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Oct. 29, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
52:56
Episode 279 Scott Adams: Domestic Terror and Who Does It
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Hey Warriors everybody Tom, get in here.
You're the fastest one.
Andrew, Unix Rab, Matthias Andy Berry, and Deep Southern.
Come on in here. Hey, Juju, and I don't know what that name is, and somebody with a bikini, and Joe, and All right, get in here.
As you might have already noticed, I was not doing Periscope this morning.
I'm in a different time zone doing some press for the paperback edition of Win Bigly.
So if you don't have Win Bigly yet, you don't know what everybody's talking about.
I feel sorry for you if you haven't read Win Bigly, but On the other hand, you are very clever to wait.
Because if you waited, you can buy the paperback edition.
And it's lighter to carry on the plane.
So, pick that up.
Do me a favor. All right.
Somebody said I just interrupted them from watching the video of Ben Shapiro and I talking.
By the way, if you haven't seen that, you can find it.
Just Google it. Just Google my name and Ben Shapiro.
It'll come up. And I'm hearing that people really like it.
Which is weird, because when I left the interview, I remember thinking to myself, oh, I wish I'd done better.
You know, I wish I'd said things a little differently.
But apparently people like it, so maybe you should watch it.
Alright. So, let me talk about two social experiments that I have been running on Twitter.
that many of you have been part of.
Now, I wasn't trying to hide it, so everything I'm going to tell you was obvious and public.
Well, let me put the frame on it that I haven't done yet.
So the first one was I was asking people to send me some information about George Soros to tell me specifically what was he funding, how much of their budget did he fund, because if it's only 1%, it doesn't mean much.
If it's 100% of some organization's budget, well, that means he's in charge.
So if we don't know what percentage he's giving to any organization, we don't know what year he did it, and we don't know what he's trying to achieve, it's kind of hard to say what's going on.
And instead of getting useful information of the form that would say, George Soros did this, here's the link to it, and here's why this is bad.
I didn't get anything like that.
But I got a whole bunch of people saying stuff such as, well, look at this video clip of his 60 Minutes interview in which he said he enjoyed being a Nazi collaborator.
That didn't happen.
If you watch the unedited version of that, it's completely different.
So first of all, most of the people who are hating on George Soros are starting from a fake news standpoint.
The video in which it appears that he was enjoying being a Nazi collaborator is just fake news.
If you see the whole thing in context, it doesn't mean what it looks to mean when you see it out of context.
Secondly, who the hell cares?
What does it matter to me what Soros did when he was 14?
That doesn't affect me.
I only care what he's doing now.
So if you were pointing me to 1940s to tell me why you don't like George Soros today, you haven't answered the question.
So here's my preliminary And I'm open to revising this.
And indeed, I think there might be a really good chance that someone will give me information that will cause me to revise it.
So I'm not locked in on this opinion.
But so far it appears that Soros Derangement Syndrome is an equivalent of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
It's just on the right instead of the left.
So I am completely unconvinced that there is an argument against George Soros which is coherent.
It might be that he talks like a vampire and people don't like that.
It might be something anti-Semitic that people don't say out loud but they're sort of thinking it.
It might be because he does seem to be doing things that Israel doesn't like.
I don't know exactly what, but to the degree that he tries to be balanced, that would be bad.
If your interests are the interests of your country, Israel is most interested in Israel, as it should be.
The United States is most interested in the United States.
I think we should be. Canada should be mostly interested in Canada.
So if George Soros is doing something that might be good for one country, let's say good for Canada, but less good for the United States, the United States has a reason to complain about that.
But I'd like to see the data that would support that.
All right, so enough about that.
I've talked about him before. So I tried a similar experiment today on Twitter in which I've been seeing summaries of what types of people are causing this domestic terrorism, the violence, the killing.
And the summaries tend to say things such as there are X number of people who are white supremacists who killed people.
And there are X number who are lefties who killed people.
To which I say, I don't know if I trust that.
