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May 3, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:05:01
Episode 517 Scott Adams: “Bigger Than Watergate”, Economy, AIDS Success
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No notification, somebody says.
There might be a setting that I need to flick here to make sure it shows up on Twitter.
I've got to make sure I set that.
Alright. I saw something very interesting today on Jesse Waters' Twitter feed.
He tweeted out some ratings for the cable news shows.
And I want you to think about all the things that have happened in the past year, and then I'm going to tell you some of the ratings of the shows and see if you can find a pattern.
So I'm going to first tell you the ones that went down.
So these are all the ones that comparing, I think it was the first quarter of this year to the first quarter of last year or something like that.
It's viewers in April.
Oh, it's April to April.
So it's last year's April to this year's April.
The ratings for the cable news shows.
So these are the ones that went down.
See if you can figure out any correlation or pattern, right?
Hannity went down 5%.
We've got Rachel Maddow down 13%.
The Ingram angle down 2%.
The last word with Lawrence O'Donnell, down 10%.
Bret Baier, down 8%.
Martha McCallum, down 8%.
America's Newsroom, down 1%.
That's on Fox.
And all in with Chris Hayes, down 20%.
So the two biggest drops, now the three biggest drops are Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. What do all of those folks have in common?
Well, it's an obvious answer.
They were all super anti-Trump and they were all fully in on the whole Russia collusion hoax.
Now, they lost massive audience when it turns out that everything they've been telling their audience was a bunch of, as the president says, ridiculous BS. And it looks like the audience is punishing them, but it may be just as simple as the people who...
Well, here's the open question.
Did their ratings go down because the audience doesn't trust them as much...
Which would be massively meaningful for what's going to happen in 2020.
If the reason that the anti-Trump shows went down is entirely because If they don't trust their own news sources, that would kind of look like a Trump landslide coming.
It would look like anybody who was capable of changing their mind already did.
They just left their news source and said, okay, I've been hoaxed for a year.
I don't need this. That's possibly what happened.
But I would say it's more likely that what you're seeing is that the audience isn't getting their dopamine hits.
If you turned it on and saw all the delightfully, potentially bad news about, you know, Orange Cheeto, as they like to call the president, you probably felt good every time you watched those shows.
And now you turn it on and it's like, ugh, I've been lied to for a year.
Nothing bad is happening.
The economy is zooming. Ah, it feels so bad.
I'm so dumb. So I think the dopamine value of those shows just disappeared.
Now, who... Let's contrast this.
Who is up the most?
Now, you're probably going to say to yourself, well, so obviously Fox News is up because they were closer to an accurate view of the world in this case.
But I just told you that there were several shows on Fox News that actually went down.
They actually went down.
But one that went up...
It's The Five. So the show that went up the most, there are two shows that went up the most, The Five on Fox and Tucker Carlson.
So The Five was up the most 10% from one year ago.
They're up 10% in a context in which even shows on their own network are substantially down.
And Tucker Carlson up 9% again in a context where shows on their network and CNN are down.
What do Tucker Carlson and the five have in common?
Go. For those of you who watch both shows, what is it that would make their ratings sharply up when even shows on their own network are down?
I just want to see if anybody has the answer here.
Okay, the simple answer.
Somebody said it's the two best shows on Fox.
I would agree with that.
And I like a lot of the shows on Fox.
But yeah, those are the two best shows.
But I would say there's something else.
I would say they were closest to the truth of the opinion shows.
If you were to look at all of the opinions that came out of the five for the last several years, and all of the opinions that were on Tucker Carlson for the last five years, they match reality really well.
You know, on average. I'm not saying everything they ever said was accurate.
Nobody would be. But if you look at the shows that seem to have taken a hit, they were probably the ones that were the least accurate about what the world would look like in a year.
So I don't know if that's a coincidence.
It could be that those two shows are just so well produced and well written.
And they're, by the way, talking about Tucker Carlson.
I would say Tucker Carlson's show for the past maybe two months or so has been unbelievably good.
I mean, compared to even his own shows in the past, they really are standing out as shining beacons of just good stuff.
And The Five is just always exceptional.
By far, The Five has the most collective talent, best production values, best concept, best energy, best chemistry.
I mean, it's really a level above most things in that genre.
Really, maybe everything in that genre.
Alright, so I wanted to give a shout out to that.
So, what do we take from that in terms of what 2020 looks like?
Well, if the only thing that changed, the only thing that changed was if fewer people are watching MSNBC and CNN, what would that tell you about what's going to happen, at least in the opinion people?
Because the opinion people are the ones that are making people adopt their opinions.
So if the opinion people are getting more audience for, let's say, a more pro-Trump kind of vibe, and the other ones are getting less audience, and our opinions are almost coming entirely from the media, wouldn't that suggest a big, big advantage for the president?
Because the other team isn't even watching television anymore.
Or they shifted to the vibe.
I mean, there's no evidence that people actually turned off MSNBC and turned on The Five.
