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Aug. 6, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
59:35
Episode 620 Scott Adams: Let’s Talk About All The LoserThink About Mass Shootings
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Time Text
You know what?
I just realized I'm in a different time zone than the rest of you.
So this periscope is the wrong time for you.
What time is it where you are?
Hey everybody. Well, I'm coming to you from a secure, undisclosed location.
Which I can't mention for security reasons.
But what time is it?
Oh, it's 8 a.m. So I've already...
Well, this doesn't help me because I don't know what time zone you're in.
But I do know what time it is everywhere.
It's time for the simultaneous sip.
It is. And if you're prepared, you already have some kind of a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein, a chalice, a tankard.
It could be a thermos, a flask, a canteen, some kind of a vessel, something like that.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
And please join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
Oh man, I'm feeling the dopamine going through my body.
I've got a pet peeve I have to tell you about.
It's a rich guy complaint, so I normally wouldn't talk about it, but you've already formed your opinions on me, so it doesn't matter.
Have you ever been in a hotel?
So already it's a rich guy complaint.
But if you've ever been in a hotel and you order room service, And all you want is for that person who delivers your food to leave your room.
It's all you want.
You just want them to bring the food, put it somewhere, and then turn around and walk right out.
But instead, they try to work for the tip.
And so they'll take each item on their little room service thing.
They'll say, fork...
Let me move this as slowly as possible from the tray upon which I brought it in here into its exact place in front of you.
Can you feel your food getting cold?
Can you feel your food is getting cold?
Your coffee is getting cold.
And I put a fork down.
And now, let me slowly take every item Which we've put cellophane on.
And let me unwrap it, but not in a fast way.
Let me unwrap it.
Oh, is your coffee getting cold?
How about your bagel? Is it getting cold?
Let me slowly, in slow motion, unwrap it.
Man, you're hungry. Oh, man, I'll bet you want to eat.
Let me unwrap it and move it slowly over to your table.
There. And now, how about a spoon?
Anyway, that's my rich guy complaint for the day.
We all have bigger problems than that.
But I can't... It just makes me crazy.
So... Meet them at the door and don't let them in.
That's a good idea. So some of you actually have the same.
Meet them at the door, give them a tip, and take the cart.
That's exactly what I'm going to start doing.
It's funny. I see that...
I can see that you've all had the same frustration.
I cannot stand watching my food get cold while the slow-motion service is going on.
Here's another complaint.
I have this store called CVS around me, and no matter what you buy, you could buy a candy bar, and they'll give you a length of receipt, a piece of paper that's, you know, this wide, and usually it's almost six feet long.
And that's not an exaggeration.
Actually, you can hold it here.
It would unfold to your feet.
It's got all these discounts and coupons on it and information.
And then you're supposed to save this gigantic ball of paper until the next time you go to the CVS because it's got some valuable discount on it.
Or actually, they'll give you free money toward your next purchase.
There's actually money on that six-foot-long coupon.
But, of course, you have to go several times to CVS In order to get enough to have some money back.
So by the time you're done, you would fill like a bushel carton with nothing but these balled up giant pieces of wiry paper.
And here's my reaction every time I go to CVS. I go to CVS and they give me the receipt and I hate them with a white hot fire.
So if there's anybody at CVS watching this...
Your customer service method of giving me a six foot long piece of paper, no matter the purchase, makes me white hot hate your brand because it's abusive and you're just doing it for...
Well, let's not kid ourselves.
The reason they do it is so that you won't keep the piece of paper.
How often have I ever used the discounts that they give me on a six foot piece of paper?
Zero. Zero lifetime usage of the free money that they give me.
So when they give me the free money in the physical form of a giant ball of paper, what do I think about CVS? All I think is if anybody ever built a store next to you, That had all the same products but didn't have this piece of paper associated with it.
I would never shop at CVS again.
I freaking hate your company every time you do that to me.
Because you give me free money and then tell me I can't spend it.
And I know I'm just being abused.
So, Safeway is just as bad.
Anyway, somebody says, why not email the receipt?
The reason is because if you emailed the receipt, people could more easily save it and reproduce it.
