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Oct. 23, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
55:22
Episode 270 Scott Adams: Caravans, Khashoggi, Avenatti
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Hey everybody!
You're probably wondering where the heck have I been?
I'm five minutes late.
But you know, one of the great things about working for yourself, and one of the great things about not working for money, you don't really have to show up on time.
Your boss will not fire you.
If you ever have a chance, To have a job that doesn't require having a boss?
You should run for that.
Run toward it.
But I know what you want.
I know why you're here. I think it has something to do with coffee with Scott Adams and the simultaneous sip.
And today I'll be taking the simultaneous sip from my new coffee mug Which arrived in the mail anonymously from, apparently, a viewer of this Periscope.
You know who you are, whoever you are.
Thanks for the mug. But there was no no in it, so I can't thank you personally.
And so, join me for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, that's good.
Good stuff. Alright, so some morning news.
Let us start with Michael Avenatti.
Oh, by the way, a number of you have asked why it is that it seems that I always line up my face so it's exactly where the comments are and then you can't see me because the comments are covering me.
There's a long explanation that it's harder to put on Twitter, but because I'm using the back camera, In other words, I can see myself.
The image is reversed.
So in order for me to see myself, you can't see me and vice versa.
And the nature of this medium is that when I can see myself, it becomes personal to me.
That's hard to explain, but you've probably noticed that this medium is very personal.
And part of it is that I'm aware that I'm not talking to just a camera.
And the way that I'm aware of that is both the comments and seeing myself.
So there's some life. If I did not see life and did not see my own face, it would feel more like a presentation.
And you would feel it as well.
So I don't think there's a good way for me to be able to solve this, but I'll work on it.
Anyway. Let's talk about Michael Avenatti.
He tweets this morning, provocatively.
So, you all know Michael Avenatti.
He was Stormy Daniels' lawyer and he represented the woman who claimed that during the Kavanaugh situation that there had been these rape parties every weekend.
He is not judged to be the most credible person in the world.
But he tweets this morning.
There is too much at stake in the midterms for the Dems to allow the Republicans to use the caravan, which is so obviously a setup, as a wedge issue.
It is time for the Dems to step up and be strong on border security.
We cannot once again be painted as weak and then lose.
And then he does hashtag basta.
I don't even know what that means. So the first thing he says is that the caravan is obviously a setup by the Republicans.
So it looks like Avenatti is saying that the Republicans, yeah, somebody's saying I should use two devices and I'll try that next time.
But I think there's a timing lag because when I see myself here, I'm seeing myself in real time.
But if I see it in the playback and watch it the way you're playing it, it's going to be a delay, so it won't get me what I need.
But anyway, Avenatti has apparently come out to be strong on border security because, and here's the funny part, Even Avenatti can't defend the Democrats.
I'll just leave that right there.
When I saw this tweet this morning, in which Avenatti, who's presumably running for president as a Democrat, even he can't find a way to defend the primary Democratic Party Policy point.
I don't even know how he can run as a Democrat when he's coming out basically as a Republican or closer to one than a Democrat.
And I just loved everything about this.
I actually sat on my couch half an hour ago and I was just crying.
I was laughing so hard that even Avenatti can't defend the Democrats.
All right. Let's talk about Ian Bremmer tweeted a graph from Signal.
And the source is the Committee to Protect Journalists.
And it shows some graphs, and I'll just tell you what's there, of number of journalists in prison as of 2017.
The number one imprisoner of journalists is Turkey.
Is this the best simulation ever?
I mean, seriously.
What are the odds?
There are a lot of countries in the world.
I haven't counted them all up, but let me ask my assistant.
By the way, I have an assistant now.
Alexa, how many countries are there in the world?
There are 195 countries in the world today, out of which 193 countries are member states of the United Nations, and two countries are now member observer states.
All right, all right, all right, all right, all right.
So there are 195 countries.
Out of 195 countries in the world, the number one imprisoner of journalists is Turkey.
Come on!
There's no way that this is accidental.
I mean, it might be accidental, but it is humorously accidental.
Who's the second worst imprisoner of journalists?
