Real Coffee with Scott Adams - July 17, 2020


Episode 1060 Scott Adams: My Idea for Fixing Everything by Forming a Socialist Country Within a Capitalist Country. Wwwwwhaaaat???


Episode Stats


Length

29 minutes

Words per minute

163.647

Word count

4,754

Sentence count

1

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

16

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Out of the Box, Scott tries to explain why socialism can't work in the long-term, and why we should have two socialist systems in one country to try and fix all the problems in the country.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.560 Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum hey guess what yeah it's me it's not the 0.76
00:00:09.780 morning isn't that weird well some of you have been asking for some evening periscopes I don't
00:00:17.740 know if I'll do this often but I thought well you probably miss me right a little bit a little bit
00:00:25.180 and so I thought I would make a very special evening periscope in which I will tell you how
00:00:32.060 to fix absolutely everything everything in the country every problem I'm going to show you how
00:00:38.540 to fix the the risk of robots taking over our jobs I'll fix systemic racism I'm going to fix
00:00:46.000 the economy I'm going to fix retirement I'm going to fix the environment all of it really
00:00:55.780 and I see that there are roughly enough of you here for me to tell you how to do that now let
00:01:04.980 me give you the setup first here's the setup I don't believe that in the future the that capitalism
00:01:13.420 will work for everybody so that's the starting point in the future capitalism just won't work
00:01:22.160 for everybody now that's always been true right it's always been true that there are winners and
00:01:27.960 losers in capitalism but because what it takes to succeed in capitalism will be harder and harder
00:01:35.720 meaning if you don't have a stem degree you don't you don't have something special going on
00:01:41.960 it's going to be harder and harder to make it in capitalism it's going to be harder to get
00:01:47.440 yourself an education the cost of moving someplace and getting a place to live before you get started
00:01:54.320 it's very hard so the first assumption is that capitalism hasn't always worked for everybody
00:02:02.280 but that that situation will get worse and then as the robots come in well then it's really bad
00:02:09.120 because the people who are rich will own the robots and get richer the people whose only way to make
00:02:15.460 money was to work will be replaced by robots so the first assumption is there is no circumstance
00:02:23.160 in which capitalism just by itself without a tweak can work in the future because it'll just be an
00:02:31.060 increasing number of people for whom it doesn't work that's pretty much guaranteed
00:02:35.120 likewise here's another system that absolutely can't work socialism right a pure socialist system
00:02:46.680 uh something that maybe the marxists and black lives matter might like you know the leaders are are 0.91
00:02:53.500 trained marxists some of them so they might like a world where there's more equality you know people
00:03:00.820 are treated more fairly there's less or ideally no institutional racism so they'd like that kind of
00:03:07.240 a world but what's the one big problem with the world that socialists would prefer there's one really big
00:03:16.000 problem isn't it that they would be conquered by a capitalist country they would be conquered almost
00:03:23.960 immediately by i don't know china russia anybody wants to take a go at it mexico canada pretty much
00:03:31.300 anybody because if you're if you're just trying to make everything fair you're not really putting a lot
00:03:37.680 of money into the military and eventually you're just sort of a sitting duck so we've got two systems
00:03:44.420 on the table that i would i would say neither of them could possibly work in the long run capitalism will
00:03:51.260 fail because the robots will unemploy too many people and then it's only good for the few capitalists
00:03:57.560 socialism can't work because eventually the the average comes down you're not creating extra money
00:04:04.580 because you don't have the the same incentives as capitalism and then you can't fund a proper army
00:04:10.220 and you have other problems as well and so it collapses on itself so what do you do here is my suggestion
00:04:17.760 out of the box now if you're new to my periscopes let me um tell you that when i give you a wild ass idea 0.67
00:04:26.560 don't take it too seriously okay they're usually designed just to make you think differently maybe
00:04:33.920 think optimistically maybe give you some starting point where you say well you know scott your idea