The whole point is you think you're getting free money back, but you're getting it in a form you can never use unless you're the most anal person in the world, and you keep huge baskets of receipts, and then every time you want to go to the store, you pour through your huge basket, piles and piles of paper, until you find it.
Anyway... That's my complaints for the day.
Let's talk about loser think and mass shootings.
So, of course, whenever there's a mass shooting, everybody in the world tries to commercialize.
The politicians try to turn it into a political weapon.
Everyone in the media gets clicks by covering the news, even though they know that covering the news makes things worse.
This is one of those weird situations in which normally the news, by its nature, is a public service because the citizens want to be informed.
But the news about the mass shootings is the one exception.
It's the opposite of a service for the public because it creates more shootings, which creates more stories, which the news can report on.
So it's a self-perpetuating cycle.
But it's not for your good.
It probably is a public good that we know it happened.
That could have been entirely covered in 24 hours.
So, for example, we could have a law or even just, let's say, an understanding.
It doesn't have to be a law.
That these get covered for 24 hours, you know, just so you get the facts out.
No pictures. And then you do an update.
Let's say you do an update in one week.
Let's say that was the rule.
Just for example, just a thought experiment.
It's a little rule where...
It's a little rule that just minimizes how much attention it gets.
Well, that would be bad for the news business.
So instead the news feeds us unending content that makes all of our hairs catch on fire.
Notice how the public is reacting to this.
It's because of the news.
The news is getting everybody worked up.
So the news is commercializing on the disaster.
All of the politicians are commercializing on the disaster.
All of the pundits Including me, right now, as we speak, I'm in effect commercializing the disaster.
Because to the extent that I put this on YouTube later...
Actually, no. Because on YouTube it's demonetized.
So I might be the only person who's not monetizing it because YouTube doesn't let me.
But if they did, I would be talking about those disasters on this Periscope.
The Periscope would eventually be uploaded to YouTube and then it would be monetized, but that doesn't happen in my case because I'm demonetized upon publication.
So I saw a letter to the editor in the San Jose Mercury yesterday in which the person said I was vile and he was going to throw away all his Dilber books.
I was vile. Because I mentioned during the Gullick, this was the third shooting ago.
There have been so many mass shootings, it's hard to keep them straight.
But the Gilroy one, I mentioned that my startup's app would be a good tool for people to collect eyewitness accounts and do it efficiently.
I forgot to mention that you can set your price at zero.
Which I would assume people would do if they were just trying to get the information out.
But they wouldn't have to.
It's just I assumed that they would.
And so there was no profit motive in it.
But somebody wrote a, or at least there's no way to directly profit in my case with a startup that was never an intention because there wasn't any way to do that anyway.
Even if people used it and even if they charged, you know, the most the company could have made would be five dollars if somebody, you know, would have stayed on there for a few minutes.
And that'd be about it.
And then the five dollars would be, you know, split five ways.
So I had maybe a dollar on the line.
But somebody writes to the San Jose Mercury News to complain about me commercializing the disaster.
Do you see any hypocrisy in using the San Jose Mercury News as your vehicle for complaining about people who commercialize disasters?
That's what they do.
That's what the San Jose Mercury does.
It's not the only thing they do, right?
They cover all the news.
But commercializing disasters Those are the people whose vehicle you used to complain about me commercializing the disaster.
How is that not obvious to people?
Well, I'm not sure that people care about what's obvious anymore.
People care about, can you make a political point?
So let's talk about that.
Let's talk about the shootings and all the crazy people and the loser thinking about that.
So, AOC says that it's not video games that are the problem, it's white supremacy.
To which I say, in my retweet of her tweet, anybody who's telling you the problem of mass shootings is caused by one variable is either lying or stupid.
Now, in her case, I don't believe she's stupid, so I think she's just lying for political gain.
Now, all the politicians that have weighed in Probably on both sides.
I'd say they're mostly illegitimate.
So let me just say that again.
Every politician weighing in with any opinion, no matter what their opinion is, as long as it's on this topic, they're all illegitimate.
Do you want to hear a legitimate opinion?
