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Jan. 21, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:07:10
Episode 384 Scott Adams: The Covington Kids, Kamala Harris and Fake News in General
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Joanne, here you are.
So fast, as always.
The rest of you, come on in here.
Michael, Mustang Girl.
Hey Mike. Hey Duke.
Oh no, I don't know if that's your name.
Bella, Driftwood Rock.
It's good to see you.
Probably going to be a lot of traffic this morning because people like to see me being wrong.
That's always fun. Alright, so let's catch up, everybody.
You are clearly aware, by now, the vast majority of you watching this, that I, like many people, were fooled by a video that CNN ran of the Covington Catholic School boys.
And the story, of course, you all know the story.
It looked like the boys were the bad guys, but when you see the full video, However bad the boys were, they were the best people at that event.
Everybody else was terrible.
But they were also adults.
So you're going to have to put a higher standard on the adults.
So you all know that I had an original view that was mistaken because of the selective editing of the video.
I have apologized unreservedly in public.
Now, here's what's interesting.
I, being the author of the 48-hour rule, which goes like this, that if somebody says something that's a mistake or they need to take back, you should always give them 48 hours to correct or apologize.
And if they do, And it's a reasonably competent, looks sincere.
You should accept it, and you should move on.
Because it's the standard we would all want to be accountable to.
I certainly understand if somebody says, I can never forgive you for the rest of my life.
I understand emotionally why you'd think that.
But as a society, should we not agree That if somebody makes a real mistake, like we all do.
We all do. It's a universal trait of humans.
We make mistakes. And then they atone for it in the sense that they apologize and correct.
Shouldn't we always accept and move on?
Because you don't want to live in a world where you don't do that.
You don't want to live in a world where people don't accept apologies.
You really wouldn't. It would be a terrible world.
So, as the simulation or fate would determine, I, as the author of the 48-hour rule, found myself right in the middle of needing to use that rule.
Sorry, my cat is getting ready to accost me here.
Say hi. So, Boo would like to say hi.
All right. So I made my apology on social media.
Now, I got a ton of pushback from people on the right saying a number of things which I would like to criticize them for right now.
Now, eventually I had to tweet that I was going to start blocking anyone who could not accept my apology because I don't want to live in a world with people like that.
The worst people in the story Are the people who didn't accept my apology?
That seems like a big statement, right?
And it sounds like I'm just making it all about me.
But whether it was me or somebody else, you know, it doesn't matter who's doing the apologizing.
You've got a story where there was a lot of alleged bad behavior, from outright racism to homophobia to terrible things.
But I'll tell you, if you can't live in a world where somebody can make a very understandable mistake, if you can't live in that world and then apologize, the whole society breaks down if you can't accept that as standard.
So I would say some of the worst behavior we've seen are the people who couldn't accept the apologies.
Here are some of the things they said in defense of their opinion that they could not accept apologies.
One was, That I'm an idiot for believing, and here's the important word, anything on CNN. So, and some people said, wait a minute, you criticize CNN almost every day, true. And therefore, how could you be so dumb that you would believe them in everything they say?
Here's my answer.
I did not believe CNN. I believe my own eyes.
If CNN had said, I have a secret source that says some kids did some bad things, I would have said, eh, maybe not.
I'd better wait on that one.
Right? But if I see a video with my own eyes, I'm not really believing CNN, because I think they got fooled by the same video.
I'd like to see the chain of custody of that video, but I have a suspicion That they may have been fooled as well.
In other words, it's the video that was the problem, not the fact that it was on CNN. So anybody who tells me that believing a video you see on any network is believing the network, well, that's kind of a stretch.
I believed in my own eyes, which were wrong, right?
I believed what was clearly in front of me and obvious.
And it was wrong. Now, the dumbest people in this argument have said to me, Scott, you should have known to do your own research and dig deeper into this.
That's a dumb opinion.
Some of these opinions are matter of opinion, matter of priority, matter of philosophy, etc.
But there are other opinions that are just plain dumb.
We live in a world where we're bombarded with situations.
It is not practical to do deep analysis on every situation.
That's not a thing.
I'm making hundreds of decisions a day.
I'm not going to do deep analysis on all of them.
Neither are you. There's nobody who applied it.
People are trying to apply a standard to me that literally no human has ever used for their life or ever could.
It's not even possible to do deep analysis before you form an opinion on everything, on just everything.
Here's what does make sense.
Sometimes the evidence is so clear that you're pretty sure you don't have to do any research.
Somebody turned that into research is dumb.
If you think I said research is dumb, you're kind of the dumb one in this conversation.
I'm saying that in the real world, doing research on every fact that is presented to you is not possible.
It's not practical.
Nobody does it.
You don't do it.
I don't do it.
Nobody does it.
You pick your shots.
So if somebody says, I've got this anonymous source, and they say something that doesn't sound right to you, well, there's a situation, maybe you want to wait, wait for a little more information, do a little deep dive.