00:04:40.380 was kind of crap but it made me think of my own idea that's pretty good and if it only does that
00:04:46.360 that's fine so what i'm trying to do is to shake the box here a little bit more than it has been shaken
00:04:53.380 and introduce this new idea are you ready two systems in one country you get to pick which one you want
00:05:03.280 and you can move back and forth now before you judge before you judge let me map it out for you so i'm
00:05:13.280 going to show it to you on the the whiteboard and walk you through it so that's that's the starting
00:05:18.080 premise why must we have a system that we know won't work or doesn't work for everybody if
00:05:25.600 potentially and i haven't sold you on this you have to wait for the the persuasion part
00:05:30.920 potentially why don't we just put two systems in the country and just run them parallel 0.91
00:05:38.000 right i'll give you the explanation but first let me say we already do it we already do it
00:05:44.960 look at all these senior citizens who are retired basically socialists right you know so senior 0.65
00:05:52.640 citizens are already a whole different system they're not capitalists not per se right they may 1.00
00:06:00.500 have saved up some money for their retirement but they're not working and they may be getting more
00:06:05.100 from the government than they're putting in so we already have two systems it just happens to be
00:06:10.680 for senior citizens but we also have a separate system for children don't we children don't have
00:06:18.040 the same laws they don't have the same rules they have a whole different system involved you have to go
00:06:23.820 to school it's not really your choice completely different system children are not working they're not
00:06:30.340 really capitalists it's a whole different system and does it ruin capitalism it doesn't it doesn't
00:06:37.820 they they seem to coexist so here is my framing for two systems in the united states again if you're
00:06:48.080 just joining me don't take it too literal just take it as some brainstorming that might make you think
00:06:53.720 a little differently that's why you should get out of it and now you want me to call these
00:06:58.140 capitalism and socialism but i'm not going to do it the reason i'm not going to use your labels is
00:07:05.320 that they come with too much baggage so i'm just going to say that there might be some people in
00:07:10.500 the country who would want a society that really maximizes equality of outcomes so just equality is
00:07:17.760 what they want and another part of the country that is more concerned with defense notice i didn't say
00:07:24.060 economics it's because economics and national defense or even private defense are really the same thing
00:07:31.620 you need money to fund an army you need money to be secure in every way that people need to be secure
00:07:39.720 so making money and capitalism is really a defense kind of an idea with extras
00:07:48.540 so imagine if you will that we carve down some space in the united states and on the other side
00:07:56.220 of the board i'm going to show you that idea oh there's there's a good part coming so if you bail
00:08:01.700 out before i get to the good part you're not going to know that this is a good idea all right so i hate 0.59
00:08:07.420 to tell you you got away for the good part so just imagine that you have some carve out some space within
00:08:13.500 the united states and you just say uh you can live the way you want to live and you can even make up
00:08:18.740 your own constitution or laws and you do not have to fund the military you're just not part of the
00:08:26.320 military thing we'll do that the people who want to work because the people who would move to this land 1.00
00:08:32.400 were not probably the you know the scientists the engineers because they're probably going to say you
00:08:39.220 know i got this engineering degree and i can do pretty good over in the regular country so i think
00:08:47.240 i'll just stay there so you'd have equality world which of course would be you know multi everything
00:08:53.100 multi-ethnic multi-religion multi-everything and of course both both worlds would be multi-ethnic
00:09:00.720 multi-everything so this isn't about black lives matter i'm not saying hey you make a place where all the
00:09:06.300 black people go if you heard that you're hearing the wrong thing so both of these worlds are 0.97
00:09:11.200 completely multi-posed situations they'll just handle it differently over in defense world there's
00:09:17.740 capitalism and you've got to be ambitious they're going to be paying for the national defense they
00:09:22.080 like their police they're very consumerish and acquisition oriented and they probably have