That would be a pretty big, you know, that would be a pretty big mental leap.
But just the fact they're watching less of it on the other side should make a difference, because they would be less influenced by the news.
We'll see. All right, the funniest things that are happening today are, number one, the economy is just screaming.
We can almost run into words for how to describe the economy so good.
Now, to be fair, the deficit, the debt, is really kind of scary.
But I'm not sure we even know what debt means in terms of an entire country when the country is the United States.
So it doesn't make sense to me and really to economists.
I think they would disagree.
We really don't know how much debt we can handle.
And the weird thing about the debt in the U.S. is when do you have a situation where the borrower is so much stronger than the lender?
In the sense that suppose the United States just decided not to pay back.
I'm not saying that'll ever happen.
But you can't compare the debt for the United States to really anything.
It's not like credit card debt.
It's not like other countries' debt.
It's just a completely unique situation because of our economic strength.
So I don't know what it all means.
I did see...
So the president tweeted today about...
The situation with Russia collusion and now Bill Barr is looking into, you know, how did the FISA warrants get started?
Who started the whole Russia investigation?
Was there anything suspicious there?
And of course, most of you think that there was.
So the president, to my tremendous delight, you know, I get a dopamine hit From a lot of President Trump's tweets because, first of all, they're so tongue-in-cheek and they're so well-crafted that, you know, let me go out on a limb here and say, I don't really think this is going out on a limb.
I believe history will record that Trump is the best tweeter of all time.
Does that feel fair?
I mean, not just that he's president.
But that the way he does it is just better than other people do it.
I mean, you can fault him for as many things as you want to, and, you know, I won't take that argument today, but you've got to give him that.
You know, the one thing you've got to give him is he is the best tweeter of all time, by far.
I don't even know who would be second choice.
And part of his genius at tweeting, and it really is genius, is that he always has sort of his tongue-in-cheek.
He's working on more than one level at a time all the time.
He's presenting information.
He's persuading.
He's making you think about what he wants you to think about.
So he's doing a lot. But it's also frickin' funny, even when it's not over-the-top a joke.
Every time I read his wording, I can see like a twinkle in his eye and like a slight smile as he's like, this is going to be great.
You can almost hear his thought process.
You know, you read the tweet and you get this full historical imagination of what it felt like when he wrote it.
I don't get that from other people.
When I read other people's tweet, I'm just reading the tweet.
When you read the president's tweet, you see a whole show in which you imagine what he was thinking, where he was, how he wrote it, the joke that he was playing, etc.
So, anyway, by saying in his tweet today that this whole Russia situation was bigger than Watergate, it was, of course, a callback to the many times the CNN would exhume Carl Bernstein, who, as you know, he's been dead for at least 10 years, but they would dig up his grave and they would put some electric stuff on him and...
And he would shock back to life as like the Watergate zombie.
And they would put him at a desk, and they'd put a necktie on him, and they'd say, Carl, Carl, we don't have much to talk about.
That's bad for the president.
Can you please say it's worse than Watergate?
And of course, Carl's been dead for 10 years, so he's a zombie.
So he's like, ah, wah, wah.
And they're like, okay, we'll just dub it in over.
Just flail a little bit.
He goes, ah, ah.
And then they dub in, where's the Watergate?
Where's the Watergate?
And it looks like Carl's saying it, but really, he's been dead for 10 years.
And we were subjected to zombie Carl Bernstein for, what, two freaking years?
I hate that guy.
Because... There are some people that you see that you say, okay, they're partisans.
I understand. You know, it doesn't matter.
I'm not saying that I disagree with them.
It's just that in his case, the impression he left, again, I can't read his mind because he's been dead for 10 years, but if you could read, you know, I'm not reading Carl Bernstein's mind, but the impression he left was that he was not a legitimate player.
The pundits I consider legitimate, even when they're badly spinning, even when they're twisting the facts.
They're part of the process.
We kind of understand what they're doing.
But Bernstein seemed like he was trying to change the result of the election, and he looked less credible than just about anybody on television.
Somebody says Dan Rather is worse.
Yeah, Dan Rather is sort of a clone.
So watching the president mock them with Bigger Than Watergate was delicious beyond compare.
Okay, it wasn't that good, but it was pretty darn good.
And you know he was doing it for us.
You know, he wasn't saying that just because it tweaks the other side.
He does that for the bass.
You know, it feels like he's talking to us.
It's like, oh, thank you.
Thank you for saying that.
I'm so happy that you used that exact phrase.
Excuse me. Because it didn't bother me.
All right. The other news, I don't know, is the president just the luckiest person in the world?
Because there's a lot of luck that comes into play when you're president.
I happen to think he's great at his job for most topics.
Not so much health care, but he's great at his job.
And... But you can't understate how important luck is.
Let me give you another one.
Today the news was that in a pretty extensive trial, they found that a combination of AIDS drugs will suppress the virus in people who have it to the point where the odds of their partner getting it, even with unprotected sex, Zero.