So what I asked for on Twitter was, I asked for anybody who could give me a list Of all the white supremacists, or at least by political affiliation, what domestic terrorist stuff they've done.
And then I would compare that to a list of the other side, say left-leaning people, and then maybe Islamists to just complete it.
And here's my contention.
If you have never seen a list of the one I described, there is no information that's useful.
And what happened was people massively tweeted me things that they thought were the answers to my questions, but quite markedly were not.
And I'm going to read you some of the responses just so you can see how wild this is.
So this is a really interesting, in my opinion, very interesting psychological experiment.
So what I was doing here is seeing if people had a blind spot and if they could see it.
So here was the original tweet.
I said, can someone tweet me a detailed list, detail being the operative word, of domestic terror incidents sorted by political affiliation of the perpetrator?
And then I said, and here's the fun part, I said, please do not, not, not, and each of the nots was in capitals, so please do not, not, not send me totals without details.
Those are worthless.
How many people responded by sending me exactly what I said in clear language, do not, not, not send me totals without details?
Quite a few. How many people sent me a list of just the leftists?
Quite a few. How many people sent me to a source that talked about the totals Without showing them.
How many people? A lot.
How many sent me to some place where I could do the research myself?
That's not what I asked for.
If the only answer is I can do the research for myself, that means nobody did the research, which is my hypothesis.
So if you look at the comments, they are hilariously blind spotted.
Some people send me the Wikipedia link which talks about it but doesn't show them the list next to each other.
I guess I would have to research their links and make the list myself.
But here's the problem. If you have a list of what Breitbart says is all of this violence, And you had a list of, let's say, what CNN said, just hypothetically, of all the violence from white supremacists or even just people who are on the right.
Could you compare those two lists and say this one is bigger than this one?
No, you could not.
You could not.
Because the method that those two entities used would, of course, be different.
So you wouldn't know anything.
So people who are sending me one side, like, hey, I've got the answer for you.
And I think there were dozens of people who sent me a Breitbart article showing 600-some left-leaning acts of violence domestically.
What does that do to answer my question?
Nothing. It doesn't do anything.
It's the same as a blank page.
Because if it doesn't, by the same author, using the same methodology, if it doesn't show you what's the other side, you don't know anything.
Is 600 a lot?
I don't even know.
It's a big country. 600 might not even be a lot.
Is the violence on the right?
Twice as much?
Half as much? I don't know.
So, if you look at the comments, it'll blow your mind when you see how clearly I asked the question, knowing that either 100% or something close to that would hallucinate the question so that they could answer it in a way that's compatible.
Somebody's saying, you're being thick, Scott.
That's cognitive dissonance.
So the people who are coming in and just insulting me for asking the most reasonable question anybody ever asked are suffering a cognitive crisis.
Because how many people were sure they knew the answer to where the violence is coming from?
Well, a lot of people, according to my Twitter feed, a lot of people thought that they knew the answer to that.
A lot of people thought they knew why Soros is an evil monster.
But when I asked them to show me even the slightest rudimentary reason...
Even the slightest little useful piece of information, it's just silence.
It's nothing. So here are my preliminary conclusions, which I'm willing to update.
So, preliminarily, I believe that the people who think Soros is a monster don't know anything about him.
And they don't have an argument to back it up.
They do have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of articles in which other people gave their opinion.
I've read some of the articles, because a lot of people forwarded me stuff, and the articles have things such as, Soros wants to destroy Israel, or Soros wants to destroy the United States.
To which I say, did he say that?
Is that mind reading?
Where did he say anything like that?
Somebody said, why would Hungary ban him?
Is that an argument?
Is the argument that Hungary doesn't like George Soros and therefore he's bad for the United States?
Is that an argument?
Because Hungary is not the United States.
They're actually different countries with very different things going for them.
Hungary Well, I would get exhausted if I tried to list all the differences between Hungary and the United States.
So, does Hungary have a good reason for banning him?
I don't know. I haven't heard it, but I've heard a lot of people say, Hungary banned him.
