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May 26, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:06:10
Episode 542 Scott Adams: Find Out Why Trump Has NO Chance of Reelection (Unless Something Changes)
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's time for coffee with Scott Adams.
Guess who I am. That's right, Scott Adams.
What a beautiful, beautiful day to be alive.
And if you're not alive, it's still a beautiful day.
You just don't know it. Would you please join me In a simultaneous sip.
This will require you to have a cup or a mug or a glass, possibly a tank or a stein or a chalice, maybe a thermos or a flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure that I like to call the simultaneous sip.
Ah, good stuff.
Well, we've got some excellent Trump news today.
It's the best kind of news, isn't it?
Isn't it always entertaining when the news is about Trump?
Have you ever had an unentertaining day when the headlines were something Trump?
Doesn't even matter what the topic is.
It's always interesting.
And today is no difference.
All right, here are some of my favorite news headlines, I guess.
My favorite one...
Some folks on the anti-Trump crowd are saying that Trump now wants to be impeached.
So the anti-Trumpers are, and this is sort of mind-boggling, they're actually talking themselves into believing that That the president somehow is trying to cleverly trap them into trying to impeach him because it will be politically good for him.
I barely know what to say about that.
Because there are some things you can say that are just true.
All the smart people agree that it would be a stupid idea for the Democrats to impeach because it would turn out good for Trump based on past experience.
I'm less convinced that past experience is as predictive as people think, but I will acknowledge that all the smart people say that it would be unwise for them to go ahead and impeach.
But, is that the same thing as saying that the President wants to be impeached?
Honestly? You know, I can't read the President's mind.
But, If the president is consistent with 70 however many years of life, if he's the same person he was a month ago and he's the same person he was two months ago and two years ago and 20 years ago,
if he's still Donald Trump, now President Trump, unless he's been body snatched, unless his body has been taken over by aliens who have different minds, unless he's turned into a different person, he doesn't want impeachment on his presidential record.
Now again, I'm not a mind reader.
I'm not a mind reader.
So I suppose I could be wrong.
But in order for me to be wrong, he would have had to somehow turn into a different person for no compelling reason.
There's nothing really that would have caused him to turn into a different person.
So the fact that the mostly Democrats, the anti-Trumpers, are actually entertaining that As if that could legitimately be a real thing he's thinking?
Like, oh, I sure hope they impeach me.
No, idiots.
You could not be dumber if you really believe that.
If you really believe that this president wants impeachment on his permanent presidential record...
You don't even know who he is.
It's like you've never seen a story about him.
You've never read your own articles about him.
That is so completely and unambiguously ridiculous.
That when I see it being talked as though, yes, I think we've figured out his strategy now.
Ho, ho, ho, President Trump, you think you're clever, but we're one step ahead of you.
One step ahead of you.
We figured out that you really want to be stained with one of the worst things that you could have on your presidential record.
Ha, ha, ha. We figured you out.
It's just mind-boggling that anybody thinks that he would want that strategy.
Nonetheless, it is true that if it happened, it'd be good for him.
But nobody wants that.
All right. Here are some of the words on CNN's homepage and the articles linked to it today.
These are the types of words that they use when they talk about President Trump.
Here's the list. Temper tantrum.
Storms out of meetings.
Tirade. Pathetic, childish, impotent, and of course the all-time favorite, got under his skin.
Nancy Pelosi, got under his skin.
Now, does any of that sound like news?
Or does it sound like mind reading?
Let me read it again.
News or mind reading?
Temper tantrum? Well, that's sort of an opinion.
It goes to what he's thinking, right?
Because I doubt that his exterior mannerism looked anything like a temper tantrum.
You know, when you imagine what a temper tantrum looks like, do you imagine that anything like that even remotely happened in that meeting?
I don't think so.
I don't think so. Storms at a meeting.
What's the difference between walking out of a meeting at the normal pace in which you walk in a meeting versus storming out?
CNN does this all the time, and they're not the only ones, but they try to turn nothing into news by using the wrong word to describe things.
So if somebody walked out of a meeting, They'll turn that into stormed out.
If somebody has a difference of opinion, they'll say, it was a tirade.
He lost it.
He lost his cool.
He was acting childish and impotent in his mind.
He was very insecure.
Yes, yes, yes. That's why.
It's not that he just has a different opinion.
It's that he's insecure.
It's all just mind reading and horoscopes.
Alright, so here's my favorite bit of news.
The president tweeted from Japan where he's meeting with Abe and others on trade.
And here's his tweet this morning.
Trump says, North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed some of my people and others, but not me.
I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me.
And also smiled when he called Swamp Man Joe Biden, which he spelled wrong.
He spelled Biden, B-I-D-A-N. He actually misspelled Biden.
Intentional, unintentional, doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter. I'll read this again.
I love everything about this tweet.
So, persuasion-wise...
This is very good work, which will, of course, be completely unappreciated by people who don't know anything about persuasion.
When the president says that he's not disturbed by these small actions by Kim, and he says that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me, that's the powerful part of the tweet.
The President is making it very clear that this is a personal relationship with somebody he respects and kind of likes.