00:09:28.520 traditional families now you may say to yourself wait scott why why do you have the traditional
00:09:34.380 families only on one side with these money-making capitalists but you don't have it on the equality
00:09:40.940 side they could have why can't they have strong families because everybody knows a strong nuclear
00:09:46.700 family is a big plus statistically speaking it seems to be the the main variable of keeping you out of jail
00:09:54.080 but did you know that a traditional family works best if you got money traditional families work
00:10:03.600 really well for people making a lot of cash because you can get your your help you can have you know
00:10:09.720 two family incomes and a nanny you've got all kinds of resources so the rich people don't have to have 0.92
00:10:17.420 traditional families it wouldn't be a law it would just turn out that way that they would prefer to
00:10:23.820 self-organize around traditional families not required no requirement whatsoever it would just work out
00:10:30.740 that way the equality people would be uh they'd have to be self-sustaining did you like that part
00:10:39.040 the other part of the country at least after some startup phase would not be funding anything that's
00:10:47.400 happening over in equality land so that they would for financial and tax reasons they would just be
00:10:53.640 separate is that entirely possible i don't know but we're going to brainstorm through this just in case
00:10:59.860 so this place would be self-sustaining and it would mostly center around low skilled work which i will
00:11:06.780 tell you what that will be as my big surprise when i turn over the board uh it would be focused on a
00:11:14.320 very low cost of living but high design when i say high design i mean this is there any reason that a
00:11:22.660 low cost uh homes organized and i'll say a neighborhood is there any reason it couldn't be beautiful
00:11:28.680 no there's actually no reason there's no economic reason there's no nothing you could make
00:11:36.380 inexpensive homes in a community really attractive so that you just enjoy being there the feng shui of 0.98
00:11:43.740 it the way it makes you feel there'd be enough green enough open space there's a whole bunch of stuff you
00:11:49.300 can just but you can fix just by orientation to the sun how do the roads work how far away is your
00:11:56.220 neighbor do you have a porch or at least a place to go outdoors is there a place to put the dog
00:12:01.880 how far do you have to go to work i mean all of those things are design questions they're not
00:12:07.260 spend extra money questions it's just where do you organize it so if you imagine it's a super low
00:12:13.960 cost of living place and let's say that they've got universal health care and free education
00:12:19.560 well how do they how do they pay for that well i'll show you they're all working so just like
00:12:25.820 in defense world they most of them if they want them they have jobs because you really can't have
00:12:32.100 a community where nobody does some work so there's got to be work it will just be low skilled and they'd
00:12:39.940 have free education and free universal health care let's think let's assume that they can figure out
00:12:45.960 how to afford that through the the work that they do because there would be trade so i'm going to
00:12:51.660 show you in a minute that although they might be their own little nation if you will within the
00:12:56.480 nation they would still have lots of people coming through they're still trading and still doing
00:13:01.800 taking money and you know etc they're selling goods etc so they're not just an island then because
00:13:10.020 they have free education and they have the other things that would give a kid a good start
00:13:15.080 they have a way to change over to the other world if they like so let's say a kid is born into this
00:13:23.680 equality world and the kid is super aggressive let's say not aggressive let's say ambitious
00:13:30.340 kid is super ambitious so you say and the kid says you know i've got a i've got the internet and i'm
00:13:38.100 seeing this world over here and it looks pretty good i don't know if i live here this isn't my
00:13:43.420 thing you know the rest of you guys you can stay here i'll visit but i'm really ambitious as long
00:13:49.740 as this kid has free education and they've figured out how to solve the you know the fatherless situation
00:13:55.500 and crime and all those other things which would be part of what they would solve so there's you
00:14:00.600 know low crime less gangs all those things so let's assume that they've figured out how to organize