China. That's right.
China has imprisoned 41 journalists in 2017.
How many fentanyl labs did they close in 2017?
I'll bet it's less than the number of journalists that they imprisoned.
I'm just going to put that out there.
I'll bet China did not close 41 fentanyl labs in China.
That is leading to the death of 30,000 Americans a year.
But they did jail 41 journalists.
So And if you're watching what's happening with China's economy and the U.S. economy, you know that China's having a tougher time of it, or seems to be.
At least that's the way it's being reported.
Who knows what's true anymore, but it's being reported that China's having more problems economically than the U.S. is.
How do you know that's true?
Well, we don't know as much about China.
That's a little less transparent.
But what we do know...
Is that the Fed raised interest rates because the U.S. economy is too strong.
Now, a lot of people don't know a lot about economics.
So there are some things which are obvious to some group of the public who has studied this sort of thing.
People have business backgrounds.
But it's completely non-obvious to the general public.
And that is that if you're looking at this trade war...
The way you win or lose a trade war is that generally the strongest economy has the leverage because they can wait longer.
The weak economy can't wait as long to make a deal.
And our economy is so strong that our own country, operating through the Fed, had to slow it down.
China is worried about not growing at the rate that they need to.
And we're worried about growing too fast.
Who wins the trade war?
Okay. Now, the fact that it took President Trump to pretty much force this through the government tells you a lot about the low quality of our government before this.
Because now that it's happening, doesn't it feel obvious that it was the right thing to do?
Before the trade war, all the smart people were saying, no, no, no, trade war is terrible.
Don't do that. Everything will come crushing down.
Didn't pretty much all of the smart people say that?
And now that we're in the middle of it, it's so obviously the right thing to do.
Obviously. And it's obviously working.
Now, we don't know how long it will be to get a deal, but we know that the President set it up perfectly.
He started with having a great relationship with President Xi.
He continues to praise President Xi for being a strong leader and a capable person, and he recognizes that Xi is fighting for his team.
He's not fighting for America.
Why should he? So, he's setting up the respect part perfectly.
And then he's using his economic leverage professionally and perfectly.
This is exactly the way a trade dispute, let's say, should look.
It should look exactly like this.
He's nailing the heck out of it.
Now we don't know how it will turn out, but if you were to judge it from this point in history, you'd have to give the president an A+. He picked the right time to do it, and he created the right atmosphere to do it.
He got a few small ones done in Mexico and Canada.
His team and the president are handling this perfectly.
There's no way that that could be missed.
What kind of a critic would even dispute it today?
You know, you can see when you add less transparency about it, you know, months ago or a year ago, I think a reasonable person could have said, you know, be careful about this, don't do it.
You know, that would have been an okay opinion even if you disagreed with it.
But today, when we're actually tamping down the rate of growth of our own economy because it's too hot, And theirs is shrinking.
And all of these inequalities in our deal, from the postage to the IP they're stealing, to everything else, it just seems so obvious that this was the right move now.
I don't know how anybody could even argue against it at this point.
So, here's the fun part.
Have you ever seen a better month for any president?
I'm not a presidential historian, but has there ever been a 30-day period when a sitting president just had everything go his way?
It was going to happen by chance sooner or later.
He was going to have the best month ever, which I'm going to drink to.
Let us drink to the best 30 days any president ever had.
Join me. Yeah, so here are some of the things that are going right.
Now, the obvious stuff are the economy and North Korea and stuff like that.
We talk about that all the time.
But in the past month, here are some other things that have gone right.
One is these rallies.
So when the president is in travel rally mode, he is the best president of all time.
You know, mostly for his base, right?
Because the other people are not watching or they don't like what he's saying.
But in terms of his base, he's the best president of all time.
They love these rallies.
They charge up the base.
I mean, he just takes it to a whole other level.
Do you remember when the president was first running for office and people said, dismissively, he's just a crazy clown and he's an entertainer and he's just a reality TV show star?
And do you remember what I said?
What I said was, well, I think you're missing something.
He does have all of the theater skills.
I call it theater. He has a grasp and an understanding of theater.