It's clear that he likes Kim.
And by the way, I think that's real.
I think I think it's real that Kim and Trump like each other.
I don't think any of that is false.
I think that's actually real.
So he's talking essentially in the tweet, he's talking to his buddy Kim, and he's saying he'll keep his promise to me.
That doesn't mean that his belief is that he will necessarily keep his promise.
It means that by saying that, he's sort of putting his friend and the honor of his friend on the line.
He's also saying, isn't it funny that my friend is mocking my competitor, Joe Biden, and you shouldn't take any of it too seriously.
Now, the fact that he's playing this whole thing off as something you shouldn't take too seriously, it's just something happening among friends, there's a little locker room talk about Joe Biden, there's nothing going on here that's important, I think is perfect.
Because he's trying to take the tension off, which is always good when you're talking about nuclear powers.
He's trying to put it in context.
It's all just good locker room fun.
It's just words.
And the only thing that matters is that Kim will be honorable when dealing with Trump, so everything's fine.
It's really good framing, taking something that sounded kind of dangerous and just completely dismissing it, because that is actually the best strategy I would imagine.
Now, I'm assuming here that there's not more going on in North Korea that I don't know about.
If there is, then that's a different situation.
Alright. There's a Breitbart article about me this morning, and I've told you this, I guess it came out yesterday, and I've told you this before, that my weird world is that if I talk about politics, sometimes I end up becoming part of the story.
So that happened in this situation again.
So Breitbart's article is about my My periscope yesterday, I guess, in which I said that the president has zero chance of winning under the current situation.
The current situation being that the social media platforms have figured out since 2016 how to be more effective and almost certainly they can swing the election.
I'll talk about that in a little bit more detail.
But so now there's a big article on it.
Now, to be clear, when I said in the article and when I said in Periscope that the president has zero chance of winning re-election, the caveat is if nothing changes.
But things always change.
So it's not a prediction.
It's a steady-state observation that if nothing changed from current conditions, he couldn't win.
And I'm saying that because social media is so rigged against him and there's no counterforce that the social media companies will simply move the few people who can be persuaded one way or the other.
That's all it will take.
It doesn't take many people to be persuaded.
Now, of course, the president has gigantic weapons on his side, and he has an electorate, which is very, very incented.
But for the most part, those things were all going to happen anyway.
The hardcore supporters were going to support him no matter what.
The people who disliked him were going to dislike him no matter what.
And there was this little sliver of people who could be persuaded that will be persuaded by the social media companies because they control that.
Let's talk about that more.
Let me give you some context first.
One of the things that people said to me when I made my controversial statement that social media is now running the country because they'll decide how the undecideds vote, People said to me, well, Scott, I think you're overreacting or overstating it because we've always had fake news.
It used to be newspapers, but it's always been fake news.
There have always been masters of the universe who are pulling the puppet strings.
So now it's social media.
It used to be newspapers.
At one point it was television.
But it's no different.
There's always somebody pulling those strings.
But I'd like to make some contrasts.
And before I do that, I'd like to recommend that you watch something by the BBC that's brand new, came out.
And it's a documentary called They Shall Not Grow Old.
And it's about British soldiers signing up and going to fight in World War I.
It is one of the most interesting things you will ever see in your life.
Because what they did was they took a bunch of black and white video from World War I.
And they colorized it.
And they brought it to life with digital effects.
And it brings you right into the trenches.
So it starts out with this black and white footage where you're really watching it as an observer.
It's just these grainy black and white pictures, and they're only square.
They're not even HD format.
So the first several minutes is watching those, and you're not very engaged because it's just black and white.
There's like a distance between you, the viewer, and the image.
And then suddenly it goes color, and it goes widescreen, and you feel yourself just go whoop.
You get pulled right into it.
And from that point on, you're in the war.
I mean, you're in the trench.
You're looking at it just like you're there.
And yeah, it is so good that I don't recommend you watch it for more than a few minutes because it's so disturbing.
I actually got, I guess I would call it like pre-PTSD, you know, obviously nothing like what you'd actually get if you were in a war, but you could feel yourself being mentally disturbed to the point of permanent damage.
I Ten minutes into this documentary.
It's so powerful that you should probably not watch it to the end because the images are so disturbing.
You really should not watch the whole thing.
But you should watch a little bit of it.
And the part you should watch in particular is the opening where they have voiceovers that are...
I can't tell if the voiceovers are read by actors who are looking at the written word or if it's actually the old people themselves...
Recorded when they were still alive from World War I. I can't tell if they're real, but it's the real words of the people.
And here's the thing that just blew me away in the first five minutes.
When you listen to the actual words of the young people who signed up, signed up, volunteered, keyword volunteered, to enter World War I, the most, you know, or at least one of, the most horrible experiences you could ever have, Those people, those young men, were happy.
The name of it, again, if you want to watch it, is They Shall Not Grow Old.
And the BBC, I guess they funded it.
But if you listen to the people talk...
Almost all of them had the same approach, which is they thought joining the army to fight in World War I they thought would be fun and easy.
You almost can't hear those words when I say them because it doesn't make any sense.