But if you see something with your own eyes, and it looks obvious to you that there could be no other explanation, jumping to a conclusion could be wrong, as in my example.
So I jumped to a conclusion that was wrong.
But, that's not stupid.
That's just being fooled.
There's no such thing as somebody who's so clever that they can recognize all fake news the moment they see it.
That's not a thing.
And to all of you people who climbed onto my Twitter feed today to tell me that you can tell fake news just by looking at it, You're all blocked.
You're just not part of the productive conversation.
Nobody can tell fake news just by looking at it.
You think you can because you've been right a number of times.
But it's easy to be right to calling fake news fake news.
Do you know how? Just call it all fake news.
You're going to be right so often That it will feel like you're magic.
Hey, I was right five times when I called out CNN on fake news because the other news told me it was wrong.
You're not part of...
Stop apologizing.
Blocked. Alright, anybody who criticizes me on the apology...
It gets blocked. Because I don't want to live in a world with people like you.
I don't want to have any interaction with somebody who can't accept a legitimate apology.
There are certainly illegitimate apologies, but mine clearly is not bad.
Nobody has suggested that I'm insincere about it.
Now, some people have said, That I should do more.
I've got to fund the lawyers for the children because I was part of getting it wrong.
I need to hunt down the actual people in the video and apologize to them and to their families in person.
No, I don't.
That's not a standard you want anybody to adhere to.
People say stuff in public on social media all day long and the best they should do is to correct it when it's wrong.
Now in my case, let me check the traffic on this.
So I pinned my apology and it got a lot of viral traffic.
And I'm going to see how many people saw the apology.
Versus the original incorrect opinion.
Okay? So, the replay of the apology, and this is just the periscope, because I also had, I think I got something like 10,000 retweets on the tweet without the video.
10,000 retweets, I believe, is my record.
I think it's the most retweeted I've been.
It might have been one other.
So the most attention I've ever gotten for a tweet, or maybe second most at all time, was the correction apology.
So it's 10 to 1 impact compared to the error.
And then the replay, the pinned replay of the apology has 181,000 views.
Typically, I'll get closer to 18,000 views for a typical video.
I took down the one from yesterday that I don't remember what the numbers were, but it was probably close to that.
So I've got a 10 to 1 impact of the apology correction compared to the original error.
Nobody in the story is doing more than I am to correct it.
Nobody is doing more than I am, at least in terms of ratio, you know, a 10 to 1 apology to error.
You can't beat that, right?
10 to 1? I would say at some point you have to say you've done enough.
I'm not going to track these people down.
I'm not going to go to their house and intrude in their life and say, oh, I made a mistake.
I fixed it on social media, but I have to talk to you in person.
They don't give a damn about my opinion.
They probably do care about social media, which I've done what I can do to fix.
I mean, what is reasonable to do.
Now, you think this story is over?
Oh no, you've got some surprises coming.
I happen to be privy to some information that perhaps you have not yet seen.
And I would love to tell you where I got this, but because it was a private conversation, I'm not going to.
I will tell you that I had a side conversation with a prominent anti-Trumper, Who showed me, let's say, another side of the story that is shocking.
So there's more to the story that is absolutely jaw-dropping, shocking, and I'll bet none of you have seen it yet.
You're going to probably see it today.
I assume you're going to see some stuff that you didn't know was coming.
I'll give you a preview.
One is that the issue of whether these kids did something bad at the event will probably be minimized in favor of other bad things they've done.
And let me give you a sample of some of the other bad things they've done, as told to me by someone who's watching one of the other movies.
And it's a prominent person.
Number one, And again, these are not my opinions.
I'm presenting someone else's opinion.
Number one, the hats are a known racist symbol.
So wearing the hats, if nothing else happened, wearing the MAGA hats was a known racist symbol.
Might as well have been wearing KKK robes.
Again, not my opinion.
I'm telling you the other movie's opinion.
Now, I thought about that and I thought, I have not given enough credit to the Democrats for persuasion.
And I don't know how I missed this exactly, but have you ever seen the situation where a political party successfully reframed someone else's political logo as a racist symbol?
I mean, think about it. One of the great persuasion plays of all time is to take this super successful, you know, hat logo thing, which I think, I'm pretty sure society will look at one of the greatest political persuasion plays of all time was the red hats for Trump.
Just a huge success.
But the left has successfully started to identify it as a racist symbol.
Now, I'm not saying it's a racist symbol.
I'm saying that they have actually succeeded in this.
So, on their side, it's so obviously to them a racist symbol that you can't even wear the hat.
And I was thinking, man, imagine if, could Republicans ever do that to the other side?
That is some seriously powerful persuasion.
So forget about what's good or right or what should happen, just talking about the skill of it.
That's pretty impressive.
You have to admit that if the other team can make you not even use your own logo, they've done a good job of persuasion.
Not a good job of being good people, but a good job of persuasion.
So you'll see that argument, that the hats alone are bad.