It's on top of his other skills.
It's not his skill.
It's one of his skills.
If it were his only skill, you know, I wouldn't even be talking about him.
Lots of people could do that one thing.
The magic here is the other stuff on top of that.
The theater part is just what he does in addition to the other things, in addition to having the business sense, negotiating the understanding of government, the understanding of people, the charisma, the sense of humor.
There's just this enormous talent stack that works really well together that he built over a lifetime.
So when you look at him using the theater layer of his considerable talent stack, we now see it differently.
Now you see it as an extra level that no president has ever matched.
He's unmatched in terms of the theater part of his talent stack.
So that part's going well.
So he's got the great visuals, he's got the enormous crowds, the news can't ignore it entirely because he always says something a little provocative that makes them have to focus on it.
So he's killing it that way, so it's good for him.
Second, you're seeing the blue wave, or at least the optimism for it, starting to atrophy quickly.
You know, we went from, oh my God, this is going to be good for Democrats, to, well, this probably will be good for Democrats, to, well, we're very confident, statistically, that Democrats will still probably win, but maybe not.
And I believe the odds of a blue wave are now, at least by some people's reckoning, almost identical to the odds of Hillary Clinton winning on Election Day.
Now, if that's not perfect, if that is not a perfect setup for Surprise Version 2.0, let's call it, it needs a name.
Should it come to pass that the Republicans outperform I'm not predicting that.
I'm only predicting that the turnout for Republicans will be jaw-dropping.
That's my prediction.
The turnout for Republicans will be jaw-dropping.
In other words, the news is going to have a hard time not talking about it.
This has everything to do with I would say my understanding of Trump supporters.
We'll see. We'll see if I do understand them.
My understanding is that they like a joke, they like winning, and they prefer action over talk as sort of a general quality.
You put all that stuff together, and what would be funnier?
I mean, seriously.
What would be funnier, if you're a Trump supporter, than watching the news on Election Day for the midterms and finding a repeat of 2016?
You know you want that.
Not just because you want it politically.
You know how fun that would be.
So that's my prediction there.
So that's going well for the president.
But the biggest thing that's happening, of course, is the caravan.
And the caravan is capturing our attention because it hits two of the dimensions of persuasion that are the strongest dimensions.
The strongest persuasion is fear.
Fear. If you can persuade using fear, you're automatically the most important person in the room because everybody takes care of their fear before they move on to anything else.
Like, okay, we've got to get rid of the fear.
And the look of just the sheer number of people in the caravan, the fact that the majority of them seem male and young, is automatically military invasion-like in our minds, even though that's not what it is.
So your subconscious is taking this visual and turning it into something scary.
So there's that, plus it's visual.
It took a concept of immigration and turned it into a scary visual.
So that's all working in the president's favor because it just fits the sweet spot of his persuasion on immigration.
But there's a better part.
You know how you can't change history?
You know, you've heard that, right?
Common sense says you can't change history.
History's done. Well, you are watching, right in front of your eyes, the President of the United States, the Master Persuader, the best who has ever done this, maybe the best who ever will.
You're watching him change history.
How, you say? How is the president changing history?
Because that's not even something that can be done.
He's actually doing it right in front of you.
And here's what it looks like.
What was the biggest mistake that the president probably ever made in terms of political discourse?
I would argue that the biggest mistake he made was the day he announced Because he made the mistake of casting the immigrants as criminals, which allowed his critics to say, you're saying all people from Mexico or coming across the border are criminals, you darn racist.
So that's the history you used to believe, or let's say part of the country believed.
So half of the country believed that he meant literally that they were all criminals, And the people who became his supporters believe that he was talking about too many criminals.
Anybody with an ounce of objectivity would understand he was not literally saying that the women and children coming across the border were MS-13 murderers.
He was talking about some of them were criminals and some is too many.
So that's how he should have said it.
He should have said most of these people are great people just trying to get a better life.
But there are way too many criminals in that group and we can't ignore that.
So something like that might have been optimal.
Now I'm careful about saying that the President made a mistake by saying something outrageous because at the same time I have to acknowledge that saying outrageous things is his technique.