That's right. There were a bunch of young people, and apparently people were signing up as young as 15.
They just had to lie about their age because they didn't have ID. So most of them were like 17 to 19, even though you had to be 19.
A lot of people younger than that have signed up.
But I was blown away by how brainwashed these people were.
Not only were they brainwashed to think that joining up for World War I and fighting in a trench war would be a good time, like literally, they thought it would be fun, adventure, and exciting, and they believed that since the British were so powerful militarily, that they would just dispatch the Germans.
It's all a big adventure.
People come back and say, hey...
Had a good time. And the people who survived, because those are the ones that were talking about it after the fact, actually said they were glad they went and it was a good experience.
It's mind-boggling how brainwashed they were.
Now somebody's saying they're not brainwashed, it's duty and honor.
No. No.
It was not duty and honor.
There was duty and honor as important variables.
But that's the part that I'm making my strongest point That it wasn't just duty and honor.
Those things mattered. Those are real.
That was part of the story.
But when you hear it in their own words, they don't use those words.
They said it would be an adventure, it'd be fun.
They did say, fight for the country.
They did say, the country's been good to me.
But a lot of it was, my job is boring, my friends are going, it looks like an adventure, looks like a good time.
Oh my God. When you hear the level of brainwashing in World War I, it's mind-boggling.
So, in fact, I would recommend that you stop watching it after the voiceovers are done, because that's the interesting part.
The rest is fascinating, but so disturbing, it could actually damage you for the rest of your life.
And that's not an exaggeration.
What I saw will stay with me for the rest of my life, and I don't want it.
I wish I had not seen it, frankly.
And I only watched the first quarter of it, maybe.
But my point here is that people were deeply and thoroughly brainwashed in Great Britain before World War I. So brainwashing is not new.
It's not something that's just happening because of social media companies.
But here's what's different.
Here's what's different. The technology for brainwashing is way better because we can give specific messages to specific people.
And we've learned a lot since then about how to do it.
If you haven't seen this book, you don't understand what's going to happen in the next election.
This book is called Pre-Suasion.
It's a follow-up by Robert Cialdini.
to his gigantic bestseller influence.
This one is the one that is the scariest because it talks about how you can prime somebody by the message or the image or the thought that you give them before the thought that you're trying to convince them of.
In other words, you can give them a completely unrelated priming thought and it will have a huge impact on how they make a decision on an unrelated thing.
How scary is that?
Because if you're a social media company, you have control over what order people see things.
Do you see it yet?
Social media gives you control.
In other words, the platform owners can control the order that you see things.
That's what the algorithms are.
The order that you see things.
This book, if you haven't read it, you don't understand what's coming in 2020.
If you think that there's anything like a fair election coming, you're really wrong.
Because this technology, in other words, this scientific knowledge, gives them the power to feed the undecideds information in the order of So it's not just that they're de-emphasizing some messages and emphasizing others, which is a big deal.
It's the order that it comes in that will be the influential part.
If you don't understand that, you've given up your republic, you've abandoned any democratic principles, you've given all of your power to the people who can decide What order you see things in, because that's what will make your decision, the order that you see things.
Now, I've simplified it a little bit, but the larger issue is that we know exactly how to influence people in ways that could never have done before.
Somebody asked for an example, so I shall give you one.
The classic example that comes from the book is that if you show somebody images of an American flag, That's the priming thought.
There's no persuasion.
It's just an American flag.
Hey, here's an American flag.
Look at this. And then if the very next thing you do is ask them to vote Republican or Democrat, people will more likely vote Republican if they just saw a flag.
Did you know that?
If you didn't know that, You're helpless.
You're living in a system that is manipulating you.
Now, even the experts would not have known that in advance.
They know it from testing.
They know it from accidental discoveries that they then confirm.
Now, that's just an example.
Let me give you another example. Suppose you wanted to convince somebody to be generous on a specific question.
One of the ways you can do that is to show a story of something completely unrelated where somebody did something kind and generous.
Even though it's a different topic, different people, completely unrelated from whatever you're talking about.
If the very next thing that happens is you ask somebody to be generous, they're far more likely to be generous because they got primed by the prior image.
See how powerful this is.
This is very repeatable, very measurable, very scientific.
So, that's the situation we have, that things can be controlled entirely by the platforms.
Now, let's talk about...
Let's talk about the Pelosi video, because this is all sort of related now.
This is all one discussion under one umbrella of influence.
Here's what I loved about President Trump's persuasion play with tweeting out the video that was a compilation clip of Pelosi slurring her words or stammering.
Now, there's a weird fog of war over this whole topic.
And I don't quite know the facts, but my main point is, neither do you.
Most of you think you do know the facts, and as the comments go by, you're going to see people give you lots of incorrect facts.
I'll tell you what I think I know, but the main point is that I cannot determine the facts with the amount of work I'm willing to put into it, and probably you don't know the facts.
But you might think you do.
So I would say, put a little pin in this and say to yourself, I think I know the facts, but I probably don't.
Here's the problem.
There is more than one video.
And people are talking about the more than one videos as if they're sort of the same without making the distinction.