Now, I believe the issue is that, and correct me if I'm wrong, that Hungary is...
Very aggressive on borders.
I believe they have a border wall.
Am I correct on that?
Or at least a fence? I believe Hungary closed their border.
And that Soros is more pro-immigration.
There are a lot of people who are pro-immigration who are not the devil.
And unless Soros is making a difference in that country, he's just a player with an opinion.
All right.
So I believe that it is a conspiracy theory that Soros is the devil without giving you an opinion of whether he's done anything worthy of this.
I don't know. But I can conclude, and this part I'm confident of, that Maybe nearly all of the people who have a strong opinion about Soros, it's not based on anything.
It's based on what they heard other people talking about without the supporting facts.
Secondly, I believe that any comparison of domestic acts on the left versus domestic acts on the right has never been made.
I believe that it's looked at through such a political lens that nobody's ever done an analysis where you can just compare.
Look, I made these two lists using the same criteria.
This list is bigger than this list.
If that's been done, that would be great.
I'd love to see it. But hundreds of people in my Twitter feed who have a strong opinion on this topic couldn't find one.
And we have Google.
if Google can't find it.
All right.
Now let's talk about who gets blamed for this.
Should the president be blamed?
Could the president be blamed for the uptick in violence?
Well, I don't know if this is true.
But people have been tweeting around a list that shows that the domestic acts of violence spiked under Obama and then this would just be a continuation of that line.
But do I believe those graphs?
No. Because they're summaries.
I can't see the detail.
I don't know who made the graph.
So I don't know if that's true.
But we should at least figure that out for context.
You know, was the trend up Did it start under Obama, or was it a sort of flat or declining trend, and then in the age of Trump it went just like that?
Which of those two things is true?
If you don't know the answer to that question, you don't know a frickin' thing about this topic.
I don't know the answer to that question, so I'm talking about myself.
I don't know a frickin' thing about this topic, but I'm pretty sure you don't either.
And I'm pretty sure other people don't as well.
So here's my take on it.
The argument about whether the president should take some responsibility about it is a sort of a fake trick argument.
And by that I mean people are shifting the definition of what that means to fit their political agenda.
Here's the rational way to look at it.
The rational way to look at it is that there are different filters to look at this.
If you look at it from a legal filter, the president is absolutely not responsible for the violent acts of a stranger.
Even the anti-Trump people agree with that.
Secondly, from a social perspective, how should we treat each other socially?
What kind of civilization do we want?
How do we want to judge each other?
From that filter, Even President Trump's critics also give him a pass and say, you just can't judge one person's talk as the cause of some stranger's action.
That's not fair.
But if you were to look at it as a science person, let's call that a scientist.
If you're going to look at it that way, you would say, if there are tens of millions of people listening, Maybe hundreds of millions listening to somebody who's speaking provocatively.
What are the odds that at least one person, and let's say more than one, but at least one person who has some mental issues will be triggered by that provocative speech to go out and do something that we wish they hadn't done?
The answer to that is about 100%.
There's a 100% chance because the population is so big.
That there's a 100% chance that the way you talk will trigger somebody.
But now let's put it in context.
Was that true under President Obama?
I don't know.
Neither do you.
But it probably was.
Do you believe that nobody killed anybody under the Obama administration while thinking that that was part of the reason?
I would guess that that's a fairly common thing to happen.
And part of it is that people look for excuses to put on their evil.
So people look for a reason.
They say, well, you know, I want to kill somebody today.
I think it's because of Obama.
I think it's because of immigration, right?
So you can't always trust people's reasons, even if they're screaming them while they're shooting people.
Those might be the excuses.
They might just be crazy people who want to shoot people and they need a rationale for it.
So you have to watch out for that.
But then you also further have to put it in context by saying, how does that compare to other things that affect the public?
For example, what about some forms of music?
Can music make somebody go kill people?
If you're normal, no!
A normal person doesn't go kill people because they heard something ugly on a song.
But if you're talking about hundreds of millions of people, Listening to music and some of them are just put it on repeat.