It's the reason that he sucks up all the energy.
So I can't say for sure that even what sounded like a gigantic mistake You know, being a little careless in his wording, so it sounded like all immigrants were being cast as criminals.
You still have to ask yourself, well, that is the reason he got all the attention.
I don't know if it was a mistake.
You just can't tell.
Because there's no way to score it.
You can certainly say it haunted him.
You could certainly say it gave tons of ammunition to the other side.
You could certainly say it created an easy trend for the other side to paint him as a racist.
But he did win!
So, you know, you have to be a little humble about looking into the past and trying to say you should have done something differently.
But, that aside, The history that used to exist was that the president thinks immigrants are all a bunch of criminals.
All a bunch of criminals.
That's how the anti-Trumpers framed him.
And he sort of He has put up with that framing for a long time.
Now, there have been many times where he is clarified, but because the clarifications are never as interesting as the original provocation, we sort of don't remember the clarifications.
So the original provocation, his announcement speech in which he said, he indicated that there were too many criminals coming across, and it sounded to some years as if he was saying they're all criminals.
That was our history.
He's changing history right now.
How is he doing it?
Well, this is such a big event, this caravan.
It's in the news. It's in our consciousness.
The president's talking about it a lot.
He's tweeting about it a lot.
So now, what we think about immigration has morphed from our earlier Mental idea of the whole situation of immigration and Trump's comment about it.
It's now morphing to more about what's happening at the moment.
Because you're always more persuaded by what's happening now.
And you're also more persuaded by the visual and the scariness of it.
So the old history of what Trump said about immigrants, that's the old history, is now being rewritten in your mind To what's happening at the moment.
Because the new stuff is sort of overriding the old stuff.
And what he's doing, if you watch the way he's talking about it, he has corrected his original misstep, if it was a misstep.
And that is, that when he talks about the caravan, look at the way he talks about the criminal element within it.
Now he says, you know, if the reporters wanted to go into the group, They would find that within the group there are criminal elements and even some people sneaking in from the Middle East.
I don't know if that's fact-checked, but that's the claim.
So he now is using the caravan to rewrite, at least psychologically, he's rewriting history about what was his opinion about the percentage of criminals coming across the border.
He's rewriting it.
It doesn't seem like you could rewrite history, but keep in mind, history doesn't exist.
History doesn't exist.
You can't hold a little history in your hand.
You can't, like, get a basket full of history.
History is a mental thing now.
You could say that things happened, and that may be true, but history is just a mental process at this point.
So the president can rewrite history because he's rewriting your mental process, which is the only way history exists.
It exists as an organization of What?
Molecules in your brain and the chemistry in your brain and he's rewiring that.
So if you are watching the caravan situation and the president talking about it, you will see that over and over again he talks about the caravan being big and that within it, if you were to look carefully, within it there are criminal elements.
That's the new frame that he's put on it and he's hitting it over and over again It's now harder to remember and less credible in your own mind that he ever said anything different than that there are criminal elements within the larger group.
It's a big, big deal that's completely ignored.
Because if you look at the importance of that original statement about crime coming across the border, that really was an enormous part of people's mental tapestry about who this president was.
And now they're watching him rewrite that history in real time so that when they look back at the original statement, they're going to have to wonder Wait, was that a little taken out of context?
Because right now he's very clear about criminal elements just being a component of that group and too many of them.
Alright, I probably could have said that in a shorter way, but...
Joel, if you're jogging on the beach, I wanted to give you as much content as possible.
And that's all I had.
Alright, it seems to me that there's not much else happening.
Is there? Guatemala captured some ISIS people?
I haven't seen that story. Yeah.
So, fentanyl China continues to do its thing.
I continue to track down different information and I'm trying to get a good angle on this fentanyl stuff.
And one of the big problems is that people can't think.
People think in analogies.
Let me tell you the most common thing that's happening when I talk about fentanyl on Twitter.
And most of you know that I've advocated that if the United States can determine who within China is running these fentanyl labs, and I understand there are lots of them.
It's not one lab.