Here's another one. And here's one you're not going to like, because I'm going to agree with the critic here.
Now this is not different from the things I've been telling you forever.
Here's a criticism that I think is actually a pretty good one.
Why are minors, because the boys were all minors, they were under 18, why are minor boys giving us all their opinion about what adult women should do with their bodies?
Because it was in the context of the Right to Life march.
Now, I want to be careful.
I'm not taking sides.
On the debate. I'm not taking a side, pro-abortion, pro-life.
I'm not taking a side. I'm making a simple statement about who should be talking about the issue.
And one of the criticisms is, why is a busload of 16-year-old boys telling adult women what to do with their bodies?
And I heard that and I thought, okay.
Okay, I'm going to accept that criticism.
That's a pretty good criticism.
Pretty good criticism.
No matter which side you are on the thing.
Now, my personal opinion on abortion, which I think most of you have heard, is that my personal opinion, okay, this isn't what you should do.
I'm not suggesting what any of you should do.
I'm saying my personal opinion is that I personally should not have an opinion on abortion rights because I'm a man.
And I think that we get a more credible outcome if women, who are obviously completely capable and have more skin in the game, make the decision.
And then just tell us what you want.
If you're in, I'll back it.
If you're not in, as a majority, it should be a majority decision.
If you're not in, I'll just stay out of it.
So my version of how an adult male should play this is that personally, I think I don't add anything to the conversation.
And if all I'm going to do is interfere with the conversation, I say stay out.
If you tell me that a minor, I don't care if the minor is male or female, if you tell me that a minor should be telling adult women what to do with their bodies, I say that's a foul.
We don't have minors informing adults what to do with their bodies.
Period. I think that's something all of us should agree on.
Even if you agree with the minors who are marching, even if you're totally on their side, minors should not be influencing adults on what to do with their bodies.
That's a red line right there.
That is a solid...
That's a wall. That's a red line.
So, when I heard that criticism, I said to myself, okay, I'm in.
I'm in on that.
That's one thing.
And I would go further.
I would say that the adults who allowed children to protest what adult women should do with their bodies had a bunch of young men do that.
It's just the wrong look.
So that was fair.
There are two photos that probably you haven't seen yet.
That are about the same school and the sports teams of these same schools that to me are clearly fake photos.
So when I look at them I say those aren't real.
And I'm not even going to describe what they are because they're so obviously not real.
But they will certainly be persuasive to the people who say that these kids are bad kids in general.
Independent of whatever happened that day, there are two photos of them allegedly involved in the worst behavior you could ever imagine that do appear to be fake.
Now, you may start seeing them on social media.
I doubt you'll ever see them.
I'd be amazed if you see them on, like, regular news because they're so obviously fake.
But in the two-movie world, other people are seeing some pictures that would make the school, but not necessarily these specific kids and nothing about that day, but it would make the kids at that school, the boys, Look like really bad human beings.
I'm not even going to say what the pictures are because one of them is so fake that it's laughable.
I'll tell you that one of the pictures that's clearly fake shows an adult in the scene as if he wouldn't mind the behavior.
He's just sort of standing there.
Okay, that didn't really happen.
There's no way that whatever was happening in that picture is the way it's being described because the adult there wouldn't just be standing there like it was no big deal.
And the second one is a type of picture.
Again, I'm not gonna explain what's in the picture, because it seems more obviously fake than possibly real.
It's a type of picture we've seen faked before.
So there are other fakes that are just like this one.
Now, I'm not gonna say That it's impossible that someday there will be a Nigerian prince who sends you an email and says, hey, you could make a lot of money if you help me get my money out of Nigeria.
So far, every single Nigerian prince has been a scam.
I think you all know what I'm talking about, the famous Nigerian emails.
But that's not to say that someday there won't be a real Nigerian email.
I'm just saying it's really, really unlikely.
And likewise with these pictures that the folks on the left are probably going to see today.
It could be true.
But it's really, really unlikely because it falls into a category of things which are almost always fake.
So, here's the bottom line.
If you think that people who are dug into a position are just going to change their minds, you don't really live in the real world.
It's very unusual for people to change their minds.
You saw me correct my opinion, but that's no big deal because I corrected it in a direction that I wanted to correct it.
I wanted them not to be guilty.
So, you know, I was spring-loaded to want the kids not to be monsters.
You know, my first impression was that they did bad stuff.
The corrected impression was I saw it in a context and it wasn't what I thought.
Hence the apology.
But people are going to kind of see what they want to see.
I saw what I wanted to see and corrected to that position.
That doesn't make me a hero because I corrected to where I kind of wanted to be.
Somebody just said, where's the simultaneous sip?
Excellent question.
Simultaneous sip coming up.
Grab your mug, your cup, your chalice, your container, your thermos, your glass, your shot glass.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee and join me for the simultaneous sip.
All right.
Let's talk about Kamala Harris, who announced...
Now before I do, I'm going to give you some context.