They've got their headphones on and all they're hearing is kill this, do that, slap this, punch that.
Could those few people who are not mentally stable and of hundreds of millions, could they be inspired to kill somebody because of music?
And the answer is 100% yes.
Almost no chance it affects everybody, but 100% chance somebody listening to music killed somebody because of it.
How about video games?
Does the average person become violent because they watched a video game?
Absolutely not. It's been tested.
I believe it's been tested.
They've put normal people in the room and it doesn't really change them much.
They can tell the difference between fake violence and real violence.
But, if you have hundreds of millions of people playing violent video games, and some few of those hundreds of millions are mentally unstable, could the video game be a reason, or a trigger, or the last necessary variable to cause them to be violent?
Yes. A hundred percent chance that video games kill people.
A hundred percent chance.
There's not even any, there's not a trace of doubt about that.
Now, so if you're trying to size how bad is it that Trump speaks provocatively and uses sort of punch-em, kick-em language, how big a deal is that?
Well, it's probably, if I had to just sort of use my best judgment based on what I know about the world and how it works, it's probably similar to music.
Probably similar to video games.
Now that doesn't mean he should do it.
If you said, Scott, are you saying he should keep talking the way he used to talk?
I would say, no, I don't think so.
I think that the smartest thing he could do with, what, six days until the midterm?
The smartest thing he could do is to say that he plans to stop doing that.
And that people should call him out If he does it again, he should actually just, he should invoke the help of the public that if he goes too far, that they should call him out.
And then he should say, I'm going to try to tone this down.
The trouble is, doing so would make it seem like he was taking responsibility for what's happened in the past.
That's very problematic.
So you'd have to be very careful about how he presented it.
It would be better to say, we should all do this and all go first.
So if he puts it that way, it goes down better.
Now, whenever I say something like this, like, the president should do X, let me put on my humility hat.
I don't have a Humility hat, so I'll put on my Humility earphones.
Now the reason I put on the Humility headphones is I ask myself, if I were to go back in time to 2015 If I were a time traveler and I could go back and somehow I met with candidate Trump and he said, look, here's my plan to be president.
Here are all the tweets I'm going to send for the next few years.
What do you think? It's pretty genius, isn't it?
I think this will make me president.
I would have looked at his list and I would have said, oh God, oh no, you've got to get rid of this one.
You've got to get rid of this one.
This one's a mistake. That one's a mistake.
You have to know...
That none of us would have advised him to act the way he acted, and the way he acted made him President of the frickin' United States.
So if you think you can look into all the things he did and say, well, okay, I'll give you that this actually worked, but these parts, these parts I've got to take out of there, because these parts were clearly bad parts.
Maybe, maybe, you might be right.
But it could be that the provocative talk that we realize is going too far is exactly what makes him interesting.
And being interesting is what allows him to control our thoughts.
And that allows him to persuade.
So it might be that he shouldn't do this.
It might be that pulling it back a little bit would help him.
I would advise it.
I saw Karl Rove advise it.
I think I've seen every talking head in the world advise it on both sides.
But you know, we don't really know.
It's a little more complicated than don't talk bad because bad things will happen because there are more variables involved.
Alright, so it is my opinion that it would be brilliant to dial it back and to announce he's dialing it back before the midterms because the biggest complaint about the president right now is that he talks mean,
right? So if your biggest problem is that you talk mean and you announce that you're going to stop doing it right before people vote, It's going to have to put a little doubt in their heads, and after the election he could go back to talking mean if he needs to, but it would be a real effective thing to get in front of it and say, you know, let's step back and maybe I'll try a few months of being nicer and see what happens.
I don't know if being nice will work.
We'll see. So that's my frame on it.
Now, the other thing I asked in the Twitter poll is whether fake news was a bigger or smaller problem than Trump's rhetoric.
And, of course, it's a highly unscientific, highly biased poll, but I think 75% said fake news was worse.
And I would agree. Now let me ask you this.
If President Trump were not battling against fake news, would he need to be as provocative as he is?