It's lots of these illegal labs.
To the extent that we can figure out who they are and where they are, We should be encouraging the Chinese government to come down hard on them and ideally execute them.
Because they're behind, at least they're supplying the raw ingredients that they know are killing 30,000 Americans here.
And so that should certainly be an executable offense in China.
But I've also gone farther than that and said that That if China won't act, we should directly execute them.
So we should execute Chinese citizens in China to the degree that we know for sure that they're drug lab operators for fentanyl.
Now, you're seeing some comments here saying, you're insane, you'll start World War III, etc.
Here's what I say.
We're already in World War III. They're killing 30,000 people a year.
In two years, Chinese fentanyl will kill more people than we lost in the Vietnam War.
Americans, anyway. There were a lot more casualties in Vietnam.
And somebody's saying without due process?
Yes, I'm saying that in a war, you don't use due process.
In a war, you do not make sure that somebody is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
In a war, you kill whoever you need to kill.
Now you're asking yourself, hey, if you were to kill somebody on foreign soil, wouldn't that start a war?
Well, here's the good news.
We don't have to wonder about that.
Because Putin already did it.
Putin already showed us that you can blatantly kill somebody on foreign soil, and if that person isn't especially important to the overall government, that you're going to get away with it.
Now, Putin killed critics, and we still didn't start a war with Russia.
Saudi Arabia just killed a law-abiding journalist Right in front of the world.
And we're still not going to start a war with Saudi Arabia.
Nobody else is either.
So the question of whether a foreign entity can kill somebody on your soil, get caught, and still not cause any major problems, has been answered.
We already have the answer.
You can kill people on foreign soil.
And here's the key part.
The other people are killing people that we think should not be killed.
That is not what I'm suggesting.
I'm suggesting that we kill people that even the Chinese government thinks should be killed.
In other words, they would kill them themselves if their government was functioning properly and nobody was bribed.
If the government of China worked properly, they would execute these exact same people.
It's against their law.
But probably there's corruption and things and inefficiencies and whatnot, so maybe their government doesn't work so well.
The odds of starting a war, because we killed Chinese fentanyl dealers in China, I believe is zero.
Approximately zero. That's my opinion.
But you could kill a few and find out.
Just kill a few and find out.
See what the reaction is.
Because they're not going to go to war over one And they're probably not going to go to war over two or three.
We could probably kill dozens.
And if it became a national headline, what then?
Suppose it became a national headline.
My God, China is accusing the United States of killing somebody on their soil.
And then we have to report why.
Why did we kill somebody on their soil?
Well, same reason we killed Bin Laden in Pakistan.
Do you remember when Pakistan went to war with the United States because we killed Bin Laden on their territory?
No. You don't remember that.
Because it didn't happen.
Why? Because even Pakistan doesn't want Bin Laden.
Sure, they complained.
They're supposed to complain.
To keep their sovereignty, it's a good form to complain about it.
But they're now going to war about it, and they got nukes.
So China, the last thing China wants is a headline that says we're killing their fentanyl dealers because they can't get it done.
They don't want that headline.
China is going to cover this up faster than we would.
Even if a Chinese publication, let's say a Chinese newspaper, wanted to report that story, the Chinese government would stop it.
They don't want a story that says the U.S. is killing their citizens because they're responsible for the death of 30,000 Americans a year.
No chance of war.
None. Not even the smallest chance.
And even if they threatened it, You'd have so much time to climb down from it.
It just is no risk.
All right. Who's going to fund the op?
Good question. I'm not sure it needs to be American government people.
It could be other people. It could be mercenaries.
It could be paying Chinese nationalists to do with themselves.
Could be lots of ways to get it done.
Now, the argument that people have said is that, well, Scott, if you say that you can blame China for supplying this deadly stuff, shouldn't you also be in favor of killing alcohol makers in the United States?
Shouldn't you be in favor of killing car manufacturers because they know that their cars kill people?
Scott, shouldn't you be in favor of killing gun manufacturers in the United States because guns kill people?
Isn't it the same reasoning?
Well, here's my answer to that.
