oh you can defend yourself enjoy. communication. seen. the enemy yes you. can r.t. exclusive wiki leaks confirms the authenticity of a recording that could spin the narrative on julian assange it shows that the whistleblower did try to prevent not facilitate the release of thousands of sensitive u.s. cables it is claimed the courts knew about the tape when deciding on his extradition to america. this is evidence that you and i can look this is. not new to newport's in the u.k. a transcript of this conversation was presented to the court in september. also

with covert 1000 cases creeping closer to 3000000 in russia experts say the infections are reaching a plateau as the country ready for weeks 3 of its massive vaccination programs. and a top british lawmaker faces a backlash after saying unicef should be ashamed of a quote political stunt as the charity organization aims to put food on the table for vulnerable children in this christmas. you know i said check out our dot com and to delve deeper into any of our headline stories the big picture with holland cook is coming up stay with us. nature gave us this virus and we made it worse how let's ask the author of the sickness is the system when capitalism fails to save. bus from pandemics or

itself available at democracy at work and diet info of which economist richard de wolfe is founder and he hosts the nationally syndicated show economic update hell of a read richard and you had me at hello when you wrote capitalisms vulnerabilities undermined the capacity to contain covert 1000 spread richard what vulnerabilities are baked into capitalism and how are they hampering our coronavirus response. well in the classic sense of the term i'm too edgy. let me try to explain it rapidly as it resists system that rewards investors who do 2 things find a profitable way to use their money and minimize the risks they take in doing so that's the rule that's the mantra that's the measure of success if you do that

and that usually gets spun asian for your failure is that you didn't do it you didn't find profitable outlets or you took on too much risk so let's look at it in terms of the pandemic. let's take is an example a mask manufacturer a capitalist who invests in goods of equipment and labor to produce max usually a situation to produce a mask takes a certain amount of money obviously to buy the new and puts paid to workers and so on but in the region sure of what viruses are they come very obviously you never know in advance whether they come how bad they will be etc the producer of a mass would also them have to store it stockpile it in a where happens and the other would have to be held secure it would have to be kept clean you not have to repair them replace them and for how long well the answer is

who no holds enormous risk it might take a few months before you can sell those masks it might take a few years therefore it's enormously risky and the solution of capitalists widens understandably given the rules and metrics of their business that they could do better elsewhere that is they can find either other profits elsewhere or lord risk elsewhere and so that didn't produce the masks and then produce the plants and the ventilators and the hospital beds and the i.c.u. units and so on this is the way capitalism works and if you don't want to make your public health a struggle so issue if you take public health seriously that inures one of the basic requirements of every konami system then i'm afraid that conclusion in

private capitalism is not an adequate or reliable basis for any society's public health. well from your book a real whack on the side of the head for me you point out that some 2000 billionaires have more wealth than the bottom half of the world's population 3 and i have a 1000000000 people and here in the usa tell me if i've got this right the 3 richest americans have more wealth than the bottom half of our population you write about an employer versus employee culture what has widened the gap between the haves and the have nots over the last 50 years. well basically it follows from this employer employee division inside virtually every business certainly every private citizens a very small group of people have an outsized amount of power the owner or the

board of directors the major shareholders they make all the basic decisions what to produce what technology to use where in the world to carry out the production and what they had to do with the profits that everybody as hell didn't produce and not to put too fine a point on it it shouldn't surprise a very many people that if a tiny minority of people and that 20 employees are of very small minority of off elation if they have all that power to make all those decisions and they care that schooled the mass of what employee he's from doing so we just the norm one of them that small group of people feathers its own nest this proportionately gives shares of a profit to dividends that is to the people on the shares to top executives that is

people who sit on the board of directors etc etc and if you have a system that works like that you really can't be surprised that the minority who sit at the top make them sal's ever are wealthier than everybody else it really is something that different from what i feel towards the end in relationship to serfs what changes did in relationship to their subjects' what masters did in relationship to slaves we have different names employer employee makes us all feel better but in the end they didn't have the system as you rightly call it is a mechanism of power and control that then explains the only equal distribution of the wealth that comes out of enterprises when they are rotten in this minority employer telling anybody else what to do.

richard you have heard the counterpoint though let the market decide that your book reminds us of a crucial time when the government didn't during world war 2 when we allocated scarce goods back to the future early on in this pandemic our governor here in rhode island said she was on the phone at all hours calling places like india and china bidding against other states for masks in the p.p. e.u. we're talking about a minute ago absent a national pandemic plan is it now time like in world war 2 for the government to step in. well i think it certainly would be an advance over what we have now i mean we are the leading country in the world for cold cases for coal deaths for the number of our workforce that are unemployed i mean we are the pioneer in the wrong direction and therefore almost anything that we might try other than what we're doing now offers us at least