00:14:06.040 in a way that's successful so this kid has a complete way to go there likewise let's say you're
00:14:12.960 you're a family you're a family member of a real successful family but you're the you know you're
00:14:20.080 the one who didn't quite do as well as your siblings you might want to say you know this whole working
00:14:28.260 hard and you know trying to compete against these geniuses and that's just not for me so you would have
00:14:35.220 the complete option to go to some place where you just feel more comfortable it's like yeah i don't
00:14:41.360 mind working but you know i don't like all the drama that i just want to you know do my work help my
00:14:46.800 community live in peace or maybe that you're an addict maybe you're an addict so an addict might want
00:14:55.400 to go where there's the best treatment friendliest situation i'm not sure which side that would be
00:15:00.920 but anyway you you'd have ability to move then you would have non-traditional family units
00:15:05.580 i didn't want to use the word tribe but it is the best word meaning that you wouldn't necessarily have
00:15:12.940 this little unit of mom dad and kids they would still exist but you'd have you know aunts and 0.96
00:15:19.280 friends and uncles and you know you'd never have to worry about health um you'd never have to worry
00:15:23.620 about child care because it would just be a big extended family essentially now they could organize
00:15:29.420 any way they want but this these are the broad strokes obviously the laws would have to be at
00:15:35.020 least a little bit compatible with the constitution of the united states because they couldn't have their
00:15:40.140 own supreme court now where would it be where would this hypothetical equality land be where would
00:15:53.380 it be here's my suggestion a network of bicycle paths around the country and you turn the country
00:16:02.560 the united states into a bicycle tourism mecca so that riding these trails are it's not just possible
00:16:11.020 to ride the trails it's really fun there's you know there's greenery there's something to see
00:16:16.820 there are places to stop all along the way there's campsites there are hotels there are places made for
00:16:22.720 bicycles there's a place to get a bite to eat and some water just all the way along the thing you've
00:16:28.620 got to do you've got to build these you've got to do the maintenance on them you've got a lot of work
00:16:33.760 from hotels to restaurants to bicycle repair bicycle rental bicycle you know pickup from the road when you
00:16:41.780 got a flat tire so a network of bicycle paths would create the necessity for an enormous amount of low
00:16:50.020 skilled labor an enormous amount and the beauty of this is if you wanted to go to let's say live along the path
00:16:58.200 it's being along the path that is where the equality society lives so you could go and live near one of these
00:17:06.360 paths and if let's say if you lived in florida let's say your family was there you might want to be nearby so you just you
00:17:13.840 know you'd be within driving distance but you would live in equality land and you would be sort of subject to that
00:17:20.240 lifestyle and culture now if you did this you would have an industry that would be
00:17:25.760 robot proof that's right it would be robot proof because robots wouldn't be as great for doing this kind of work and the
00:17:35.220 people in equality land could just say no robots no robots no robots we just decided that we won't have any robots in
00:17:43.320 equality land which is spread along these paths and
00:17:48.260 and they would not be along highways because you don't want your bicycling and your cars to be in the same place now obviously
00:18:01.880 depending on the season there would be different parts of the the bicycle paths that would be better in different
00:18:08.860 seasons who is policing the paths who's policing the paths would be the the citizens of equality bill they would
00:18:17.680 have lights they would have cameras they might have humans but the but you wouldn't be ever too far away from
00:18:23.860 something civilized uh and yes and a big part of this idea is a lot of you know i got an e-bike recently
00:18:33.540 so it's got a battery that assists you when you pedal now if you have not experienced the fun of
00:18:40.700 riding an electric bike that makes you feel like you're you have super strong legs because you always have to
00:18:46.340 pedal it it doesn't do anything by itself but the pedal assist you'll go up hills like they don't even exist
00:18:52.980 you know senior citizens can easily climb hills with these senior citizen meaning probably through 1.00
00:19:00.460 to your early 70s you could you could go up hills pretty easily um so that's the basic idea so if