So, apparently there's a compilation video that the president tweeted.
Which may have been simply uploaded at a different frame rate.
It might have been intentionally slowed down.
The reporting is unclear.
At the same time, and separately, there is another compilation in which it very clearly has been slowed down.
So there's one video that has clearly slowed down a compilation of her misspeaking, I guess.
And in that one, she clearly sounds drunk, and it's obvious that the thing has been doctored.
They're saying it's been doctored.
The presidents may or may not have been doctored, or it may or may not have been uploaded in a way that makes it sound different, but it may or may not have been intentional.
So the first caution I would give you is that whenever you hear any story or any comment about this situation, people are not necessarily talking about the same videos, and I can't tell who's lying.
So, the New York Times, for example, showed the two videos next to each other and said, this is President Trump's video, here's the other one, and if you look at them together, you can see that they're quite different, and you can see that the one that seems to be doctored Does look like she sounds worse than that one.
But here's the problem.
Do you trust the New York Times to show you the actual doctored one and to show you the one that President Trump tweeted and that both of them are actually the videos that he tweeted?
You know, one is the actual real one and one is the actual thing he tweeted.
Do you trust the New York Times to To put them together and pick the right ones and say, this is really the one?
No, you don't.
You cannot trust them.
In fact, you can't trust any video from any source.
We don't live in that world anymore.
Now, I'm not saying that they lied.
I'm not saying it's wrong.
I'm saying that there's no credibility from any source on any video.
We don't live in that world anymore.
You simply can't believe it, no matter where it comes from.
So that's the first thing.
Does it matter? That the president doesn't matter whether the video is, you know, accentuated to make her look bad.
Yes, it does. Because if you ever saw the one that's the fake, it's hard to get it out of your head.
I'm going to talk about that a little bit more, but let me tell you what the president did right in his persuasion.
Now, if you're looking at this situation, I think it's always fair to look at it in several layers.
There's the political layer, the how effective is the persuasion layer.
There's the ethical layer.
I will trust you to understand that I'm only talking about the persuasion layer.
Ethics matter. Ethics exist.
But that's a separate conversation, and you can make your own decisions on that.
I'm not your pope. Persuasion-wise, what the president started with before he tweeted this, he said that Nancy Pelosi is clearly, quote, not the same.
Now that is a brilliant framing.
When the president says, hey, something's different, she's not the same.
I'm muting all the people who complain about the sound, by the way.
So I'll never see them again, because I think most of them are trolls.
So, when he said they're not the same, that is a hypnosis technique.
You want to make claims that are not so specific that people have reasons not to believe them.
So by simply saying she's not the same, everybody can read into it their own preferred explanation of why she's not the same.
So when you hear the President say, Nancy Pelosi, well, I know she's not the same.
Somebody hears she's too old.
Somebody hears she's tired.
Somebody hears she's drunk. Somebody hears she has a mental disease.
Are any of those things true?
I don't know. Probably not.
But it doesn't matter because the technique is if you give somebody a general area to think about, they will fill in the details that are most persuasive to them.
So the way that you can persuade people who are all different is by giving them a general persuasion and let them fill in the details.
That's what he did. If he had said...
If Pelosi sounds drunk, then we would be arguing whether or not she had a drink, we would decide that she had not, and it would be bad persuasion.
It would just look like a lie.
If he had said, I think she has a mental problem, there would probably be some reporting on that.
People would say that's a terrible thing to say.
They would say it's not true, look at her this other day.
We'd probably decide it wasn't true, and we'd say, well, it's just a lie.
But by saying...
She's not the same.
He says something that you understand to be true.
Because nobody's the same at that age.
So at the very least, she's older than she used to be.
So he says something that's unambiguously true.
She's not the same. And then you fill it in with whatever is the worst thing you can imagine about why that's true.
Here's the other thing he did that's great.
It's a visual. He tweeted around something that's visual and you can listen to it.
So there's an audio version.
There's an audio element and a video element.
So that's good persuasion.
You get as many of the senses involved as you can.
That's better than if it's just a concept somebody's reading about.
So that's true.
Secondly, there's something called the uncanny valley I've talked about before.
It's the theory that if something looks like a human being, but not quite, it's disturbing.
It's deeply disturbing to people.
That's why zombies are so scary.
They look like people, but they're not quite people.
That's why they're scary.
Anytime you see a robot that doesn't look exactly like a person, It's sort of creepy, right?
Now, when you see the Pelosi video, whether you just see the compilation, which is bad enough, where they take the worst parts of her extended speaking, and they take all the worst parts and put them together in a compilation, she doesn't quite look like a regular person.
And if you see the slowdown or, quote, doctored version of it, it's even worse.
She doesn't quite look like a human being is supposed to look.
They're not quite supposed to sound like that, talk like that, or act like that.
And it's actually gross.
Like it creeps you out to watch it.
That is unbelievably strong persuasion.
If you can creep somebody out about the thing you're trying to discourage, that is a home run.
Getting creeped out by something, you can't come back from that.
Nobody gets creeped out by something and then recovers.
It's like a one-way trip. Once you're creeped out, you're going to see that forever.