Zero. Now, if you haven't heard this news, I'm just going to say it again so you can know that you heard it correctly.
A major trial of, I guess it's a cocktail of AIDS drugs, given to people who were in relationships and having sex.
They had apparently unprotected sex or protected sex in some cases, but over an extended period of time, The number of people who got it from their partner who was on this suppressive drug was zero.
Zero! We should just cancel the news today, right?
If the news talks about anything else today, I feel like it's almost abusive because this is like the best news Well, you know, it'd be hard to rate what's the best news.
But among good newses, this is about as good as you can get for good news.
And it happened to happen.
It just happened to happen during the Trump administration.
Now, I'm not going to suggest that Trump had anything to do with that.
And, you know, I think people are talking about him, budgets and whatever, and I don't know the details there.
But It certainly is a suggestion that the golden age is upon us.
The age where we can fix all the big problems, we have the resources, we just need to get our psychology right, which is pretty hard.
So I just had to note that.
What an amazing, amazing accomplishment.
It does not mean the end of AIDS by any means.
I mean, it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of money to take it to the finish line.
But we now have a clear path.
We probably can't prevent people from getting it because I don't think it's used as a prophylactic in that way.
But if everybody who knew they had it It eliminated the risk of spreading it.
I think you can get to zero eventually, or something like it.
Amazing. There was a video by Dan Crenshaw, a popular Republican People seem to love Crenshaw.
He's a spray shooter, a veteran.
He's got everything going for him.
He's got the full package. And he did a talk about not wanting to get into the Paris Peace Accord.
He went through the numbers.
It's very persuasive.
It would be impossible to see anybody who saw Crenshaw's presentation, which as far as I know is 100% accurate.
I didn't see anything that I even...
Questioned as being, you know, maybe a little gray area.
It looked 100% accurate.
Here's what he did. He accepted climate change as a risk.
Remember, he's a Republican.
So he's a Republican who accepts climate change and CO2 as a risk.
So right there, he's more credible than most Republicans.
Because whether or not, I'm going to talk about persuasion, not science here.
So what I say next is about persuasion, not science, because I don't understand science.
Persuasion-wise, the very strongest thing Crenshaw could do is agree with the other side.
That's called pacing. You're worried about climate change?
I acknowledge that's a problem.
It takes all the energy out of the other side.
Now what do you do about it?
Okay, I accept your argument.
Climate change is a big problem.
Now what? The now what part that he presents is really, really good.
Because the now what is that the way forward...
It was probably using a lot of carbon fuels, but better ones, more efficient, moving more toward gas.
Apparently the U.S. has lowered its CO2 emissions, and if we helped other countries do that, they would lower theirs.
But here's the part that bothered me.
The smartest grand choice is, As good as he is in this public sphere, he's really good.
He's an A player, for sure.
An A player where I would put, say, the President at an A+. But he could be A-plus pretty soon.
And sort of toward the end of his video, where people maybe stopped watching, and just as a throwaway, he throws in nuclear energy.
Now, that feels to me like a mistake.
Because even though I get that in the short term, probably natural gas and other things are things maybe he wants to focus on, because they really make a difference and they do it pretty quickly.
It feels like there's something missing, something he's not telling us about that specific topic.
Is he not completely down with nuclear?
Is he not completely up to date on how good things are in that area and where it's going?
So... I would put this as a question.
What does he know that I don't know, that you don't know, about nuclear that would cause him to downplay it?
Because that seems opposite of reality.
Reality seems to be that there's so much activity and progress, and it literally is the only way out of, you know, out of a climate change risk, no matter what you think about it.
So I just have a question why he's soft...
On nuclear, when he has to know, unless there's something I don't know, but he should know by now that nuclear is the thing he should be emphasizing.
So I don't know, maybe he just thinks politically it's not time.
Don't quite know what he's thinking there, but he's a straight shooter, so I feel like he would have presented that topic in a straight way, unless there's something we don't know.
So I'd love to know what he thinks he knows that we don't know.
Maybe it's the other way around.
All right. Have you ever noticed that when you're talking with anti-Trumpers and you mentioned that the Russia collusion thing fell apart and it was a giant hoax, they don't really say, my God, you certainly were right.
Look how wrong I've been for all this time.
Let me apologize for any suggestion that there could be some Russian collusion.
They don't do that. They don't do that.
They usually bring up Manafort.
Right? Or they bring up the related people who had problems, but usually Manafort.
And I've started to think that Manafort has become like a comfort pet, a therapy dog.
I mean, Manafort is literally the Democrats' therapy animal.
Because if they think about the Russia collusion hoax completely falling apart, humiliating them all in public, showing that they don't know anything about how the world works, showing how easily they're duped, and of course it leaves Trump in power, that's got to be really...
Oh, Manafort.
Ah. Ah, Manafort.
Ah, he's in jail.
And he had something.
He was part of the campaign.
Sure, it's unrelated things.
He's in jail for nothing that had anything to do with Russia.