00:19:08.520 you're just joining me i will recap the idea is to uh and again it's not a proposal it's just for
00:19:14.360 brainstorming reasons you don't have to love the idea but think in terms of letting the people who will
00:19:20.020 never be comfortable in the dog eat dog world of capitalism and free markets why not let them have
00:19:27.340 their own piece of the pie and they could build something from scratch that would not be racist
00:19:34.420 at all now what would be the alternative well the alternative is we either live in a country where
00:19:42.500 there's continuous tension about systemic racism or we say how about you show us how to do this right
00:19:49.800 how about you start in a fresh situation because you know if we're being honest most of the people
00:19:58.660 affected are people who don't have a lot of skills because they've got other problems right the people
00:20:05.620 have lots of skills probably doing okay it's sort of everybody who's below that lots of skill level
00:20:12.360 who's got the extra burden of racism without the benefit of at least i made some money
00:20:17.340 all right somebody says that's what homeless encampments are for
00:20:23.100 now the the idea here is not is not to simply put them in some kind of uh like a native american
00:20:31.520 reservation all right if you're thinking in terms of uh it's just like a native american reservation
00:20:36.920 did that work out no we're not talking about that i'm talking about a really well-designed society
00:20:43.380 from the ground up using the best knowledge we have and you don't even do the first you know you
00:20:50.040 don't even do the first town along the first bike path until you've got something that looks pretty good
00:20:56.960 right so you don't have to just say here's a bunch of land good luck native americans with your
00:21:02.380 with your land you can design it right so you know what you're getting into before you go live
00:21:08.800 all right now as you might imagine there are a billion ways this can go wrong we have to compare it
00:21:16.280 to the alternatives compare it to the alternatives the alternatives are we either fight forever about
00:21:24.280 socialism and systemic racism because it doesn't look like our current system can be tweaked
00:21:30.360 it just doesn't look like it can i was uh i was looking at an announcement from cornell i think it's
00:21:38.380 just came out and cornell was talking about all the things that they were doing to address systemic racism
00:21:44.880 it was just page after page of this class and this education and we'll fund this and do this and it just
00:21:53.520 looks like it will be too hard to retrofit something that's so mature you know the rest of the country
00:22:01.800 and i i would be perfectly okay if the country said you know what if you've got a better idea let's test
00:22:10.900 it let's test it we'll give you some space see how it goes uh what about borders in this case the
00:22:20.040 the uh that's a good question um i would say that one of the questions would be what to do with
00:22:26.500 immigration now because the equality uh land likes immigration likes a lot and so too does the defense
00:22:36.900 land but they would prefer you know the high-skilled workers more more so um you could say that you could
00:22:45.580 have unlimited immigration into into these areas as long as people are let's say tracked and maybe
00:22:52.940 they have to have a phone with a tracker on it so they're not they don't they don't just immediately
00:22:57.220 leave but it would be a great place to go so if you were an immigrant let's say this let's say you're 0.76
00:23:03.540 an immigrant and if you went with the approval i guess they wouldn't even need approval of the people 0.95
00:23:09.860 in equality land that you could just go there you just couldn't leave there because you you wouldn't
00:23:15.980 have a free pass to go to equality land and then just leave there and go to the rest of the country 0.97
00:23:22.340 now how could you do that i don't know you know maybe there's some way to i i've suggested for a long
00:23:28.340 time the immigrant immigrants should have some kind of an immigrant phone that has special apps for 0.97
00:23:34.640 finding work but also for tracking them and for you know making sure that they're doing what they
00:23:40.680 need to do so uh there might be some way to allow immigration into the worlds where they want it
00:23:47.880 and control it more for the worlds where you know they're really just watching the dollars
00:23:53.220 uh so that's so that's the idea um it's good to see exactly one person who said this is great
00:24:04.980 uh i've got a feeling this wasn't the kind of idea that everybody would light up with