Suppose the anti-Trump press just covered the news straight, just gave us the facts.
Would President Trump feel the need to be as provocative as he is?
I don't know the answer to that.
But you have to ask that question.
Because the fake news and Trump are not separate entities.
They're like one monster That when one moves, the other moves with it.
When one hits, the other hits back.
They are joined.
They don't like it.
Neither of them wants to be joined.
But the fact is that the media, both, you know, the entire media, not just the fake media, but they are joined at the hip.
And so you cannot say That President Trump acts independently, even when you're looking at his provocative language.
It's not independent of how the news is treating him.
He does what he needs to do to get the job done in his mind.
Some of us would disagree about the method, but he's clearly doing what he can do in the face of a hostile media.
And so to ask him to tone down while the media is staying at DEFCON 10, I'm not sure that's fair.
Would it be fair to say Trump should change and the anti-Trump media should just do what they've been doing?
I don't think so.
Because if he started getting uninteresting and the news remained interesting, he's at a great disadvantage.
So I think it would be fair to say, it would be fair to him to say, I'd really like to tone it down.
Can you help me? Can you fix, for example, the Charlottesville fake news where Trump said both sides of the statue issue were fine people or that there were fine people on both sides of that issue.
And the news, the anti-Trump news reported it as that he says white supremacists are fine people.
That never happened.
Take that away. Go first.
Go first, CNN. That's a challenge to you.
I know some of your producers are going to see this.
Go first. Just take back the Charlottesville hoax and see what the president does.
Test it. If you think less provocative talk is good for the country, go first.
Somebody says, nope, they won't.
Well, I'm not optimistic that that would happen, but the only point I'm making is that the president doesn't operate in a vacuum.
A huge part of why he chooses the strategies he does is because of the context.
He's got to get above the noise and be the strongest voice.
Right now, the noise is so evil The only way to get above it is with a good dose of hyperbole, which he does.
Why? Because it works.
Because it works.
That's why he does it. Somebody said the Charlottesville thing is...
I have to read that dumbass comment.
Sorry, I can't scroll that for some reason.
Somebody said Charlottesville is not a hoax because of his demeanor.
I'm sorry. Apologist again.
I'll delete the guy who thinks apologist is part of reason.
So to the people calling me an apologist, keep in mind that I disagree with the president on health care, I think immigration could be better, race relations should be better, I disagree on statues, etc.
But the Charlottesville hoax is pretty clearly factually on my side here.
So you don't have to wonder if I'm shading it.
Let me ask you this.
If you believe that the president was calling the white supremacist fine people, do you think he also meant the other side are fine people, meaning Antifa?
Do you think the president decided to label some people in Antifa fine people?
No. Do you think that he went on television and decided that as a sitting president, who as far as we can tell is not crazy, decided it would be a good strategy to throw in with the white supremacists on national television?
No. No, that never happened.
It's ridiculous on its face, and when he was asked to clarify, he disavowed them in the clearest possible language.
Yes, it was about the statues, and he probably didn't know exactly who was at the event.
He knew some of the players, but not all of them, and he made a standard comment that there are good people on both sides of the statue question.
Now, I happen to be on the opposite side from the president on the statue question.
So I'm on the side that says, you know, the statues are just decorations.
And if they're offensive, well, that's a bad decoration.
And they're clearly offensive to a significant portion of the population.
Why do you put up a decoration that's offensive?
It's the worst idea in the world for a decoration.
Erasing history is wrong.
Yes, that's why I'm not suggesting that you change the history books.
I'm not suggesting you change the internet.
I'm suggesting you change your decorations.
Do you ever redecorate your house?
Why do you ever redecorate your house?
Why not leave it the way it was, for history?
Do you want to change history?
The changing history thing is a terrible argument.
History should not be erased.
Is a statue really history?
Do you remember when you were in seventh grade history class and the teacher said, you know, we were going to use books, we were going to use books, but instead we're just going to take you down to look at the statue, because that's history.