So that was strong persuasion.
Again, not talking about whether that was ethical, because I think you can make your own decisions on that, but it was strong.
Now, the other thing that the President did cleverly is that it's a three-day weekend with no real interesting news otherwise.
So he drops this flaming bag of, you know what, on the porch of the press, and he rings the doorbell, and then he runs away for three days.
Three days of this incredibly damaging news cycle for Pelosi, and he just completely destroyed her reputation and then went on vacation and golfed.
So he's off there golfing with his buddy Abe, literally having a good time.
He loves golf.
He loves Abe. He loves being outside, golfing a little on the weekend.
He's having a great time over there.
Meanwhile, most of the country is trying to decide whether his arch nemesis, Pelosi, is old, mentally diseased, drunk, or maybe just lost a step that day, or whether it's the video that makes you look that way.
But it's all the same, because in your mind, it's all this one big something wrong with Pelosi situation.
Now, the other strong technique that the president uses, again, not talking about the morality, not talking about the ethics, just the persuasion.
The persuasion here is that these videos had a mistake in them.
So I don't know that he knew that or did it intentionally, but I do know he didn't care.
And the reason he didn't care is that if the videos were not doctored, well, he tells his message and it's pretty powerful.
But if the videos were doctored, I'm sure he wouldn't care because it makes us talk about them even more.
So the error is a feature when it comes to persuasion.
Remember that rule. In persuasion, the error is the feature.
Because it's the error that draws your attention to it.
It's the reason we're talking about it.
It's the reason it's in the headlines.
It's the reason that everybody's saying, oh, it's unfair, it's unfair, it's a doctored video.
That's the feature.
That's not the problem.
So if you were the one who put this flaming bag of you-know-what out into the universe, you would be pretty happy about all the attention you got.
All right. Having seen these deep fakes, did you see the videos of...
There's a company now that can animate a CGI version of a person from a single photograph.
And in fact, they even did it with a painting.
A painting of a person.
Just one picture of a painting, a flat painting of a person, and it's not even a good painting.
They could completely animate and make it talk like that painting was a real person.
But they can also do it with humans.
They can take a screen grab from me, no other data, and they can create what I look like from every side and animate it like I'm actually talking.
Now having seen that, do you believe that that video you saw of the founder, leader of the Taliban was real?
Do you think that that very unusual, we haven't seen him on video for years and years, and then suddenly there's this nice clear video of the, I forget his name, somebody will remind me in the comments, of the leader of the Taliban?
Maybe? It might be a real person.
But here's the thing.
If we are not already creating the fake version of these terrorist leaders, Why not?
Baghdadi, yes. So, al-Baghdadi is the name of the Taliban leader.
If we're not creating fakes of them and sending those fakes out to the Taliban so that the Taliban is getting all these fake instructions, like, oh, here's a video of al-Baghdadi telling me I should take a lot of drugs and throw down my guns, or whatever it is.
So, I would not...
Oh, somebody's saying al-Baghdadi is ISIS. Was it the ISIS leader?
Do I have this backwards?
I was saying... I was saying...
I think I might have this backwards, yeah.
So I'm being corrected in the comments.
So forget I said Taliban.
He was the ISIS leader that we hadn't seen.
His name is al-Baghdadi.
And we finally got this clear video of him after years.
And I'm thinking to myself, if we're...
Yeah, that's right. Mullah Omar is the Taliban, and we have not seen recent video of him.
But we should.
If you see a new video of Omar, that's probably not real video.
Anyway, the point is this.
Um... We live in a world in which anything can be faked and the major platforms will decide what we see, the order that we see it, and that will be enough to determine the election.
So I don't think that we have a real republic anymore.
The votes will go through the motions and the votes will imagine that it was fair.
But we no longer live in a world where you have anything like free will and votes and elections and stuff in a real sense.
Now, I loved yesterday, Anderson, I think it was yesterday, or the day before, Anderson Cooper interviewed a Facebook representative who failed to take down the video that they knew to be doctored.
And here's a really problematic situation coming.
Because, so Facebook decided that the way they would play it is they would leave it up, but they would label it as fake, and they would give links to articles that would describe that was fake.
Anderson Cooper would not let that go.
And he got really aggressive, not in a bad way, but he was very aggressive in his questioning about why they would leave that up there.
Understanding that even though it's clearly labeled as a fake, it will still have the impression because it's visual.
And to his credit, Anderson Cooper understood that the fake visual is so strong that just putting a label on it that says it's not true doesn't even come close to making it okay.
And his argument was that if you know it's not true, And you know it's influencing people.
How can you leave it up?
Now, Facebook, to its credit, held tight to, no, we're just going to label it.
It's not our job to police the truth of things, but it's a fake, so we'll label it.
Now, I guess it is their job to police the truth of things, which is my main point.
What does it mean?
For a video to be doctored.
So the standard that Facebook has created is that if they say the video is not true to the facts, if it's doctored, and that doctoring makes it look opposite of what's true, then they will label it as fake, and they also will de-emphasize it so it doesn't show up as often.