00:24:09.640 uh but if you if you have a bicycle it probably excited you somebody says once again seniors are not
00:24:18.200 socialists well you know what i meant all right no seniors aren't socialists but you know what i meant
00:24:24.600 they're for the most part they're not going to work they're receiving money it's not all the money
00:24:31.960 that they put in in most cases they're getting most seniors are getting more from the government than
00:24:37.520 they ever put in in social security so but again everybody's different there's no one thing you could say
00:24:43.920 about seniors that would be true oh okay a few more people are saying it's a good idea i'm actually
00:24:50.420 gonna uh watch some more of the comments because i have no idea oh some more people love it how about
00:24:57.360 that um and by the way you could also have you know your solar panels all the way you could have
00:25:04.360 your windmills i mean you could do a lot of cool stuff there
00:25:08.160 yes i do really like my bike i do i'm sorry if i sound like an e-bike commercial but if you've
00:25:17.080 experienced it you would immediately know you're seeing the future because those batteries are going
00:25:22.900 to get better and better and even senior citizens will be able to have a three-wheel trike
00:25:28.000 that they could go 100 miles i mean you could go 100 miles on flat ground well even with a little
00:25:34.300 bit of hills if you're 75 years old and you're willing to sit on a three-wheeled vehicle with a
00:25:40.660 good battery in it you'll just pedal yourself 100 miles and you'll be happy about it so imagine if you
00:25:47.940 could that going on vacation a family vacation how hard is it to go on a family vacation raise
00:25:54.800 you raise your hand if it's the worst freaking thing in the world why because nobody wants to do 0.59
00:26:00.120 the same stuff good luck getting all the members of your family to do any one thing that they all
00:26:05.540 like equally well and then what do the kids say the kids say yeah i'll go on that vacation with you
00:26:11.280 mom and dad uh i need to bring a friend and then it just becomes impossibly complicated to satisfy
00:26:20.080 everybody's needs and it's really expensive to go on any kind of vacation now imagine that your vacation
00:26:27.080 is hey kids uh we're going to drive and park next to the closest uh bike bath and we're just going to
00:26:34.840 bike and we're going to camp how expensive would it be to bike and camp it would probably be a really
00:26:42.900 good vacation would the kids like it yeah the kids can go ahead you don't even have to wait for
00:26:47.580 them the kids could be 10 miles ahead and playing at the campsite before mom and dad get there as long
00:26:54.080 as everything's safe so we could transform the country into a tourist destination we could fill
00:27:01.340 this thing with uh with people who come to love america because they see it up close and have a good
00:27:07.620 experience and uh somebody says your your ass won't let you ride that far i am sure that we can fix 0.88
00:27:17.020 bicycle seats i'm sure we can do that it hasn't been done yet but i feel like we could do it
00:27:24.060 um somebody says equality land sounds like it would take capitalism to make it work it would take
00:27:31.280 capitalism to get it going and it would also be um functionally capitalistic with whatever rules they
00:27:39.460 wanted because the people who were working there in the hotels and the food services would be getting
00:27:44.760 paid so they would just have to work out what that means do they pay taxes do they share it equally
00:27:51.500 and then everybody gets ubi let them work it out all right um somebody says are you an artist or
00:27:59.760 scientist uh you've got google scott you could just move to tucson with great biking and by the way
00:28:08.720 there's already uh plans for a national bike bicycle path so if you hear that somebody's already doing
00:28:15.980 this i'm aware of it uh i think maryland is already complete so you can ride a bicycle the entire length
00:28:23.500 of maryland on their bicycle path i don't know how much of it is on roads but some of it probably
00:28:29.580 um and their plans if they can get it funded is to connect the entire united states but i think
00:28:35.780 one bicycle path would be great but having a network of them so you could really see the country
00:28:43.420 would be amazing i mean how would you like to know that you could ride your e-bike to see a mount
00:28:49.420 rushmore kind of cool right and and somebody would pick you up if you get a flat tire you know everything's
00:28:56.260 organized and friendly all right that's all i got for you and i will talk to you in the morning