No, the statue is not history.
That's a dumb, dumb argument.
A statue, you know, it's not a history anymore than everything else in the world is history, right?
You can preserve all of your history without a statue.
In fact, I live in a town that does not have a statue.
How did I learn history?
If statues are history, I think you get my point.
Put in museum and then people could go look at them.
Yeah, I'm not sure how easy it is to move these gigantic statues to museum, but in principle that would be a fair thing to do.
The statue will be history when it's removed.
True. If you move the statues to a different place where they could be put in context, Because I don't think that's offensive.
You know, there's such a thing as the Holocaust Museum, but nobody's saying they're pro-Holocaust.
Or if they are, I don't want to beat them.
But if you move the Confederate statues to their own museum, nobody's going to say you're praising slavery.
They're going to say, well, you put it in context.
Thank you. No one worthy of a statue in California, somebody said.
Well, maybe I'll be the first.
I hope somebody's starting to carve my statue.
There's a lot of offensive art that's offensive to somebody.
Where do you draw the line?
Good question, and I think there's a good standard for that.
If 100% of the public disliked a public declaration, should you remove it?
Let's say they were offended, deeply offended.
Most people would say yes, if 100% of the people disliked it.
Suppose there was just one person, in the whole world, just one person.
Should you remove the statue or the art?
No, because it's just one person.
You got the whole public wants it to stay.
What if it's 40% of the public is deeply offended Yes.
Yes. If 40% of the public is offended by a public statue, you move that statue.
Now, how many people are deeply offended by the Confederate statues?
I don't know. But it's probably somewhere in the 20 to 50% range.
Somewhere in there.
Is that enough to say we should get rid of it?
Yes. In my opinion, a public statue That offends nearly all African Americans and a lot of other folks, too, is absolutely inappropriate.
And it has nothing to do with history.
You can put it in a museum, as people say.
Take a picture of it.
Alright. The reason they're offended is because of slavery.
It's one thing to be offended by a piece of art because you don't like it.
It's another thing to be reminded of slavery.
That's a different situation.
It's been going on for decades.
I wouldn't compare Christmas decorations to slavery, if you don't mind.
I think I'm going to keep those separate topics.
What if it was 1% of people?
I think if it was 1%, there would be an argument to not get rid of it, but it would also depend on their argument.
If the 1% had a pretty compelling argument, I'd listen to it.
That doesn't mean I'll agree, but I would certainly listen to an argument.
1% is actually a lot of people.
It's not a high percentage, but it's a lot of people.
I would certainly listen to what they had to say.
Alright, I believe I've said what I need to say.
So I didn't realize this, but apparently I get some small amount of money when people send me super hearts or hearts or something.
So if anybody's inclined to do that, Please do.
I'm not sure exactly how it works, but somehow, if you tap the side of your screen, hearts appear, and some of them are super hearts, and I don't know what any of that means, but for some reason, Periscope will give me some small amount of money if you do that, which you don't need to do.
It's optional. What about.01?
Again, it would depend on the The argument.
Let's say there was a statue of, well, I don't know, I can't think of an example, but it's unlikely that 0.01% would be good enough to remove a statue.
You changed my mind in this subject.
I changed somebody's mind.
Look at me, being all persuasive and everything.
So whoever said that, that I changed their mind, props to you.
Because you really rarely see anybody change their mind based on argument or data.
It's a very rare thing.
And to whoever it was who just went by, I forgot to look at your name.
Whoever said that they changed their minds, I have a lot of respect for that because it's just so rare.
It's just a great quality. Just to be able to change your mind is really terrific.
All right. This is my TV shirt.
Somebody asked me about my TV shirt.
This is my TV shirt. So tomorrow I'll be on Fox& Friends.
I'm scheduled to show up, which doesn't mean I'll be on the air, but I'll be showing up for the 8.30 Eastern Time.
So West Coast people who've got to wake up early, it's 5.30 Western.
So sometime after the 8.30 Eastern Time, I'll be on there for a few minutes, and I will explode some more minds.