So Kamala Harris announced she's running for president, no big surprise, but now the fun begins.
So yesterday I tweeted around a Jake Tapper, a clip from Jake Tapper interviewing Kirsten Gillibrand.
I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
So she is also a candidate for president.
I think she's announced.
But in any event, we all know she's running.
And I guess she was more conservative in the past.
And Jake Tapper said...
To her, you've called the president's border wall plan racist.
And then he said, why wouldn't your own opinions be racist since in 2006, I believe, you agreed with funding border security.
So why is it racist when the president does it, but it's not racist when you did exactly the same thing?
And that was CNN. And Jake Tapper asking exactly the right question.
Now, it was shocking to see, actually, because she sputtered and couldn't answer it.
And you watched her presidential ambitions just fizzle in front of you.
So CNN clearly is not backing Kirsten Gillibrand.
And what I predicted was that you would watch CNN, and not CNN alone, you know, everybody on the anti-Trump side, that you would watch them start picking off the weak candidates on the left because they don't want to have a real messy situation.
They need to get their top candidate, whoever they want, up to the top and clear out the weak field as quickly as possible so they're not cannibalizing each other.
I have predicted since, I don't know, at least for the last six months I've been predicting that Kamala Harris would be the likely eventual candidate.
It seems to me that CNN agrees, because if you watch the coverage of Kamala, watch how it's more positive.
And watch how all of the candidates who are not Kamala Harris get criticized by the pundits.
And I think you're going to see a very clear pattern start to develop.
So this is a prediction. We haven't gone far enough for me to say that it's already happening.
But I will say, you know, I'm not already wrong.
Meaning that they haven't gone hard at Kamala Harris.
They've been very nice to her in their coverage and they have definitely been not nice to other competitors.
So Tulsi Gabbard and Kirsten Gillibrand have gotten the tougher treatment.
So here's something you need to understand about the world and about how candidates are selected.
This is the actual way it happens.
People don't generally understand this.
There are a handful of influential, mostly billionaires, media mogul types who decide who the candidates are going to be, typically.
Trump was the total exception to the rule, because he was the billionaire, and there's only one Trump, and he broke all the rules, etc.
But the typical way that the world works is that a small group of people decide who they can fund, basically.
Who is it that would be worthy of their money and their attention?
They decide, and then the media that they control gets on board, and then they brainwash the voters, and then the voters have the illusion that they have selected a candidate.
But the only information the voters have It comes from their chosen media, and their chosen media is pretty much following, not necessarily a specific memo, but it starts to become clear to everybody in a variety of ways.
Who their team wants.
So I'm not gonna say that there's a meeting or there's a memo that comes out and they all read the memo and go, okay, we're all getting behind this or that.
What I'm saying is that, in essence, very few people decide who the candidate is gonna be.
The media will cement that view in the public, and then the public will have the illusion The illusion that they chose the candidate.
None of that's true.
And the way you can know that this is the case is that if you imagine all the different ways that a story could be told, and then you talk to any of the voters who are, let's say, on the left, Those voters will all mimic exactly what they heard in their preferred media.
If you just grab somebody on the street, let's say three months before Election Day, or even three months before the primaries, if you talk to any voter and say, why do you like X? They will tell you something they heard on television, or something they read in their friendly media.
They will not tell you something you've never heard.
That just doesn't happen.
And that's your tell, that they're getting their story from essentially brainwashing.
Alright. I just want to circle back to this thought.
For the people who are chastising me for being wrong in my initial view about the kids because of the video that I saw, it is not wrong to believe your own eyes.
Most of the time.
Alright? Most of the time, it's the best you have.
You know, if you actually directly or even on video observe an event You know, it can be wrong, and often is.
And this is the perfect example of that.
But you don't have a more direct way to know reality.
There's no better way to do it, right, than seeing it.
And that can be wrong too, as we saw.
So don't be the dumb people who say, why would you believe your own eyes?
Well, that's what we do.
So I will commit to you, as a number of people have said, Scott, Just make sure you never make this mistake again.
The mistake being watching a video and believing what I saw in the video.
I want to guarantee to you, I will make that mistake again.
I guarantee every one of you watching this will make that mistake Of believing what you see over and over again in your life.
You don't have the option of not.
There's no option of not believing what you see.
You can disbelieve a story about somebody who talked to somebody.
You can disbelieve somebody's spin.
You can disbelieve a document.
The document could be forged.
You can disbelieve a lot of stuff.
But the one you're going to probably get fooled by every time is a picture or a video.
Those are just too influential.
It's really hard for anybody not to be fooled by that.
And I'm certainly not going to commit to you that I will never be fooled by a video of an event.
That's not a thing.
I will be fooled I will be fooled by a video event in the future.
I will be. Guaranteed.
And when I find out, I'll try to correct it.
That's all I can commit to.
That's it. Somebody says, get the facts.
Alright, let's follow your brilliant belief that you should do your research and get the facts.