a better chance let me stress what the government could do not in some abstract way but i telling you what the government is doing now see it turns out that there isn't enough profit and too much risk in another industry besides health care of like health and that other industry may surprise you it's the military so it turns out that it's very expensive to produce tanks and battleships and guns and missiles and capitalists who do that sort of thing will make a gram would not only have to make them but i think with the health care they would have to store them somewhere and then they'd have to secure them and maintained a man clique and you know it's up to you risk because you don't know when finally there will be a military activity that would make a demand allow you to sell your missile and your gun and your battleship the

government so how do we handle that well it's interesting in our society we will bring the government the government says to the military i will buy you a missile as fast as it comes off you summary line ditto your garden ditto your aircraft carrier and then a government public expense your and my taxes it to the government that takes all the risk away because the government stockpiles those things and the government pays to secure the men clean the men replace the and repair them and waiting until the next military adventure. requires debt here's the irony the government is already taking care of compensating for the fact that private lives that wouldn't produce guns in their souls if the government didn't step in the exact same logic applies to public health but those companies don't want the government for fear

that we might then go another step in the direction of having the government run a public health system which is what happens in most of the other countries around the world so we don't have it but of course the government could do for public health what it has always done for the whole defense military and the logic would be we ought to have done bad the government should do it for one simple reason we have already lost more people's lives more american citizens lives to the cold disaster than we did in world war 2 all we did in all the wars since world war 2 this is a bigger threat than the military that threatens us and yet we do for the military what we are afraid to do for our own public. a man we're speaking

with economist richard wolfe author of the sickness is the system when capitalism fails to save us from pandemics are itself available at democracy at work died in tow during the f.d.r. years richard we got social security the minimum wage millions of infrastructure jobs that lead us out of the great depression and begat the american middle class that is now struggling i got a little over a minute but here's a hypothetical phoria if you had president elect joe biden's ear what would you recommend. well you know if i would take hours and we only have less than a minute so off the real one pick number one up there in the liking thirty's we had a public jobs program franklin delano roosevelt under pressure from the law created something on the order of $50000000.00 federal jobs fantastic program that took

unemployed people gave them a job gave them a decent income allowing them to maintain their rental payments on their mortgage payments and put them to work doing some of the 1st environmental work in this country artistic work in the home you p.t.a. building bridges and highways wonderful things we still get. almost a century later why in the world since it worked so well the last time we had unemployment why is it that our 2 major political parties can think of everything other than what comes out of american history and live and should be the solution. amen and right now some of that century old stuff will create a lot of jobs when we get busy with infrastructure thank you university of massachusetts amherst professor emeritus richard wolfe happy new year to you. come on up do you know this man. does she look

familiar how about this lad don't blink none of us are getting any younger but these faces you're seeing are not any of us they're not real people but real people could be using images like these to rip you off when we come back artificial intelligence run amok this is the big picture on our team america. the universe of. information presses. that is the reality of this thing we call nuts. if you can touch it so it busy. doesn't change who says. it's all about it.

we may. need to. say to let yes or no or yes is good but that is a probability. model. that actually not. even gets it. right. here's to it except that it.

does look familiar or does he. these faces are fake people images created by the new york times using what it calls g a n a generative adversarial network the times explains that in essence you feed a computer program a bunch of photos of real people in studies and tries to come up with its own photos of people while another part of the system tries to detect which of these photos are fake the back and forth makes the end product ever more indistinguishable from the real thing every single day on facebook i got a friend request from somebody who's facebook wall is pretty much blank scam stor

is trying to get to 1st base using fake 'd names and photos for less than a ferry is purposes possibly for a video game characters or advertisements you can acquire fake folx from generated dot photos which offers what they call unique worry free images for $2.99 each or just a 1000 dollars for a 1000 of them if you're on a budget fake faces are free at this person does not exist dot com where you can adjust their likeness as needed make them old or young or ethnicity of your choosing. if you want your fake person animated a company called rose bud dot a i can do that and even make them talk creeped out yet it gets worse how much worse let's ask legal and media analysts lionel of lionel media

or is that really him lionel if this technology was available during advertising's mad men era don draper might not have been drinking so much he wouldn't be able to do a photo session without coddling temperamental models in their managers and agents who gets hurt if we're dealing with fake people. one of the things which is important is to put on your generous a conspiratorial hat now and you remember years ago at the advent of this thing called m.t.v. right around 1905 there was a a song by godly in cream called cry where there was this transmogrification just transmutation of images from. a brazilian warrior into a swedish mends young girl then and we marvel that at that says 35 years

ago now let's go back a little more u.s. what could go wrong you know colony imagine one day somebody looked at us as you know i want to maybe work on your image a little bit what a haircut. how about maybe if you could different i know we're going to change your face we're going to change you we're ok you can say whatever you want but let me change you know research and you know research we know from our case of a radio those research berends we found that if you have a little less credible more gray if you're a sinner or bigger or broader or less whatever let us change you and the problem with that helen have you seen a friend of yours send you a picture of maybe you've looked at him or her on instagram and they have filters now you don't even recognize them thinner younger or smoother they're not that