You changed my mind about Trump.
Well, let me ask you this question, because this could be interesting.
How many of you have ever changed your mind about, let's say, a political topic because of me?
Just show me in the comments how many of you have changed your mind on anything.
It doesn't matter what it is. You could mention what it is, or you could just say yes, whichever you're comfortable with.
You've changed mine, but not this time.
I'm just looking at your comments.
Open your mind to Trump.
Time to support Gab.
Let's talk about Gab. So I find myself in a very awkward situation with Gab.
So I'll just completely...
I'll be full disclosure.
Because there's no right answer here.
So I'll just fully disclose and then you can do with it what you will.
I, of course, like free speech.
I, of course, don't like any suggestion that Twitter would be shadow banning any conservative voices.
But here's the problem with Gab.
In theory, Gab would be a competitor to Twitter.
But because of their business model of allowing people who would not be allowed on Twitter It becomes a magnet for all the people that are sort of too misbehaved, if I can use that word, right?
It's all subjective. But in Twitter context, they're the misbehaviors or most drawn to gab.
The people who are not misbehaving in a way that Twitter cares about, in other words, people who are not conservative, why would they leave?
It would be crazy to leave Twitter If you're a liberal or if you're on the left or even if you're just not conservative, it would be crazy to leave Twitter because that's the bigger, more robust place.
There are more people on there. There's multiple points of view, etc.
Gab, unfortunately, because of their business model, became a magnet for the people who got kicked off of Gab and the people who are just duplicating their exposure on another platform.
That's not a business model I can imagine working.
So when people say, hey, weigh in here, you've got to support Gab, I say, it's not a free speech question.
It's not exactly a free speech question.
It's sort of a business model question.
And I feel like supporting Gab's business model unintentionally supports people that I don't really want to support.
Because if you get, keep in mind, That Gab quite publicly kicked the shooter of the synagogue, they kicked him off, deplatformed him as soon as they found out what he was up to.
But not until the shooting.
And I think to myself, if Gab is kicking people off too, How long will it be before they have to change their business model to be basically the same as Twitter's?
You know, which is banning people who say things that you feel are dangerous or don't help the country.
So I think those two models have to either come together or gab.
I don't see how they can make it.
Now, I am concerned, as all of you are, that the big tech companies are de-platforming them.
So I think, who was it?
Their credit card processing companies, their server companies, might be some other entities, have de-platformed them.
Now, I don't like that because it kind of puts those people...
In a censorship position when they should be bankers.
You know, the bank should just be a bank.
I don't think that they should be stifling free speech.
But, so that's where I am on Gab.
And so the reason I don't say my opinion quickly, like, hey, Gab is great, or hey, I don't support them.
The reason I don't do that is it's complicated, and I wanted to do that here.
Gab does not promote violence.
I never said they did. I agree with you totally.
Saying dangerous things are not allowed anywhere.
That is correct, but keep in mind if you were a neo-Nazi, But you had enough self-control not to actually advocate violence online, you would have a happy place.
And that's problematic.
Because people don't want to go where the only people there are the ones who couldn't make it on Twitter.
The business model just doesn't quite make sense, even though I love the idea of it.
I have nothing against, of course, I'm pro-entrepreneurial people, so nothing against the team.
I'm glad that people are enjoying it, that people are using it.
It's a tough one to just say you're supported or you don't because it's complicated.
All right. Hello from Bishop Ranch, my old office.
Kim.com is creating an alternative to Twitter.
We will believe that when we see it.
See, the problem is that Twitter has the, I think you'd call it the network effect, in which if you're already on there, there's not much incentive to leave.
Somebody said they want the Scott Adams degree.
I've actually thought of defining what that would be.
So the Scott Adams degree would be some kind of combination of things you've read or studied.
That would be interesting because I think that's the place the world should go.
We should have degrees that are not Conferred only by colleges.
You know, I've said that someday if I could get the, let's say, the Bill Gates degree, Which means I just learned the things that Bill Gates thinks a successful citizen should learn.