So they can make content essentially disappear because they've decided it's not true because of the way the video is doctored.
So let me ask you this.
If something is a video that only shows part of a statement, but it doesn't show the second part of the statement that completely changes the first part, is that a doctored video?
In other words, if it's a simple video that's not edited in any way, except that it leaves out some context, is that a fake video?
Well, most of you know what I'm talking about.
There's a very famous example, which I'm not going to name, because if I do, I'll get demonetized, and people won't be able to see this video, because it will be less visible to people.
So I'm actually intentionally not using the name of this situation, but I can tell in the comments, which, by the way, will not be transmitted to anyone, To YouTube.
So when this video gets uploaded to YouTube, the comments are stripped out.
So I don't have to worry that YouTube will pick up your comments and demonetize it because of the things you're saying, because that gets stripped out.
But you know what I'm talking about.
So, yeah, there's a very famous situation in which there's a video of the president saying something, That they cut out the second part of what he says to reverse its meaning.
How many times has that video been shown on TV? A lot.
What does Facebook say about the truth of that video?
At least the video that cuts off the second half.
Well, I think they have a problem now.
Because Facebook has created a standard which they can't live to.
Because it's fine when it agrees with them.
If they happen to agree with the fact that a video is misleading and it's telling the wrong story, then they'll block it.
But what if they don't agree?
What if it's only the Republicans who say it's a fake video?
Well, I think you have the worst possible situation where you have people who are literally deciding what is true from things that are all false.
In other words, the environment is serving up Almost nothing but falsehoods.
Everything that comes out of the right, I'd say 80% of it is fake news.
Everything that comes out of the left, at least 80% of it is fake news.
You could argue one of them is a little more fake than the other.
But both the left and the right are producing gigantic mountains of fake news all the time.
Is Facebook going to treat it all like fake news and de-emphasize all of it?
They will not. I don't think there's any chance of that.
It seems very clear that what they'll do is they'll say that the things they imagine are true, or their fact-checkers tell them are true, which we know are highly biased fact-checkers, they'll present that as truth.
But it will be debatable.
Now here's the question.
What do you do about all this?
I'm getting tired of people telling me that I should do things that would get me kicked off of all the platforms as part of some kind of solidarity with people who have already been kicked off or demonetized or anything else.
Let me suggest that that's the worst advice in the world.
The last thing that you want is for me to get kicked off of a platform.
Likewise, the last thing you want is for you to get kicked off and for anybody that you might agree with or want to see to get kicked off.
The worst, dumbest, self-immolating strategy is to say, oh, some other person got kicked off, so I'm going to retweet their content, and I'll get kicked off too, and together we'll all get kicked off.
It's the dumbest thing you could possibly do.
Let me tell you the smartest thing you could do.
Smartest thing you could do, don't get kicked off social media.
Don't say things that will get you demonetized or de-emphasized.
I am going to go the exact opposite direction.
Now, keep in mind this is all A-B testing.
If this strategy turns out to be a bad one, I'll have to adjust someday.
But my current strategy is I'm actually going to make my content less provocative sounding without being less provocative.
So I'm not going to pull back on the ideas, but I'm going to use words that are hard to demonetize and framing that people will have a hard time finding a problem with.
So I'm going to make sure that by election day, you're still listening to me.
So I'm going to curse less.
I'm going to mention fewer topics.
And by the way, there's a There's one word that will get you demonetized for sure on YouTube, and I'm not going to mention it, but let's say there are a lot of people in Israel who might be described with that word.
I mean, you know, I'm not talking about a bad word.
I'm talking about the actual word that they would use for themselves.
If you even use that word, it's the J word.
Turns out you will get demonetized.
Because somebody is going to think they're on the other side of that argument, and some advertiser is going to say, we don't need any of this racial stuff.
So I probably will never use that word in a description to one of my videos.
So I'm going to be far more dangerous by being harder to delete.
I'm going to make myself very hard to delete.
And that will be a good strategy.
At the same time, why does anybody use Facebook?
I don't know, is it just me?
I ran out of reasons.
If you would like to have some control over the social media network, it's pretty easy to reduce your Facebook use, isn't it?
You don't have to...
And here's the other thing. I don't recommend that you quit Facebook.
I recommend that if you were using it two hours a week, you cut it down to 15 minutes.
You still see all the photos of your friends and everything, except instead of logging on and seeing a lot of ads all the time, just do it once.
Just do it once this week instead of ten times this week.
It would be very easy to ramp down your Facebook use.
I personally still have my Facebook account and plan to keep it.
I have reduced my Facebook usage to almost nothing, which is where I want it, because I just don't consider them healthy for the Republic.
They certainly have their benefits, and I'm not going to get rid of my account, but they're not healthy.
All right. Let's talk about...
You know, I was thinking about this idea, and I'm just going to put it out here for a comment.
One of the big problems, really the big problem, is that if the social media platforms want to do a good job of making it, to use Jack Dorsey's word, a healthy place for conversation, they are going to be kicking off bad people.
I don't have a problem with the concept that there are some people and some messages that are so bad that they should not be on the platform.
I agree that that's the case.