Let's just show you how brilliant you are.
And let's see. I'm going to turn this around because I might need this later.
Oh good, there's nothing on there.
Alright, so all of you geniuses who piled on today and said I should follow the facts.
Let me show you what that looks like.
So here's the initial story.
And then there's the smart people.
The smart people who are giving comments.
And they do their own research.
And they get to the truth!
And so these brilliant people are saying, why did you stop here with the original story?
When all smart people know, you need to do a little deeper dive.
You must get more facts.
You must research to get to the truth.
The people who say that are the dumbest people in the story.
These are the dumb people.
And there's no other way to say this, unfortunately.
I don't want to insult you, but these are the dumb people.
Here's why. How do you know when you're done?
How do the people who researched and got to the truth, how do they know they're done with the research?
How many times have you seen people go down the research well and they say, okay, I guess I'm done.
I've got everything. I've done all the research.
I'm done. How do you know you're done?
If you were fooled here, How do you know this isn't fooling you?
You have no way to know.
You have no way to know.
Let's say you're looking into climate science.
Climate science, I'm calling like a well.
Here's a little bucket on your well.
If you get the story on climate science, that's the surface, and people say, oh, I'm not going to believe all the scientists say, I'll go down and I'll look at the skeptics.
All right, skeptic tells me that the story is wrong.
Now I've done my research.
I'm brilliant. No, you haven't.
Because if you show the skeptic's argument to the scientist, the scientist will tell you why the skeptic's wrong.
So now you're done, right? You saw the story, you listened to the skeptics, then the scientist told you why the original story was right.
You're done, right? No, you're not.
Because the skeptic will look at what the scientist said, and the skeptic will say, no, the scientist is wrong.
And then you show that to the scientist and the scientist will say, no, I was right the first time, and here are the things you've forgotten.
To infinity.
It's turtles all the way down.
And eventually you will reach a place, right about here, where there's something you don't understand.
Because you're not a climate scientist.
Eventually, this argument will be an infinite, perpetual falling into things you don't understand until you get to a point...
I'm seeing comments that are making my head spin.
Eventually, you get to a point where you can't check it or you don't even understand it.
So, the dumbest opinion...
Is that you should have researched it.
Okay? That's always the dumbest opinion.
Anybody who says, you got it wrong because you didn't research enough, that's the dumbest opinion.
Because you can't research these things enough.
You never know when you're done.
There's no way to know you're done.
Can't be done. Alright?
So don't ask me to do the impossible, especially when you've never done it yourself.
Alright, uh...
So I'm just looking at your comments now.
How did you learn to think that way?
Well, that's a good question, and it is answered in my new book, Loser Think, which I just handed in my first draft.
You're comparing science to a self-explanatory video.
No, I have a chapter on people who say stuff like that, though.
I'm not comparing them.
They are two examples.
That is different than comparing them.
Now, the other problem is what I call the failure of imagination.
When I saw the original video that I incorrectly made an assumption about, the reason that I got fooled was a failure of imagination.
I failed to imagine that there was any other way to interpret it.
Then when the new information came out, I said, oh, okay, this is the new information.
But I'm making the same mistake again with the clarification, am I not?
Because having seen the clarification, I said to myself, well, I can't imagine anything that would change my opinion now that I've seen the clarification.
That's exactly what I said when I saw the first story.
Exactly the same mental problem.
I said, I can't imagine how this could be wrong.
And then when it was wrong, I said, I can't imagine how this new thing will be wrong.
But it could. It could.
And if anything that I heard from my source on the left today is true, it would definitely change the story.
But I wouldn't know if it was true.
So it's turtles all the way down.
See, somebody says the video did not show the kids doing anything wrong.
home.
But I saw that.
I saw them doing something wrong.
It was an interpretation that was incorrect.
So when you say the video doesn't show it, you're failing to understand the basic nature of human beings, that we can look at exactly the same thing and have different opinions, and it doesn't necessarily mean one of us is dumb.
It's not dumb to look at the same situation and have different interpretations.
That's just the normal way of all minds.
So you can't say that the normal way humans are is dumb.
That wouldn't make sense. You should always look for multiple sources.
That's dumb. Here's why.
Not the fact that you should look for multiple sources.
The problem is that there will always be maybe more sources.
You never know when you're done.
It's impossible to know when you've researched enough.
Yeah, there may be exceptions to that, but sometimes.
Now, yeah, now I'm seeing stories about allegations about the Native American veteran and people are doing math and saying, "Well, "Well, he couldn't have really been in Vietnam "when he said because of his age, et cetera." I would say I would not Let me ask you this.
For those of you who say we should do your own research and keep looking down, do you believe the people who say that the Native American is not the veteran he claims to be?
Do you believe that? Because you first learned he was a veteran and then people did a bunch of research and they have evidence they believe shows that he lied about being a veteran.
Are you done? Have you done your research and now you're done?
Because don't you think there's a little more research after that?
