w, not that day. I think he had a, yeah, I won't say more than that.

The Trump administration is rumored per Forbes that they're thinking about maybe selling a portion of their gigantic student loan debt to a private market. Why would they do that? Now what that means is people owe the government I don't know $1.6 trillion for student loan debt. The way anybody who owns the debt, in other words the people who are supposed to be paid, the way they can get rid of that debt is by selling the debt to somebody else who's in that right kind of business. So in other words you say if you give us, I'll just make up a number, if you give us half a trillion dollars, we'll give you the ability to collect $1.6 trillion from these people who used to owe us, but now they'll owe you because we sold it to you. So they would have to deeply discount it for it to make sense at all.

But you have to keep in mind that a private entity probably can't be as successful garnishing wages. So debt is worth more to the government than it is to private individuals because the government can pretty much squeeze you until you pay. Private companies, they can squeeze you a lot. They can mess with your credit, etc., but probably can't force you to pay. It's a little bit harder for a private entity. So that makes the value of the debt lower because what they would be buying would be worth lower. And maybe private entities could be more aggressive in collecting. Maybe they could be more innovative in how they handle the debt. So there's something there. I wouldn't say that this is necessarily a good idea. You'd have to know the details. It's all in the details, but maybe. I mean, it's within the realm of yeah, maybe.

Eric Nolan of SciPost is writing about a study. They showed that public opinion shifts your cardiovascular response during political talking. So in other words, if they hook you up to sensors, they can determine that some political topics make your heartbeat and your hands sweaty and basically your body has an autonomic response.

Now let me ask you this. What would be more useful in understanding the American public? An opinion poll in which we already know that 25% of the people asked are going to have the wrong answer because they do on every poll and the other 75% didn't understand the question. Right? That's what an opinion poll is. If you say can you give us your opinion on closing the border? Well, people will have an opinion, but do you think they'll understand it? They want to close the border, but do they understand all the ins and outs of the policy? You know, the short term, the long term, not really. So opinion polls are a pretty good gauge of what people are going to say. You know, if you talk to them, they'll say those things and that's a good gauge of that. But what about how they feel? That's what this cardiovascular response is. So this is not so much about this specific study making more general statement that if you could study how people feel like literally put sensors on their body so that they can't lie to you. You're just reading their body directly then you would suddenly know all the right policies. Not the logical policies but you would know what you could sell.

Now imagine, and by the way, I think that Trump understands this like nobody has ever understood it. That's what it means to be able to read the room. Reading the room is not listening to the words. It's knowing how they feel. That's what he does. So if you look at the top three issues for voters, often it'll be stuff like crime and the border and inflation, of course, but that affects everybody. But don't you think that those are the same things that would show up on an automatic, what is it, your cardiovascular and your other responses? If I hook you up to something and you're having a tough time paying your bills and then I say, "How do you feel about inflation?" It doesn't matter what words come out of your mouth. As soon as you hear inflation, you think, "I can't pay my bills. Oh my god, what am I going to do?" And your body starts going crazy. Now you really know something. I mean, you really really know something. And likewise with the border. If you show somebody pictures of non-citizens streaming over the border and say, "How do you feel about that?" I don't want to hear what words they use. That would be a little bit interesting, but not really. But if you tell me that if they see that picture, their heartbeat goes, "Oh my god, I'm under attack." Which it might. For some people, it might feel like an attack. It does feel like an attack. It does.

Don't you think that opinion polls should at least be augmented by a smaller number of people checking people's automatic responses? So you know, my friend Carmen Simon who's in that line of business and that line of business means testing people's bodily responses to different questions. She doesn't do politics. But because you know I'm very familiar with her work. By the way, you should follow her on Locals. Carmen Simon, Dr. Carmen Simon. So she's usually doing corporate questions and things like that. You know, if we do this versus that, how do you feel?

One of the things I learned years ago when I worked in the user interface lab at Pacific Bell, now I was not one of the scienti