Whatever that is. It could be just borrowing a couple of classes from different places.
It could be books you have to read.
It could be you had to try a startup on your own.
It could be anything. But whatever Bill Gates says, this is the Bill Gates degree.
If you do these things, you've got the Bill Gates degree.
That could really move things forward.
Am I next to the elevator?
I am. Oh, you heard a ding.
But that was some other ding.
But I am next to an elevator.
He has no degree himself.
That's true. Bill Gates did...
while he has a high school degree.
Your sheer sleeves were too long on Ben's video.
Ben Shapiro. Isn't that the same shirt I'm wearing right now?
I thought it was the same shirt. Oh, now I have another shirt.
I better watch that.
What's in the new chapter for Win Bigly?
The new chapter is an update on my predictions, so you can see how things went compared to how I thought they would go.
Some things I got wrong, some things I got right.
I need a tailor.
I do need a tailor.
Alright.
Blexit.
Blexit.
Let's talk about Blexit.
So apparently, reportedly, Kanye designed the Blexit design and t-shirt.
And I love the...
I guess it would be the subtitle.
You know, the title is Blexit.
And then the subtitle is We Free.
And I don't know why that is so perfect.
We Free. You know, because it does the...
Persuasion-wise...
What it does is, it's a mistake.
Right? Because the proper way to say it is, we will be free, or we're trying to be free, or we are free.
But when you say, we free, It makes you stop and you can't not think about it longer.
So I don't know if Candace came up with that.
I don't know if Kanye came up with that.
But it is kind of genius.
It's kind of great, I gotta say.
Specifically because you know exactly what it means.
And your brain can't get off the fact that there's a word missing.
Now, of course, it might be also calling back to sort of an urban way to express yourself.
And that just makes it perfect, too.
I mean, it sort of hits a lot of notes.
Charlie did. Somebody says, I don't believe that.
I don't believe a white guy...
Could suggest we free because it doesn't sound like it would be culturally the same.
So my guess is either Candice or Kanye or somebody associated with them, but it's a great slogan.
It's a great design too.
I love the design. I love the slogan.
I love the name, Blexit.
Some people have said it should be Blexit, but no, Blexit is better, absolutely.
And we'll see if it makes any difference.
Somebody says, Kanye and Candice designed the shirts together.
Well, you know, you always have to be careful.
There may have been somebody else involved as well, so I don't want to give credit without knowing exactly who, but my guess is that at least Kanye and Candace were key authors of that.
I don't know who else was. You're sounding like Larry David a little.
A little? Probably a lot.
Somebody said they're glad I'm on their team.
Well, you should be.
Talk to Hawk.
I was just texting with Hawk.
So Hawk has some things he wants to add to the discussion on rhetoric from the president and violence in society.
And I said I was very interested in seeing that.
So he'll be coming to us at some point soon on that topic.
And always interesting to hear his thoughts.
All right. He's going off the rails, people are saying.
Well, here's the thing.
I believe Hawk wants to make a positive difference in the world, but it's a tough, tough situation to try to find common ground when people are so polarized.
If he tries a few different things, if he tries a few approaches, I would ask you to have a little bit of patience because nobody knows exactly what's going to work.
Sometimes he needs to pace his team.
Sometimes he needs to reach across.
And nobody knows exactly when is the right time and the right way to do that.
So he's out there in the streets.
He's out there in the, you know, he's in the trenches.
Somebody says he hates us.
I don't see that in evidence because I've had enough personal conversations with Hawk that I feel like I would have picked up actual hatred.
And I'm not picking up a hint of it.
So I think what you're looking at is a communication strategy that doesn't work for you or you think you shouldn't use.
Which is a little bit different than hating you.
It's actually a lot different.
What is his goal? Well, he's an advocate for, you know, urban folks, primarily the African-American community, so his objective, I think, is quite obvious.
He's trying to make things better in a variety of ways for a certain population that could use a hand.
Nothing wrong with that.
All right, that's enough.
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