But, ah, my comfort therapy animal, Manafort.
At least we had Manafort.
So Manafort has become, instead of a story, he's become a comfort animal.
Anyway, the big story on social media today is the platforms that are banning conservatives.
Are you watching all of this?
I don't yet know what to make of it because one of the things that happens when people get banned is that the people who are banned have trouble telling their side of the story because they're banned.
People like, was it Watson, who got banned on Facebook, but he's still on Twitter, so I can see a little bit.
But I don't really see, and I don't even think they know, they don't know why they were kicked off.
They don't know why they were kicked off.
So, if they don't know, they can't explain it to us, so I feel as though we're sort of in the dark.
I would love to know what rules they crossed.
And I don't even have a full list of who got...
I don't know who got banned.
I mean, I know some of them.
Yeah. So, right.
So Laura Loomer, Paul Joseph Watson, James Woods.
But I don't know if...
Did they get banned for similar reasons?
PJW got banned?
Yeah. So here's an interesting thing.
Suppose China formed a Facebook competitor and said that at least for your traffic that shows in the United States, we won't censor you.
How hard would it be for China to just create a Facebook competitor that, at least within the United States, Isn't bad.
Some interesting things.
Oh, and Farrakhan. And Milo.
Alex Jones, who's already kicked off.
But I guess he got kicked off some more things.
So, you know, the thing that everybody wonders is, is this the beginning of just getting rid of conservatives off the platforms?
I don't think there's any chance of that.
So... I find myself in an awkward situation where I want to weigh in aggressively against censorship.
But I also don't know the facts.
I don't know why they were kicked off.
I mean, some of them are obvious in terms of the types of things they say, but I kind of have to see the exact thing.
I would have to see the exact thing to really have a sense of it.
So I guess I don't know if this is the beginning of something large or if this has something to do with just some specific voices that they've been looking at for a long time.
Snoop Dogg is mad that Farrakhan got kicked off.
Well, it seems to me that it was fairly brilliant of, I think it was Facebook, who kicked off Farrakhan at the same time they kicked off a number of conservative people.
And that was probably very smart for them to do, because it gives them cover.
But let me just say that I'm monitoring the situation.
So I haven't formed an opinion yet, because I don't have enough information.
Alright. I had a suggestion that I'm going to put in the bad idea pile.
So what I'm going to suggest...
Isn't, you know, isn't necessarily a good idea, but it makes me, you know, it might inspire some good ideas.
So here it is. Right now, immigration is at a standstill because it seems that there's no freaking way that the Democrats will get everything they want.
There's no way that the, there's no way that Republicans will get what they want.
So, we just don't have a solution and we really, really need one.
It's a legitimate crisis.
So I would suggest the following.
Both sides should draw up their plan and present it to the public.
And maybe their plans could be scored in some way, the way the OMB scores budgets.
Some kind of independent entity needs to score the two Plans.
And if the Democrats don't want to create a plan, then I think the Republicans should create one that represents their current position.
In other words, you should have two plans.
One of them is, this is everything the Republicans would like to do, and it would be comprehensive.
So everything from how many people they want to let in, the wall they want to build, the The merit system, the lottery, the visa overstays.
So just cover everything from the families coming in, etc.
So a comprehensive Republican plan, which we all know has no chance of getting passed, right?
But bear with me. So it doesn't matter that it's impossible.
We'd just like to see what it would look like.
And if the Democrats don't want to come up with their own plan, And actually, you know, say what it is, then the plan to compare it to is the do-nothing plan.
Do you feel where this is going yet?
If the public saw the Republican plan in its fullness, the kind that could never get approved because it's a full plan, you know, not just teeny little things that maybe the Democrats would negotiate for, but just a full plan, could they associate with their full plan What does it do to wages?
What does it do to employment in this country of people who are already here?
What does it do to tax revenues?
What does it do to our social systems?
What does it do to crime?
And so you create a set of metrics that says, we don't know for sure, but this plan scored by the people who are good at doing this thing says that the outcome over 10 years would look like this set of statistics.
Then, if the Democrats don't want to create their own full plan, and I expect that would be true, because it would expose the flaws in it, take the other plan as business as usual.
And just say, if we continue to be incompetent, our current system, this many people will get in compared to the other system, this much crime, this much expense, this many people get raped.
And you have to go to that level.
So you say, okay, you know, the Democrat system gets you 125,000 rapes in 10 years, which is probably not an overestimate.
I mean, it's going to be something like that over 10 years, right?
Be something like...
Because don't you figure there are more than 10,000 sexual assaults in the whole immigration world south of the border?
Even before they get here as part of the caravans and everything else.
So something like 125,000 rapes under the Democrat plan.
Now, the Democrats have made the case...
That immigration is just good for the economy.
And part of their argument is that our economy is doing so well, we actually need some workers.
Now, that's not a dumb thing to say.
I don't have any kind of automatic objection to the fact that our economy is so good, we need to bring in workers.