But there's certainly a lively debate about whether too many people have been kicked off, etc.
But here's the other big problem.
If you look at the First Step program, which is trying to rehabilitate prisoners who get out of jail, Get them trained in something and get them into a productive life.
We have this sense that you should have some path to recover from mistakes, even bad ones, even the kind of mistakes where you go to jail.
There should be some kind of path that society recognizes to recover.
And I would suggest that we should at least talk about What I would call a national pardon of everybody who's been banned from social media.
I think it would be healthy, and I don't think all of the platforms have to do it on the same day or anything, but I think the platform should at least be a universal unbanning of just everybody.
Now, there might be some exceptions, but I'd rather see...
And here's my specific problem.
I know people who were banned from social medias, you know, forever or whatever, for things they did in their 20s.
Do you think that someone should be banned forever from social media for something they did in their 20s, which was a speech-related thing?
Well, that's the current situation.
You could be banned for your life for something you did in your 20s before your brain is even fully formed.
Does that seem fair?
How about people who literally made one mistake, however bad it was?
Should those people get another chance?
I would like to at least put the idea out there that every time there's a major rethinking of how the platforms handle banning, That that's a good opportunity to do a pardon.
It doesn't have to be every year.
It could be every five years.
Whatever makes sense.
But say every five years you just unban everybody, but you keep an eye on them.
Because the people who are banned, most of them are going to have another, you know, they're going to offend again.
Like, woo-woo, we're back.
Let's talk about bad stuff again.
And then you have to re-ban them.
But it can't be that hard.
I would think that at least, I'm just going to make a guess, probably a third of all the people who would be allowed back on the platforms, probably a third of them would live a life that would not get them banned.
It's pretty important.
If a third of those people can get back on the platform and you need social media to have a real life in the modern world, I think I'd be interested in seeing what that looked like.
Somebody says 25 years.
No, I think we are very different people.
There's a case in the headlines right now.
Somebody will have to help me with the name.
Who is the young guy who's a conservative, who was at the school shooting?
Is it Kyle?
Somebody... Remind me of his name.
I'm blanking on his name.
But, yeah, Kyle...
Kyle something?
All right. So he got a lot of attention on social media, and he was sort of a rising star in the young conservative...
Voices, I think he was pro-gun, etc.
And I guess he was accepted by Harvard, so he's a smart person with a future.
And then it was discovered that he said some horrible things, like really, really bad racist stuff in social media I don't know how long ago.
But remember, he's only 18?
18 years old?
And he said something horrible a year or two ago or whenever it was.
This kid got into Harvard.
And since the time of the shooting, I don't believe he said anything publicly or on social media that would be bannable.
I guess he said it when he was 16.
Now, what he said when he was 16 was terrible.
Certainly a bannable offense.
Easily. But, what is our standard?
Do you not let a 16-year-old, you know, improve?
Can he not become a better person?
I think that becoming famous is actually a very rehabilitating thing.
There are things that you'll say when you're 16 and completely insignificant that you just won't even think anymore when you're famous.
There is something about getting actual power And he did gain power by becoming more well-known.
There's something about growing up.
There's something about getting power.
There's something about having influence that does bias you toward being a better person.
I think this kid and a lot of other people need a path to become better people.
And to reintegrate with the social media world.
So I just put that out there.
I don't know if it's a good idea, but I would consider a universal pardon every five years or so.
Now, again, there's a practical element to this.
There might be millions of people banned, and most of them are trolls, and maybe there's just no practical way to do this.
Maybe there's a segment that can be...
Maybe if you've only done one thing wrong, that's enough to get you unbanned.
So there might be some standard that works.
I'll just put that out there. All right.
That is just about all I have to talk about.
So, he should have learned racism was bad before 16.
That is just such a wrong thing to say.
So somebody's saying in the comments that Kyle Kuchov, if I'm saying his name right, he should have learned that racism was bad before he was 16.
Yes, he should have. That's what makes it a mistake.
That's why he got banned.
Nobody's disagreeing with that.
I'm just saying that people need a chance to improve.
Now, I've said this a number of times, but I thought of a better way to say it.
I've said that you shouldn't judge people by their mistakes, but rather you should judge them by how they respond to the mistake.
How did they apologize?
How did they make good?
What have they learned?
How are they going to go forward in life?
That's a good way to judge people, not by the mistake.
And here's why.
A mistake is something that people don't do intentionally.
Their response to the mistake is something they do intentionally.
So if you want to know who somebody is, you have to look at what they do intentionally.
Now, of course, you're going to argue a little bit about what's intentional and what's not.
But do you think that if Kyle, that we were just talking about, if he could go back in time, that he would have done those same comments that got him in trouble?
I think no chance.
I think that in his own mind, he would call that a mistake.
Meaning that it was conscious decisions at the time, but he wasn't conscious of its effect.
So he consciously chose to do those things, but I think it's true that he did not understand the effect it would have on other people.
He didn't understand that it would become national news.
Certainly he didn't know that.
And he probably is not even the same person anymore.
So, in a sense, anything that a teenager does is sort of conscious, but they don't really understand what a mistake is in the way that an adult mind would.