Because I don't think you're done, but I bet a lot of people think they're done.
That's the illusion. The illusion is that you only do your research until you find something you already were likely to believe.
This is the best way to say it.
In reality, people will do their research Only as deeply as they have the interest and the talent, generally until they reach a point that they already agreed.
So in other words, they're looking for a confirmation of their opinion.
They're not looking for research.
It feels like you're researching, but you're not.
How about having a 24-hour rule of not compensating?
So I agree with the 24-hour rule.
Except when you can see it with your own eyes.
If you see it with your own eyes, do you really need to wait?
Do you really need to wait a week?
If you saw a video, let's say you saw a video of Mel Gibson being stopped by police and saying a bunch of anti-Semitic things.
I think he was accused of that.
So I wasn't there, but let's say you saw a video of it.
Would you need to wait? Would you need to do your research to find out that somebody's on video?
Let's say if you saw on video something that clearly was somebody saying a bunch of racist stuff.
Do you need to wait? No, you don't.
You don't need to research that.
You saw it with your own eyes.
Now, I thought that I saw one of those situations with my own eyes, and it was clear and obvious, and I was wrong.
That's why I apologized. But it is not wise to always wait 24 hours if you think there's nothing to wait for.
So you have to use a little judgment.
We don't live in such a clean world that waiting 24 hours always makes sense.
Now, I think this was a good...
Cautionary tale, because it sort of gives you a sense of how wrong you can be about things you think are right.
So I think my own opinion about what is clear and obvious and incontrovertible has been now permanently adjusted.
So one of the questions people ask me is, what are you going to do differently next time?
And I would say, it's not so much what I'm going to do differently next time.
You know, what have I learned from this?
But rather, my filter has been permanently reset.
So as skeptical as I have always been, and I'm deeply on the skeptical side, even I wasn't skeptical enough.
So I took my skepticism, which was probably an 8.5 out of 10, and I just said, man, that's not enough.
Being skeptical at a level of 8.5 out of 10 still wasn't enough.
I need to dial that up a little more.
Maybe 9.5.
So here's my answer.
I will never commit that you should wait on every story for 24 hours.
Because there are some stories that just are so obvious that you can't convince yourself that waiting makes any difference.
But I'm definitely going to be a lot more discriminating about how often I say you don't have to wait.
And that just shrunk to a very small number.
And it was a small number before, but now it's going to be minuscule.
So I have changed.
That's the change I can commit to.
So the change I commit to is that I will adjust my own sense of how certain I can be even when I've seen it with my own eyes.
That's the new part.
Even when I've seen it with my own eyes.
I won't automatically believe that now.
But that doesn't mean there aren't still things that are just so clear.
There's nothing to say about them.
All right. Somebody says, you think you're a god.
You're meat like all of us.
Did I just say something that made me sound like I thought I was God?
What video are you watching?
It's an entire video talking about my mistakes and my inability to see the future.
And somebody said, well, you're calling yourself God?
That feels like exactly the opposite of what was going on here.
Somebody said, I made the mistake of thinking that Trump's enemies were acting in good faith No! No, I did not make that mistake.
There was no point that I trusted CNN, at least as a mental process.
I believed my own eyes.
I looked at the video and it didn't matter where it came from.
Why would it matter where it came from?
I believed my own eyes, and I was deceived.
That's not me believing CNN. Believing CNN is when they have a secret source.
I don't believe that.
But if I'm looking at the video, I don't care who gave it to me.
If it seems that clear, I'm going to be fooled again in the future probably, but I'll definitely try to tighten my filter.
All right. You were on the sanctimonious side today.
What does sanctimonious mean?
Let me see if I make sure I know what sanctimonious means.
I mean, I know what it means in context, but I want to make sure I have the right definition.
Because I don't want to say I'm not being sanctimonious until I know exactly what it is.
Making a show of being morally superior to other people.
Oh, no, I'm not doing that. Has anything I've done spoken to my moral superiority?
I don't think so.
I don't even think that's the topic, is it?
Have I talked about morality at all?
I think everything I've talked about is a practical thing.
Meaning, when do you believe things when you don't?
What's a good system for society, including accepting mistakes and accepting apologies.
That's not a moral opinion.
It's not a moral opinion that you should accept apologies.
It's a practical opinion.
It's a system that makes society work more efficiently.
So if you interpreted anything I said as being a moral superiority, I'm not even talking about morality in any way.
At all. Alright.
I'm preachy.
Preachy may be in tone, but certainly I'm telling you systems that I think work better than other systems, and one of them is don't believe that research does what you think it does.
I definitely am preaching that.
You scolded the teen's parents.
In which context?
I think there are two different contexts you must be talking about.
I would not take scold necessarily as a description of what I did.
The world you like.
Somebody says, I'm claiming superiority because I apologize.
What was the alternative to that?
Is the alternative that I'd be a better person if I didn't apologize?
People have really strong opinions on this whole topic about the kids.