So you would include some good benefits on the Democrats' plan of essentially do nothing.
There would be benefits, but there would also be costs.
There would be crime. There would be a difference to the Republican plan.
So here's my suggestion to get us off of nothing.
The Republicans should create the plan they want, not the plan that they would have to negotiate down to.
Show us the actual frickin' full plan with everything you want so we can see it.
Then compare it to do-nothing, which is the Democrat plan.
If the Democrats want to add a real plan that's got details and stuff, and maybe each of the candidates running for president, maybe they have their own plan.
Then we could have the same entity or entities.
Maybe you have an entity of the left and one at the right, just to make it fair.
You have them score them.
And then you present them to the public and Because the public needs to beat the crap out of its government to get something done.
The public is going to probably have to break the logjam.
The government we know can't do it on its own.
It's going to have to be forced on them by the public.
But the public is unarmed because we don't have the plans.
If you ask me, do I like the Republican plan for immigration, I would have to say, what plan?
What plan? I've heard parts.
I've never heard a plan.
Have you? I've never heard a complete plan.
I've never seen it scored.
I've never seen it projected.
I've never seen any of that.
I've seen just parts.
Here's a wall. We'd like to do something with this.
Like to do something with this.
Show us a frickin' plan.
If the Republicans can't show me a plan, I can't support it.
I can't support the Republicans.
I can't support the President without a plan.
And if the president is just saying, hey, Congress, give me a plan, well, I'm not sure that's doing a good job.
The president needs to take a little leadership on this.
Give us a whole plan, but don't do it.
Don't show us a plan until you can show us the comparison.
People who have studied economics, people who have studied business, anybody who's been in science, There are some disciplines in which you would never pay attention to a plan in isolation.
You would always say, compared to what?
There's no such thing as a plan compared to nothing.
That's not a plan.
You at least compare it to the current situation and run the same set of estimates against do nothing.
So anyway, I think the way forward is for the Republicans to create a plan and then create a, let's say, an artificial plan that they label as the Democrats' plan and just run the statistics.
Now, people will argue whether the estimates are right for these plans, but that's the argument we should be having, right?
We shouldn't be having the argument with no data.
We shouldn't be having the argument about, well, I think this side would do a good job if they made a plan, and I think all of this that I can't quite imagine, and nobody's told me what it looks like, would be better than all of this that has never been described and nobody has told me whether it would be good or bad.
So we're all just flying frickin' blind because our government has completely failed us, left and right, for even letting the public get involved.
The bosses need to get involved.
We're the bosses.
The voters, we're the bosses.
We hire these cats.
If the people we've hired are not doing it, not on the left, not on the right, nobody's getting it done.
The public, the bosses, Need to require, you know, give me my slide deck from this side, my slide deck from this.
Pitch it to me. Somebody's got to pitch me.
If you don't pitch me, neither side is doing your job.
I have not been pitched.
Enough on that. I want to ask you so that you can prepare for this answer.
I wanted to ask if anybody's tried the Hoax Funnel Challenge.
Now, the Hoax Funnel Challenge is that you take my blog post about the fine people hoax in Charlottesville.
It's pinned to the top of my Twitter account so you can find it.
And it shows you how to take somebody who believed the fine people hoax and Believe that the president called neo-Nazis fine people, which didn't happen.
He said the opposite. But anybody who believed that, start with the debunking points that I lay out and see if you can drive them down the hoax funnel from the big claim, which is a statement, I believe the president called neo-Nazis good people.
Then you debunk that by showing them the transcript, and they move down to, well, I'm not sure your transcript is accurate.
Where'd you get this transcript?
Then you show them the video that supports the transcript, and then they move down, and it's like, well, sure, but they were marching with Nazis, and then you show them the New York Times that says, no, they were just there.
There's no evidence anybody was marching with the Nazis.
That's something you just made up.
Then they go down the hoax funnel.
The bottom of the hoax funnel ends up with a question.
It's not always the same question, but it's always a question.
Because when they've run out of all their arguments, they don't give up.
They first will try to change the argument to something else.
But if you keep them on point, they will end with a question.
And the question looks like this.
Who would attend a Nazi rally?
Now, that may not be the question, but it's one of the questions they'll ask.
They'll turn it into a question.
These questions, of course, have easy answers, which I lay out in my blog post.
So if any of you have tried this, I ask you to see if you could get somebody who believed the hoax to read the transcript, which is also included in that blog post pinned to my Twitter feed.
See if you could get them to read the sentence out loud in which the president said, at the same set of statements, he said, I condemn totally the neo-Nazis and white nationalists.
Because my assumption is that people would literally be struck dumb.
They wouldn't be able to speak the words and they would get angry or they'd throw it at you or they'd bring up another topic.
So I don't believe...
So I want to see if anybody has done the test.
And if you have done the test, I'm going to ask you about it at the end.
I'll put on my headphones and take some callers.
All right, apparently Dennis Miller has called out the fine people hoax on his TV show, not TV, on his radio show.