So you're not really seeing the real person when you're looking at their mistakes.
Because if I judge any one of you only by your mistakes, well...
You know, I would have to hate all of you if I judge you by your mistakes.
But your mistakes are mostly unconscious or you didn't mean it, something in those forms.
Now, it's a different kind of mistake if you knew it was illegal and you tried to hide it.
You know, that's just a criminal.
So I'm not talking about somebody who's a criminal.
I'm talking about somebody who did something in public Which obviously you wouldn't do if you knew what a big frickin' mistake it was going to be.
You just wouldn't have done it.
So let's judge people by what they do intentionally with their best thinking.
Because that's what the response to the mistake looks like.
Right? The mistake itself.
Nobody makes a bad mistake intentionally.
Unless it's in the service of a crime, for example.
That's a different situation.
All right. What Jussie Smollett did.
Yeah, you know, there's lots of gray area here.
So if you were to judge Smollett by the offense versus how you dealt with it, you end up getting the same answer.
Because the way he dealt with his mistake was so bad that you do know who he is.
So somebody, you know, I could easily imagine that somebody who was so hypnotized and brainwashed by the press that they actually thought that what they were doing might somehow be good for the world or, you know, it might help get rid of President Trump because you think he's a monster or whatever.
So you can imagine somebody being so deeply brainwashed that doing something ridiculous like Smollett did, he had some weird justification for why it made sense.
You can imagine that. I don't think there was any justification for what he did.
But the fact that once it was uncovered, the way he handled it was the worst you've ever seen anybody handle anything.
That part was all intentional.
So I think you can condemn Smollett on every level, both the mistake and the way he handled it.
So I think there's no explaining that away.
Why is BuzzFeed attacking Tony Robbins?
Good question. I only am vaguely aware that there's some kind of Tony Robbins thing going on.
What is it they're accusing him of?
He was filmed using racial slurs?
He berated abuse victims?
What? I don't think any of this is real.
Oh, so here's an old video of him in which he's using it not in the context that people are imagining.
Oh, okay. Robin said that he had then told the whole audience to just do what I do just for a minute if you really want to be free and if you want to have some fun.
He proceeded to perform a dance in front of the crowd while saying, I'm a N-word, you're a N-word, be a N-word too.
He said the technique worked to change the mood of the room and eventually audience members were also singing, I'm a honky and black and white people were hugging.
Now, oh my god, BuzzFeed.
BuzzFeed is just a wart in the ass of civilization.
I mean, they really, really need to go away.
BuzzFeed just needs to leave the earth.
Let me tell you, out of context, this looks terrible, which is why they read it, because out of context is very provocative.
If you were in this room When Tony Robbins did this, I guarantee you it would be a whole different thing.
It's obvious from even a quick reading of this that what he was doing was breaking people out of word thinking.
He was taking the importance of that word and the whole way that we frame race and he was just mixing them up so that people would get to a good result.
This is so clearly not racist.
I mean, so unambiguously, clearly not racist, that BuzzFeed should be shut down for this, right?
Now, here's a perfect example.
Now, maybe you could say, oh, BuzzFeed thought they were doing the right thing with this article in some way.
But now that I've seen it, if they haven't removed this article and apologized deeply to Tony Robbins, This is a crime without the fact, you know, it's probably not illegal, but this is the fakest news you'll ever see.
Would Facebook run this article?
This is a doctored video.
This, the Tony Robbins situation, and again, I've only looked at it for five seconds.
I'm just looking at the page.
It's clear that they're showing a video that had a very important context, and they took it out of that context.
To turn something that was a positive, based on just what I'm reading, the people in the room had a very positive experience in which it says, literally, white people and black people were hugging each other Like during this exercise, he got them out of their racial frames, got them into human being frames, got a good result.
Man, but you take that in the context of the most influential, best hypnotist the world ever saw, Tony Robbins, it makes it look terrible.
So, BuzzFeed has got a lot of explaining to do there.
All right. Yeah.
So doctored videos is going to be, that might be the big story between now and 2020, is that we're going to have a realization that all video is doctored.
I would like to borrow an observation.
So this is not my original observation.
But the observation is that all photographs are persuasion.
And all video is persuasion.
A photograph is not a recording of what happened.
That's what we used to think.
We used to think, well, pictures don't lie, right?
That's one of the most famous sayings in our experience.
Pictures don't lie. Absolutely wrong.
All pictures lie all the time.
It is much more accurate to say, every picture lies, every time.
Because a picture is staged to create a certain...
Yeah, Peter Duke is the one who said that in Hoaxed.
Mike Cernovich's film that you can see on Vimeo, and you should, because it's amazing.
You should watch Hoaxed on Vimeo.
And yeah, I couldn't remember where Peter said it, so I was holding off until you reminded me.
So he said it in hoax. And the point is that all videos, all videos are a lie.
They're designed that way.
There's no exception. They're all lies.
They tell you a story that the photographer wants to tell.
It's not the story of what was happening.
It's the story that the photographer wants to tell.
And that's an important point.
All right. Just looking at your comments.
I think we've said enough for today.
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