Those are different situations.
What can a different situation tell you about your situation?
Nothing. Nothing.
There's something wrong with your brain.
If you're asking yourself about gun makers and cars and American products which are, wait for it, legal.
They're completely legal.
Now if those things were illegal, if let's say guns were banned and some manufacturer was making them anyway, let's use a better example.
It's illegal to make a bazooka or an automatic weapon and sell it to the public.
You can't do that in the United States.
If we found that there was a company, an underground company, making fully automatic weapons, and let's say they were making drones that spray toxic chemicals to kill people.
Let's say they were making IEDs for terrorist attacks.
So in other words, illegal companies.
Would I advocate killing the operators of those illegal companies Who were making terrorist bombs and terrorist equipment that could only be used for illegal terrorist stuff.
Yes! Absolutely!
And if the United States government, for whatever reason, wouldn't or couldn't kill those terrorists operating on our own soil, would I be upset if China killed them for us?
Well, I would certainly raise an eyebrow about that.
I would certainly wonder why that's happening.
But if the Chinese government, and this is a ridiculous thought experiment, but that's the point.
Whenever you're talking about, you know, give me your opinion on this because something completely different was something completely different.
You know, so yes, analogies are not persuasive.
But I'm making a point that if the Chinese government came and killed somebody in this country who was a known terrorist, it wouldn't start a war with China.
So my point is that I'll take it out of the analogy.
Countries don't go to war because you solved their problem.
And if we kill some of the owners of their fentanyl labs because for whatever reason they're not doing it, we're solving their problem too.
So you don't go to war because you solved another country's problem.
You just leave all the analogies out of it.
And you can't compare that to any kind of legal industry in another country.
There's no comparison there.
Alright, tariffs on all Chinese drugs.
I'm okay with that.
I'm okay on any kind of maximum pressure on China under the circumstances.
Should fentanyl be illegal?
So, and other people are arguing that you're not going to change the supply of fentanyl by killing the dealers.
I agree with that.
Let me say it as clearly as possible.
No matter how many fentanyl labs you close, no matter how many you execute, you won't change the supply.
Because it's too easy for another one to pop up and fill in the gap.
That's not the reason I'm advocating killing them.
I'm advocating killing them to size the problem.
It needs to be treated as a war.
And one of the ways to get people to understand the size of it so that they'll put the right priority on it, so that they'll put resources on it, so that they'll stop thinking of other things and think about this because it's so critical.
It's like a big bleeding wound.
You've got to put the tourniquet on it.
All I want is to kill enough people that we understand that what the labs are doing is so bad that it has to be treated as mass murder.
If we treat it as a drug problem, we completely lose the magnitude of it.
Let me use an analogy to make my point.
A handgun is a weapon used to kill people.
Or it can be, right?
A nuclear weapon Is a weapon used to kill people?
Should our laws about handguns be the same as our laws about nuclear weapons?
Answer, no.
Because even though they're both a weapon to kill people, the size and scale of a nuclear weapon makes it an entirely different situation from a handgun.
Likewise, if you're looking at laws that we have for heroin, laws about cocaine, laws about marijuana, those are like a handgun.
They can kill, well, not so much marijuana, but...
But the lower level opioids, you know, the heroines and the cocaine and stuff, they can kill people like a handgun can kill people.
They can kill a lot of people. But it's not fentanyl.
Fentanyl is a nuclear weapon.
And if you're treating the nuclear weapon the same as you're treating the handgun, you're in the wrong conversation.
So everybody who says to me, hey, why don't we legalize fentanyl because somebody, somebody did something with heroin, you're using handgun laws to make decisions about nuclear weapons.
Now that said, I am in favor, I am totally in favor of anything that can be tried small.
So if you can do a trial in a city or a state where you relax the laws and somehow you protect people and you treat them instead of putting them in jail.
So I'm in favor of trying every small thing you can try that has any potential whatsoever as long as it's reasonably constructed.
Let's talk about George Soros.
So I feel bad about this.
So I had asked on Periscope a few times for somebody to explain to me or send me a link to something that would describe why people think George Soros is the devil.