So Dennis Miller pointed out that Jake Tapper did read the second part of the president's statement, which debunks the host.
Tim Pool, independent journalist Tim Pool, who is greatly respected on the right, and I don't know if he's greatly respected on the left, but he should be, For being independent.
And he just gave a good shake to that fine people hoax on his video, too.
So, let me give you some context.
There are people like me who are somewhat rare in that I can take more heat than other people for something in public.
So I can say something controversial and I can get away with it for a couple reasons.
One, I have enough money that, you know, if I lose my job, I'm still rich.
Two, I'm good at handling things in public.
I'm a professional communicator.
So it's a little less likely I could get trapped.
And three, I have a big audience, you know, big enough that I can get my counterpoint out.
There's some people who get attacked, but they don't have much of an audience to push back.
So I have an unusual situation where I can take on a greater risk, a public risk, than most people.
The fine people hoax was a situation in which smart people who did good risk management would reasonably say, I don't want to touch that thing.
Imagine, if you would, just a standard Republican questioning the fine people hoax even a few months ago.
It would have been suicide, right?
It would have been career suicide To question the fine people hoax even a year ago.
It wasn't until people who had a different risk profile, and I'm one of them, waded in and just took a big frickin' risk for the benefit of fixing what I consider one of the biggest problems in the country, which is this hoax that the president isn't active, like he's supporting the neo-Nazis or something.
People literally believe that.
So imagine how important it would be to get rid of that.
So, Steve Cortez, you saw, was also probably one of the primary people who was getting in this in public.
And I can tell you he took an unusually big risk.
Because not only is he a contributor on CNN, But, you know, he's exposing himself.
He's exposing himself to a lot of pushback and that guy's got A big set of brains, let's say.
So he took the risk so that other people didn't have to.
And there are people like the Mike Cernovich's, the people who can simply take the heat.
And Cernovich is exactly the same situation as I am, which is that he's simply not afraid of anything.
And he's willing to do what's good.
Without really any fear.
And so you need a few people like that to test the environment.
So collectively, and you know, Joel Pollack took a big risk too.
A little safer for him because he's at Breitbart.
But these are all risks.
These are big, big career life risks.
And you don't have to thank me for it because I just had a different risk profile.
So my risk profile allowed me to do what not everybody could do right out of the gate.
At this point, those of us who are the...
I sometimes think of Trump supporters, which I include myself, as sort of like the Island of Misfit Toys, It's sort of like a billy ball, you know, money ball situation, where somehow Trump gets this tremendous value out of the oddest collection of people.
People you wouldn't expect would have any impact on anything.
And it's really amazing watching how much value Trump extracts From people like myself.
You just wouldn't expect it, right?
I sort of come out of nowhere, you know, and you could probably list ten other people who five years ago, if you said, oh yeah, those will be people that a lot of people are listening to, you wouldn't have seen it coming.
It's somehow Trump weaponized a lot of different personalities that wouldn't have even been in the fight.
It's sort of amazing.
But anyway, so the point is that the White House and the rest of the media now feels safe because, you know, I and, you know, Steve Cortez and Joel Pollack and now Tim Poole and a whole bunch of people have created a body of, you know, persuasive and, you know, well...
Well-documented arguments to show that this is a hoax.
So now people can just point to our arguments.
They couldn't do that before because there weren't any arguments.
So it's an interesting study on how things change.
Now, I'm not going to tell you that this fine people hoax goes away.
It's way too embedded in too many heads.
It's like a virus, you know, we're stamping it out little by little.
But at the very least, all the people on the right who were not pushing back against it now push back.
That's different, right?
It's easy now for, you know, a Brit Hume to retweet one of us and say, hey, look at this.
It wasn't as easy before.
That wasn't as easy before, but now it's easier.
All right. I've got this weird question about Russia.
I've said this before, but you know how sometimes there's the right time for an idea?
Sometimes an idea can be a great idea But the world isn't ready to hear it.
You need the zeitgeist or something to shape up so you can hear something that makes sense.
Here's my question.
Why are the United States and Russia adversaries?
Why? Can anybody think of a reason why Russia and the United States are adversaries?
I'm pretty sure that the The reason got lost in history.
Because when we were worried about communism taking over the world and there was the Soviet Union, you know, you could argue that that fear was overdone.
But at least it was a reason.
People could say, oh, the communism is spreading.
We have to push back hard wherever we can to stop it from spreading.
But Russia isn't the Soviet Union.
Russia has an economy smaller than Italy.
Even its military spending is starting to lag.
In what world would the United States ever go to war with Russia?
No world. There's no reason Russia would ever want to attack us.
There's no reason we would ever want to attack them.
Is Russia better off economically?
To be our nemesis?
Or is Russia better off economically if they would just sort of join the world of nations and play fair?
If they just treated us the way Great Britain does, the way France does?
What if they literally just said, yeah, why don't we just become your allies?
What would stop them?
What would stop Putin from saying, you know, this didn't work out.