I think it was sort of a perfect storm in which it took every...
If you think about it, the story with the kids took every emotional thing and put it into one story.
First of all, it was about minors.
So anything about children has more impact.
Second of all, it had racism.
It had different races.
It had something about anti-gay stuff.
It had every interesting thing you could ever have.
Oh, somebody wanted me...
Let me give you an update on my hot water heater.
This will only make sense for those of you who have heard the whole story, so I'll just zip through it.
I had this long sequence of bad coincidences where everything kept breaking as soon as one thing was fixed and another got broken.
So I did get my water heater fixed.
After it seemed impossible several times, it took an entire day, and it was finished that night.
The moment it was fixed, and those of you who heard my story about the simulation will understand this, the moment my water filter was fixed, Something unrelated, which is the warm floor's manifold, which puts warm water under the floor to warm the house.
Completely unrelated.
A different piece of equipment, not physically attached to the water heater except by, you know, hoses.
A completely different piece of equipment popped a leak As the plumber was standing there fixing the other thing.
So the simulation part of it was the weird set of coincidences that when one thing was fixed at the exact moment it was fixed another thing broke on and on and on and that trend has continued and after the water heater was fixed completely unrelated a leak popped with no known cause on an unrelated piece of equipment 10 feet away Because simulation.
I can't explain it, but it's been weird.
Somebody says that I've been seeming different lately.
I don't know about that.
I think I'm different depending on the story, wouldn't you say?
There are some stories that I have more skin in the game.
So yesterday, for example, you have to understand how weird my life is.
My life is just sort of not like other people.
And one of them is that most of you just watched the news about the Covington kids and you maybe made some comments on social media and that was your only involvement.
I made comments about the same story all of you were commenting on, except I became part of the story.
So I think the Daily Caller and Breitbart and at least one other major blog ran stories about me.
Because of this story.
And the story was that some people were apologizing for getting it wrong the first time.
So when I comment on stuff, I'm not just commenting.
I actually become the story simply by the commenting, depending on what I comment on.
So there are stories which I have skin in the game, and I'm sure that shows differently than when I'm just talking about something that I'm not really a part of.
Did the repairman lie?
Not that I'm aware of.
I think the plumbers actually did everything that I wanted them to do.
They just had an insane number of bad coincidences that could not have been anything they were doing.
This was a bit personal.
It was personal.
It was personal because I was part of the story.
That's what I'm saying. How is my girlfriend, Christina?
she's great and we're great.
Ray Bart yelled at me and No, Breitbart was just telling the story about some people apologizing.
They were descriptive.
if they were not putting an opinion on it in my case.
Your mistake helped turn it around.
Well, let me ask you.
Do you think that my apology and my clean reversal of opinions, do you think it changed the story?
In any important way.
I mean, everything's part of the story, but do you think that my involvement actually changed the nature of the story in some national way?
Because I don't see that.
I don't see my involvement being part of really changing the story.
I think I'm just part of it.
Could it be you analyzed the future better than the now?
That's a great question.
So somebody said, am I better at predicting the future than I am at interpreting what I'm looking at in the moment, such as that video?
I've never thought about that question.
I would just say that everybody is bad at interpreting the present.
We're sort of universally all bad at that.
But sometimes people are better at predicting the future.
Your apologies, set a positive example.
I don't know. There's no way to know that.
My guess is that the other people who apologized probably would have ended up there.
The fact that maybe I was early in that process, I don't think it was really influential.
Maybe, but I don't see clear evidence of that.
Somebody's asking if Ruth Bader Ginsburg is deceased.
The answer is no.
The answer is no. People use me to analyze the now.
Well, you should use as many sources as you can stand, but remember, you can never research it enough.
With all respect, you should listen to your audience more.
Really? Here's the thing that bothered me the most.
Maybe I haven't said this as clearly.
The people who said they were positive it was a fake from the moment they saw it are not credible voices in this.
Because if all you did is disbelieve everything the other side says, that doesn't make you a genius.
Let me say it again.
If you reflexively disbelieve everything the other team is saying, that doesn't make you the smart one in the conversation.
That makes you the dumb one in the conversation.
If you're not looking at every situation as freshly as you can and as objectively as you can, you're not really in a strong position to criticize me.
And I can't tell you how many people criticized me yesterday and today for not believing that the other team is wrong 100% of the time.
They're not wrong 100% of the time.
And you do know that they think your team is wrong 100% of the time.
So if your belief is that the other team, all their facts are wrong, all their reporting is wrong 100% of the time, you're not part of the thinking The thinking population.
You're just a bumper sticker with a spine.
Maybe a bumper sticker with a central nervous system.
If all you are is a bumper sticker, and you're coming to criticize me for having an independent opinion, you're not standing on the solid ground there.
Somebody says it's a pattern.
It's not a 100% pattern.
If you were to actually take the news that CNN reports and actually make a list, what's true and what isn't, most of it would be true.
I know you don't want to hear that.