Now it's not because I haven't read things about him.
I have.
But every time I read it, I keep looking for the The part where I'm supposed to understand that he wants open borders or no borders or something, or something that would make him as evil as he is portrayed by the right.
And then I read the article and it doesn't really quite sell it.
So I think, okay, it wasn't that article.
Obviously, I'm just not reading the right articles.
And so I kept thinking I would at least accidentally just run into something about Soros that would tell me his open society or whatever was a menace to the world.
And that there would be an explanation.
It would say, oh, he's doing this, and you can tell that if people do this, it will lead to this bad result.
That has to exist, right?
Well, so I asked people to explain it to me.
What's so bad about him?
And people would resort to generalities.
And I thought to myself, well, maybe everybody thinks somebody else knows what he's doing.
They can't quite explain it themselves, but they've heard it so many times.
So there are stories about him being a Nazi collaborator, which was apparently true when he was a child.
So that's not like being a Nazi collaborator.
Being a Nazi collaborator when you're a child...
Doesn't mean you are Nazi.
It just means you didn't want to get killed.
So certainly don't blame him for being a 14-year-old who did what he was told so he didn't get killed.
So, people pointed me to Lee Stranahan, if I'm pronouncing right, Stranahan, who apparently is one of the most knowledgeable people on the question of George Soros.
He was nice enough to make a video explaining his view.
I don't like to watch long-form videos.
I know, it's ironic, but I usually don't have, you know, half an hour to sit down and absorb something long.
So I said, you know, could he just summarize it?
Just put it in a tweet.
I don't need the details, but just what is in one sentence, two sentences, three sentences, tell me what he's doing that's so bad.
Because it seemed to me that if you can describe anything that's real in a few sentences, Watch me do it.
So I'm going to describe any problem that's a real problem with just a few words.
Okay, here's one. China's trade deals are unfair.
Now I'm leaving out the details, but just telling you that tells you the basic idea, right?
I'd have to support that with some details, but you understand it.
It's just one sentence. I could say ISIS are a bunch of terrorists who want to kill us.
Totally understandable.
You don't know the details, but you get that.
Fentanyl coming from Chinese labs is killing 30,000 Americans a year.
That's a problem. One sentence, and I described it.
And I think you could go down a very long list.
Yeah, climate change.
People are worried that climate change is warming the world and will destroy our climate.
One sentence. And I understand what's wrong with climate change.
Now, I still need the details, but it only took one sentence to give me the general idea.
Now, people are saying open borders.
As far as I can tell, that's just false.
I think that's just false, the open borders, because I think that the way people are interpreting that is literally no borders, as in no countries.
I don't believe there's any indication that Soros wants to get rid of actual borders.
If I'm wrong, it's been five years and nobody sent me a link that would support the fact he wants to get rid of borders.
I think he might want to have better systems for bringing in temporary workers across borders.
Which is exactly what the president wants.
The president also would like better immigration systems so that you could easily bring people across borders for work, but they wouldn't necessarily be residents.
All right, so I sort of asked Lee on Twitter to just sort of tell me what is the problem, the basic problem.
And he did, and this is the part I feel bad about because I know he's like a legitimate guy doing legitimate stuff and has lots of followers and he's very popular.
But when he tried to summarize it, it was generalities.
And when I say generalities, I called it word salad, and I felt bad about that.
But when I see generalities, and then I asked him, you know, could he show me a link to somebody who would explain it in a written article just because it's faster?
And Lee actually said that he's probably the one who knows the most about this topic, and one of the problems is that there aren't good articles that sort of tell the story.
If there were, he would have linked me to them.
What do you do if you're me in this situation?
So here's the setup.
I wrote a book called Win Bigly, in which some of what, I don't know if I said it as explicitly as I'm going to say it now, but you get the idea, that if somebody can't explain fairly succinctly what the problem is, It might be imagination.
In other words, what do you call it?
A mass delusion. So, a mass delusion The tell for that would be that everybody's afraid of it, but when they go to explain what they're afraid of, it sort of doesn't make sense.