Hey, President Trump, let's talk.
I can't remember why we're adversaries.
I can't think of one good reason.
Tell me one good reason we're adversaries.
The best reason anybody could come up with is that we poke them, they poke us, and you can't let people poke you without poking back.
And I'm thinking, we've sort of run out of ideas.
Now, you can always imagine, okay, Putin's really trying to build his empire and blah, blah, blah, blah, but everybody's trying to build their empire.
I mean, in the sense that every country is trying to get stronger.
Would Putin care as much about controlling his neighboring countries if there were no military threat?
I think a lot of what Putin does is because he thinks we're a threat.
Why are we a threat?
Because we think he's a threat?
Here's my point. I've said before that the Golden Age will be identified by the fact that our physical problems are either solved or on their way to being solved.
And that our remaining problems are that we're not thinking right about our world.
And if you could get to the way we think about our world right, Then we can take advantage of the fact that most of the resources are in place to fix things.
This Russia thing makes me crazy.
Because Russia and the United States are not natural enemies.
A natural enemy would be somebody who, let's say, shared territory, a border, and had, let's say, a historical dispute about who owns something, or there's some resource that we need for strategic reasons.
Those would be reasons to have a natural enemy.
Or even if there were an ideological difference.
That one needed to conquer the other for ideological, religious reasons.
None of that applies.
I can't think of a frickin' reason that going forward, we should be enemies with Russia.
And I have never heard a reason.
Now, usually, if anybody offered a reason, it would be something like, well, they're messing with us all over the world, so of course there are enemies.
But there's no reason For them to mess with us, except that maybe they think we're messing with them, they can get a little advantage.
What would happen if we just stopped messing with each other?
Somebody is mentioning radical Islam.
What I'm talking about, of course, would not work trying to stop terrorism, because the terrorists do have a reason.
In their minds, they have a perfectly good reason to fight against the United States.
But what the hell reason does Russia have?
Now, consider also that China is the emerging power that can or will rival the United States in a number of different ways.
Wouldn't Russia be a little bit happier to be a little bit friendlier with the United States?
Isn't Russia safer being good friends with the United States?
Don't the United States and Russia have common interest in fighting radical terrorists?
It's just hard for me to imagine why we're enemies with people when we forgot the reasons.
It's time to update our thinking a little bit.
There must be some way to get past this.
I'm not saying it would be easy.
All right. Joe Biden is leading the polls.
In hypothetical polls, Biden would beat Trump by 51 to 45.
Now, of course, all the fun is ahead where Biden will be ripped to shreds by his own team and whatever is left of his stinking carcass, President Trump will finish off over the course of the final six months before the election.
But I keep having, and I think Biden just said that we shouldn't worry about China Because, you know, they have internal problems.
And I thought to myself, well, that doesn't sound like a message that's going to sell very well.
But maybe. Some of you said the connection got lost.
But now it's back, as it looks like.
All right. My impression of Biden is that if you started with President Trump, So imagine that you're building a candidate.
You start with President Trump, and then you start removing all the good parts.
It's like, oh, he's funny, but let's take that off.
He's willing to shake up the system.
Let's remove that. He's going to be nice to dictators while negotiating extra tough, which is exactly what you want to do.
Well, Biden won't do that. And you would just...
Eventually, if you removed all of the good parts of President Trump, do you know what you would be left with?
Joe Biden. Joe Biden is what you are left with if you removed all of the good parts from Trump.
He's like the stem cell.
It's like, well, this Biden, you know, he could become something, but he's just sort of a mass of cells right now.
He doesn't have any of the good things that Trump has.
Now, you could argue, okay, he doesn't have the bad things if you're a critic, but if you put the two of them together, one just sort of disappears.
All right. Let me put on the other headphones, and I'm going to ask the question...
If anybody's used the Find People Hoax Funnel Challenge.
So if you have, just hit the icon at the bottom of your screen to be a guest.
I only want to talk to the people who have tried the test.
So if you've tried it with A coworker or a family member, let me know.
I only see one person who signed up as a guest.
I think I'm going to wait and see.
Well, actually, there's one guest.
I'll take that one guest.
Hold on.
All right.
Nerdy headset is on.
All right.
All right. I'm going to take one guest, Tom.
You were probably here for other reasons, but while we're waiting for other people to sign up.
Tom, are you there?
Tom? Tom?
Can you hear me? I can hear you.
Hello. Did you try the Find People hoax test, or are you curious about something else?
Yes, I have tried that a couple of times.
How'd it go? Speak up, Tom, so there's a little louder.
Oh, can you hear me? I've tried it a couple of times, and it always turns out pretty much like you predict.
You get kind of a glassy stare.
The one friend of mine does what I call the Johnson Jump.
As soon as the topic comes up that introduces cognitive dissonance in him, he just changes the subject.
So if you try and discuss it with these people, One of the first things they do is they just jump out of the conversation and they'll say, well, he's a dictator.
