalism.
	Do you like having a legal system?
	Do you think capitalism would work if we didn't have a strong legal system?
	Because the legal system is telling you what you can't do in the other system.
	It's a guardrail.
	Well, the answer is obvious.
	If you got rid of the justice system, it wouldn't matter what you were doing in the economy, it would fail.
	Because crime would just destroy trust, it would fail.
	So the guardrails of having laws, in my opinion, are essential.
	I'm not aware of any modern civilization that worked without a Justice Department.
	Are you?
	Is there anybody who succeeded within a Justice Department?
	Now, there would be the question of the guidelines and regulations.
	I suspect that some guidelines and regulations are additive, and some of them are negative, and Trump would like to get rid of the ones that are negative.
	But do you think that there are no rules that are worth pursuing?
	Let me give you one example.
	A bank is required to put their loan offer in the form of an APR. An APR is a calculation that banks have to do the same way.
	So when they say, we'll give you a loan for, you know, this rate and this starting thing in these phase, you can't really compare it to another loan that has a different down payment, a different fees, different starting point, different calculations.
	And so banks were using that confusion to make it look like they were giving you the good loan when it was just the bad loan.
	You couldn't tell the difference.
	And then the government said, no, no, you have to calculate it all the same way, and then you can know for sure which one will cost you more money between banks.
	Was that a good idea or a bad idea?
	Because it allowed you to trust your bank.
	And when it comes to banking, trust is the primary requirement.
	So there's some people who say no.
	They'd rather not be informed.
	What about ingredient lists on food?
	Do you think food should be required to have ingredients listed?
	See, here's the problem.
	If you had a world where information flowed, let's say, efficiently, then information could do the job of these guardrails and laws and procedures, right?
	So if somehow I knew which bank was giving me the best loan, I wouldn't need an APR. But there is no way for me to know.
	There is no way.
	Because the incentive is for all banks to lie.
	If you took that away, all banks would lie.
	I work for a bank.
	All banks would lie if they could get away with it.
	So I would say that the trust which makes the American system special Because remember, in human history, trusting strangers was the thing you didn't do.
	Our economy is based entirely—well, that's an exaggeration—it's based very much on the fact that we found a way to trust strangers.
	And the way we trust them is, if you screw me, I'm going to sue you, and we've got this legal system that will take care of you.
	So we replaced trust with guardrails.
	If you didn't have trust, your economy would fall apart.
	There's no way around that.
	There's no low trust economy that's raging, I don't think.
	I don't think there ever will be.
	So if you look at, say, the Ayn Rand view of the things, maximum freedom gives you maximum happiness.
	You're looking at a technique that has never been tried anywhere and never can be successfully because it would fail immediately.
	That's my opinion.
	I don't think it's a coincidence that nobody has ever done a full freedom, high output, successful anything.
	It's never happened in the history of the world.
	All right.
	But generally speaking, we should lean toward freedom whenever it's a jump ball.
	So I would agree with you that if you can't see the reason for the restriction or the obstacle to freedom, if you can't obviously see what the benefit is, and you can obviously see the benefit of a Department of Justice when it's working properly, it's very obvious.
	But if they say, hmm, I think you should all use these pronouns or something, you might say, it's not really obvious how that's making me better off.
	So that's a debate.
	I would lean toward freedom when it's just an opinion which ways the better to go.
	But if it's just really obvious, like the Department of Justice, I'd rather have the guardrails.
	All right.
	That's all I got for you today.
	I'm going to go talk to the locals, people privately.
	I went on way too long, but it's Saturday.
	Remember Owen Gregorian will be doing a Spaces after we're done.
	So I'll be fast on the after show with Locals.
	We'll let Owen take it from there.
	I assume Owen will be up and live like fairly quickly on X in Spaces right after we're done.

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