In other words, you can't agree with it or disagree with it, it just actually doesn't make sense.
That's the key.
So if you're looking for a Salem witch trial situation, if you're looking at Trump derangement syndrome, if you're looking at any kind of Thing that you're wondering, is this real?
Or is this some kind of a national hallucination?
Look for the word salad.
Look for the inability of anybody involved to succinctly explain what's wrong.
And you can see it in the comments.
So let me put it to you right now.
So your comments have enough space for you to tell me what's wrong with Soros.
So he's a currency manipulator.
That is true.
It's also legal, and it's also not the reason that people are complaining about him.
Read his book, Open Society.
that's an example of so whoever said somebody just said read his book Open Society that's an example of you being in a hallucination It's not an example of you making your case.
Because if you were making your case, you'd say, George Soros killed a baby.
And I'd say, he did?
I don't have the details, but now I know what your problem is.
If it were real, you'd say, George Soros wants to overthrow the government of the United States.
And I'd say, oh, I understand that.
I'll still need to see the details, but I understand it.
If you say, read his own book, you are indicating to me in the strongest possible way that you don't know what the problem is.
And somebody else is saying, his own book, he wrote it.
He explains it.
If you can't explain it in one sentence what the problem is, it's not in his book.
So that's my challenge to you.
I'm looking at you He's a proven anarchist.
That's not true. He funds Antifa.
Does he? So he funds a variety of interests, but why?
Funding Antifa is not the worst problem in the world, because Antifa really is not terribly important in the big picture.
Does he fund Antifa because he wants them to take over the world?
Does he fund Antifa because he wants to take over the United States?
Or does he fund Antifa because some parts of what they say he agrees with?
So he might be against racism, for example, as is Antifa.
The most cogent argument is that he's accidentally funding bad groups.
That's pretty vague, isn't it?
Pretty vague.
Take, for example, apparently somebody said he's funding Black Lives Matter.
Now, seems to me that funding Black Lives Matter is very similar to being against racism.
He doesn't have to agree with everything the groups do, if he agrees with sort of the main thrust.
He can't be responsible for the actions of every single person in Black Lives Matter.
But he can say, yeah, I think police brutality is something to worry about.
I think racism is something that needs to be addressed more aggressively.
That's not exactly a monster.
Somebody says, I can't watch this anymore.
He's a Nazi. I believe he is not a Nazi, and I believe that all of you have, not all of you, I believe that most of you have been duped.
duped.
I hate to say it, but I think most of you have been duped by the Soros stuff.
Being against racism and being for Black Lives Matter No, they're not exactly the same thing.
But there's no indication that Soros has bad intentions.
Is there? Let me say this.
Does anybody think that in Soros' own mind he has evil intentions?
Or do you believe that he has good intentions for the world, but his idea of how to get there is different from a lot of other people's ideas?
What do you think? I've seen no evidence he has bad intentions.
Now, I'm not ruling it out.
But if you look at the fact that nobody can explain it, he destabilized currencies, yes, completely legally.
The trouble is that everybody in the high finance world is doing stuff that if you were to look at it from some kind of fairness filter, you'd say they ought not be doing that.
There are some things that are useful, but a lot of it in the high finance world looks like just people doing shenanigans.
Somebody says, I think you're just playing with us.
Well, I'm challenging you.
So, to be very clear, there's no trick to what I'm doing right now.
So there's no hidden motive.
I am telling you that I don't see a compelling reason to think he's the devil.
I see reasons that you might not agree with some of the organizations he's funding, but they're sort of trivial.
They don't seem to be, and they don't seem to have bad intentions.
Alright. I know you don't like hearing this topic because it so disagrees with your preconceived notions about him.
And let me be very clear, I'm not defending him.
I'm saying I don't know much about him, but it's very telling that those of you on here can't come up with a coherent problem with him.
That it's a lot of people signing out on this topic.
All right. So if you want to make your George Soros case, I'm open to it.
So if you think I was giving you an opinion on George Soros, you're wrong.
I was telling you that I'm puzzled by why your opinions about him are so unpersuasive.
And that's not a coincidence.
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