So why are we even discussing this?
He's a dictator, there's just nothing to discuss.
It's funny that anybody thinks that a dictator...
It's still a good thing to say based on anything we've observed over the last few years.
Yeah, so you did see...
Let me ask how far you got.
Did you succeed in getting anybody to actually say the words on the page, reading the President's quote that he condemned the neo-Nazis?
Did you get them to actually read it?
No, and I think part of the reason that I can't get them to read it is with some of them, I've talked to them before about politics.
Because I'm a logical person, I take things a step at a time, and these people are not stupid, and they can see where I'm going.
They know where they're being led, and they just won't engage.
They just absolutely refuse to engage in intelligent conversations.
So, would you agree that the test was fascinating for you, that you couldn't get somebody to read one sentence?
They just literally won't do it, right?
No. Wait, I have to make one correction to that.
Okay. I did the same thing on Facebook, where I posted, I think the thing you originally had put up on Twitter, the graphic.
Right. And this guy was just adamant, you know, about what a horrible person Trump was and all this garbage.
And so I posted this thing.
And naturally, never heard another word in the thread.
Just, you know, completely killed the thread.
Nobody discussed it anymore.
All right. Thanks for that update.
I'm going to take another caller.
It looks like somebody is on there.
Thanks, Tom. All right.
Got a few more people on here.
Let's do Anthony. Anthony, can you hear me?
I can hear you well.
Did you try the fine people hoax?
Well, I did. I did.
I actually have a little AM radio show out here in North Carolina on the weekends, and I did it for a show.
And the interesting thing...
Was the fact that, like the last caller, I don't think you can get too far into the funnel because either people immediately just said, you know what, you're lying?
Even though I read the quote to them.
But what was really strange was, as soon as they admitted, and a bunch of people did, they admitted that the quote was accurate and they admit that this was a false story, They immediately jump to the 1,213 other things that they believe that, you know, why Donald Trump is the Antichrist.
So to them, it's like they believe, well, we have enough examples.
We don't care if one is false, even though maybe 1,212 are false.
It's that 1,213 where he's the Antichrist.
So it's impossible.
So the bottom of the hoax funnel is the laundry list.
Yes. Where they default to it.
Now, that's why in my blog post, I address some of the laundry lists, so I just sort of did one-liners debunking all of the rest of the laundry list that's in the same genre.
But yeah, you can't get people to even read the sentence.
I was just going to say, I think it's a two-step funnel.
As soon as you read the quote, they go right to the laundry list.
There's no reasoning.
It's, oh, but everything else, right?
Yeah. Now, in your case, you weren't doing it in person, you were doing it on the show, right?
That's correct, yeah. Well, no, I've done it in person as well, but what's been interesting to me is I've done it to people who are Trump supporters.
Because a lot of people that are Trump supporters, they don't obviously think...
That he's a supporter of white supremacy and neo-Nazis.
They don't think that's accurate, but they think he makes enough verbal gaffes that it might possibly be true.
But when I told them the actual quote...
Because they start to buy into it a little bit.
They're like, well, some of it has to be true because he's a wild card.
And I'm like, no, it's not true.
And then they get upset.
And they're like, well, my God.
And I'm like, yeah. The media's been promoting this for a year and you guys have not bothered to even look up the quote.
So it's crazy.
Yeah, and... Remember, I predicted that we wouldn't get people to be able to read it out loud.
Sure. Thanks, bud.
Thank you. Thanks for the update.
Thank you. That's funny.
As soon as I heard Anthony's voice, I thought, well, this sounds like somebody who's on the radio.
And sure enough, he is. All right.
Let's see, Stephen. You don't have a profile picture.
I'm always a little hesitant to allow a guest in who doesn't have a profile picture, but I'm going to trust you.
Caller, can you hear me?
I can hear you.
Did you try the find people hoax?
No, I did not.
No, I was calling about something else.
I said I could convince you that the purpose of sports is fairness in two minutes.
I'll give you 30 seconds.
To convince me that sports are about fairness.
And when can I play in the NBA? Go.
30 seconds. I guess he's gone.
All right. Let's try Dino.
By the way, convincing me that sports are fair?
You're not going to be able to do that.
All right. Caller, can you hear me, caller?
Did you try to find people?
One little kill shot for the whole...
Okay, let's hear it.
Here's a kill shot. The thing is, I've been spending like two, three days just to find people.
And the last thing they will say, who will ever...
I get to.
And then it's like Reuters did a poll.
Do you support the removal of the statue?
Turns out 44% of black people Opposed the removal of...
Right?
Can you tweet? Yes.
I already did.
But yeah.
It's on my right now because I haven't tweeted anything after it.
But... Amazing.
Like... There's a lot of things like approval ratings and whatever...
Representative African Americans actually opposed to removal.
That's great. Yeah.
All right. I'm definitely going to add that to my blog.
Yeah. I'm getting...
All right.
Thanks so much. Bye-bye. Bye.
All right. That's all for now.
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