Now, their interpretation of the news often would be different from what you would call true.
But if they report that somebody quit, if they report that there's a war, if they report that something blew up, if they report that the president said he's going to run, if they report that Kamala Harris says she's going to run for president, most of what CNN says is true.
Their interpretations of it, of course, and how they put a spin on it, of course, is opinion.
But if your opinion is that 100% of what CNN says is untrue, you're not smart enough to talk on social media.
I mean, you've missed the bar.
Honestly, I hate to say it, you're just not bright enough to say opinions in public.
You're a bumper sticker with a central nervous system.
And you probably shouldn't join the smart people talking.
Did that sound arrogant and...
What was the other word?
What did somebody call me earlier?
Sanctimonious. It's not sanctimonious because it's not a moral opinion.
It's an opinion about what works.
And what doesn't work is assuming that one of the news sources is 100% wrong 100% of the time.
That's not thinking.
All right. Which side is the side of love?
Both. It's definitely not true that one side is in favor of love and the other side is evil.
I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
Somebody said, I didn't say patterns were 100%.
Then why would you treat them like they're 100%?
Patterns can tell you maybe the odds, but they certainly can't tell you what is.
You're adding to the body of evidence that white people are held to a different standard.
Should I care that white people are held to a different standard?
I think it depends on the situation.
Because, for example, adults are held to a different standard than minors.
For example, if there's a fight that breaks down the bar, men are held to a different standard than women.
Let's say a man and a woman got into a fist fight.
I don't think they should be treated with the same standard, assuming that the man is the larger creature in the story.
There are lots of situations Where you should not hold people to the same standard.
I think you have to look at each one.
You have to look at each situation.
Distrust any sensational story at least a little.
Yeah, I think that's the lesson here.
I think we should narrow the lesson.
I would narrow the lesson from the Covington situation.
If people are saying the lesson is you should distrust everything CNN says, I don't feel like that's the right lesson.
I think the right lesson is video lies far more than you could imagine.
That's a good lesson, right?
Because it wouldn't have mattered.
I'm pretty sure that if I'd seen the same video on Fox News or any other source, my opinion would have been the same.
Wasn't it on Fox News?
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, can somebody inform me, did the video that played on CNN, that was just the small video of the interaction with the Native American guy and the guy in the hat, Was that video also on Fox News?
Can somebody clarify that?
Did Fox News play the same or similar video as CNN played that was just the tight clip of the interaction?
Can somebody answer that?
Because I assume they did, right?
Because it was the video most people were talking about, and it was short.
So I don't think I would have had a different opinion if I'd seen it on a different network.
I was basing it on being fooled by video.
So that's the lesson. The lesson is video lies, and video will lie more aggressively every year because the technology will allow that to happen, and there will be more videos.
So, whatever you thought of CNN, that probably should stay the same, but whatever you think of the power of videos, whether you see that video, well, let me ask you this.
If you saw a video on your favorite news, Fox News, would you believe it?
If you saw a video on a news source you trusted, and let's say many of you might like Drudge or Fox News or something, would you trust it?
Because if you would, because it was on a source that you trust, you haven't learned the lesson, I don't think.
The lesson is that independent of who has the video, The video itself can be the lie.
And the people who publish it may not be aware of it because they might have been lied to by the video just like you were.
So I wouldn't put the trust in the publishing platform.
I would say that the video is what you should question, no matter who was presenting it.
Talk about how we can be doped up on emotions.
Well, I think everybody knows that story, right?
We can get such a rush from our opinions and our emotions that actually just feels good.
And we're just chasing the high.
Because wouldn't it be...
Didn't you feel a high?
When the story was very, you know, anti-Trump supporter on day one, but then you saw it reverse, in your opinion anyway, it reversed completely, didn't you feel a high?
Most of you were, you know, Trump supporters.
Didn't that feel like an actual, like, oh, that's so good, that's so good, right?
That's what's driving your decisions.
It's not your great brain that's done a bunch of reasoning and came up to an opinion.
It's your emotions. How can you assert that race relations are hurt by CNN and yet they love?
Because you are making a mind-reading assumption that the evidence does not support.
The mind-reading assumption is that CNN is intentionally slanting the news to be racist because they're evil people.
I don't think that's an evidence.
The evidence is that they believe what they're saying.
And believing what you're saying and trying to fight against what you believe is racism, you could be right or you could be wrong, but you're not evil.
If you're fighting against evil as you see it, and it's an evil that a lot of people would agree with, you could be wrong, but it would be hard to be evil in that case.
Some people are making the Duke Lacrosse comparison.
I would say there's no comparison.
Duke Lacrosse was based on human testimony.
Am I wrong? Believing human testimony we already knew was a dicey proposition.
But believing a video that you're watching with your own eyes, a lot of us didn't know how lying a video could be.
And now we've been informed.
Our filters have changed.
All right. Did Q lie?
Alright, I'm not going to talk about Q. We'll talk to you later.
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