person anymore we're having the. the end of people we're going into this is we're going to an n.p.c. world this non player character look at did you ever think you'd watch sporting events with cut out cardboard or we don't need people anymore it's just film out with people that look to be people and let me days of if you don't think this is possible one day and it's already been done you're going to see t.v. stations and new programs where there's not a human being in there and when automation hit radio there were radio there are no people there well you're going to have automated ai automated new ascent and film and it just the possibility is are endless. as a big corporate radio's bloodbath continues radio is becoming more and more robotic and for a couple of decades i made my living talking on radio which is where you and i 1st

met lionel so this particular innovation to hit a nerve watch this. how cool would it be to just generate a perfect sounding voice with a voice that would sound as cool as my voice. like mine. like mine how cool would that be introducing speech of the most natural sounding speech software on the market. and i'm one of the $0.34 from speech that. i bought it was $47.00 a month i want to up sell you all the foreign accents and lionel do you remember this classic t.v. commercial for a member sets up. if you want to hear. your record. 3 cassette

tape it reproduces. such crystal clear fidelity you have to ask is it or is it makes 3. x. . is alive or is it a matter of $1700.00 catch phrase or remember big win for madison avenue but lionel at least there was an elephant's jerald as each of the as innovations has surfaced you of warned about what you call the anonymization of humanity where does all this lead. it's it's the end of the necessity of humans one of these days we're going to see kids in particular especially with more covidien shut in and shelter in place where they're going to have dolls who really aren't dolls dear robots to not really robots or ai and imagine this doll which will it 1st will be

introduced to help the sick kids would behavioral disorders or problems where the robot doll whatever ai will learn the particular idiosyncrasies of the person will become this child's best friend the unanimous asian the dehumanisation the remove all of the necessity of humanity and this is not only going to going to be just for dolls but sex robots this is going to be you laugh now whenever you bring this subject up people that are in agony chortle ads would you stare as they are want to do but mark my words you're going to see people who are going to have robots who are soul life like sed that can blush and there is now concern with there is a programmable sex robot that you have to ask for consent before you were engaging the very activity you bought this one for now imagine the other such a loser that your robot refuses you. can't imagine my bad

this this is your it it's a years ago in new york there was a man standing on the corner screaming come back hair come back i said might not even a solution a here will talk to him so when you get into any weird permutations of reality that are going to confound which frankly i just love and the show hallmarks . on a more serious note we are speaking with the legal and media analyst lionel who is a former prosecutor so counselor i wince just saying the words because child pornography is a crime so heinous but taking this fake people technology though it's a logical extreme is it not a huge loophole i got about a minute. well there was a case i want to refer you to in 2002 the supreme court reviewed a case called ashcroft against free speech coalition and it dealt with the child

pornography prevention act of 1996 and both the 9th circuit and supreme court basically struck it down here's the question where member they the expression how and they said no animals were harmed during the course of this or if i were to follow the law and say it is against the law to have 2 to do you picked or to have children involved this is horrible to say in that activity what if i said fine i now have a robot i have something that appears to be like a child but he's not a child no check no children were involved in this. but it's so real so incredibly real can you imagine crafting legislation that says you cannot not only have behavior involving children but peering to involve children the supreme court handed this in 1906 and said if you deal with this you will get rid of lida

romeo and juliet lots daughters you'll be able to basically just put a big x. on a lot of literature because they do have picked activity as well so where does this remember lionel's law the law always lags behind technology so get ready. you know and often when you and i are talking about things like this year a quick to point out we're probably about 5 years behind legal and media analyst lionel at least i think that's who we've been talking to it thank you for stepping into the big picture as a rudolph giuliani was getting a laughed out of court from state to state one of his wild side arm waving charges was that 2020 votes were being cast by dead people and enough of the walking dead failed to stagger into the polling places the president over a loyal attorney general william barr and the justice department found no

widespread election fraud but the dear departed are gobbling up your tax dollars. among $2.00 trillion of your tax dollars improper payments listed in a report from american transparency nonprofit nonpartisan watchdog group since 2004 uncle sam sent dead people nearly $872000000.00 in mistaken medicaid and social security payments federal pensions and even farm subsidies and 6000000 social security numbers are active for people 112 years old or 'd older even though only 40 people in the entire world are known to be $112.00 but all is not lost of the nearly $27000000000.00 the internal revenue service eroni asli sent out almost $3000000.00 have been identified for recovery efforts

a capture rate of nearly 63 percent but hey it's a start and all that is before the trump tax audit is complete you can download this entire report free and open the books. and that is the big picture will be back same time next week if you want to set your d.v.r. or direct t.v. channel 321 on the dish dish we're 280 you can find all of our shows are you tube dot com slash the big picture our t.v. and you will be too cool for school if you download the portable t.v. . in the app store or google play you're not going to be to leave how much stuff we have in there i'm holland cook stick and close to home here in rhode island hope you're being safe over the holidays to question more.

well welcome to. this fundamental question. i guess today. we're tracing a. physicist. and bestselling author. professor paul davis. astrobiologists cosmology bestselling author really great to have you with us today. so i should talk about a special information because i'm a journalist and i work with information a lot now you're in.