Now, you don't even have to agree with what I say next.
The only thing I'm trying to sell you is that this opinion, if someone had this opinion, it would be legitimate.
Legitimate means they're not doing it for self-interest.
Here's a legitimate opinion on gun control.
We don't know what to do, but we have lots of ideas we can try.
States have already tried some of it.
Let's do a deeper dive to find out if any of it's working.
If any of it's working, let's consider making it more widespread.
For example, apparently there are these red flag laws, and I think Massachusetts has one, a few other states, in which somebody can be flagged as having a potential mental or violence problem, and they have handguns, and there's some legal process in which they can be temporarily removed to remove the danger.
Does it work? Does it work?
I don't know. Do you know?
I don't know if there's a way to know because if you take somebody's gun away and then they don't do a shooting, you don't know.
You don't know if they would have done the shooting.
I think you have to do it probably for a while before you can determine whether or not it worked.
But you could certainly say we'd like to do a deep dive on this and get to a better common understanding.
Now, if you said that, let's try some things and see what works, I would say, well, that sounds to me like somebody who actually just wants to solve a problem.
But if you say, and every time, it doesn't matter who it is, doesn't matter if it's Trump saying it, doesn't matter if it's AOC saying it, doesn't matter which politician or pundit is saying it, if you hear this form of an argument, well, the problem is X, doesn't matter what X is.
Doesn't matter. You can fill an X with anything, and the person who's talking is lying or stupid.
That's the end of the story.
You don't have to listen to them. If somebody says, the problem is too many guns, they're lying or they're stupid.
If they say, the problem is video games and nothing else, they're lying or they're stupid.
If somebody says, it's white supremacy, they're lying or Or they're stupid.
That's it. It doesn't matter what you fill in X with.
If it's just one variable, you're lying or you're stupid.
Now, and this applies to the ones that you like, too.
So if there's somebody on your side who's coming out in public and saying, well, the problem is X, they're lying or they're stupid.
Because whatever the situation is, there's certainly lots of variables.
Let me give you some backing for this opinion.
So the New York Times has a story that said, video games have been studied and they can find No causation.
So in other words, they can't find causation between video games and the people who consume them more likely to cause a mass shooting.
Are you convinced? Is that the end of video games?
Have video games been cleared?
Because they did a study and they found no confirmed causation and in fact not even a correlation.
So there's neither causation nor even correlation.
Between how much video games you consume and whether or not you become a mass shooter.
So, end of story?
No. Wrong question.
Here's the right question.
How many mass shootings happen in countries that have access to guns, but for whatever reason nobody watches video games and nobody consumes movies?
Well, that doesn't exist, right?
You can't actually study...
The effects of video games when they are universal.
In fact, the New York Times article said as much.
They said that video games are universal, and here's where they add the loser think.
This is so dumb that I feel like it gave me a headache reading it.
They say that video games and violent ones are universal, and not everybody is becoming a mass shooter.
So, therefore, video games are not the cause, right?
Now, they didn't say it as directly as I'm saying it, but that was the inference.
Does that make sense? No.
Let me explain the problem in the thinking.
And I said this before, but I'm going to connect it to this explanation.
People do the things they can think of that are doable.
You don't do things you can't imagine.
Today, I'm going to spend the entire day doing things that I have thought of before.
I'm drinking coffee.
This is something I have thought of before.
I did not wake up and order an exotic kombucha.
Well, maybe I thought of that one before.
But nobody who has never heard of kombucha has ever ordered one before.
It hasn't happened. No one who has never heard of yoga...
has ever accidentally done it.
Do you feel me?
I'm going to say that again because I liked it so much.
Nobody who has never heard of yoga has ever accidentally done it.
Likewise, mass shootings happen exactly because they're top of mind.
It doesn't matter that you played a lot of video games It doesn't matter how many movies you've seen in which there are lots of mass shootings.
It simply matters that it's top of mind.
So the culture does create a situation where mass shootings are the first thing you think of.
What's the first thing you think of this week?
Mass shootings. It's all we're talking about.
It's on the news, it's in the movies, it's on TV, it's in video games, etc.
Now, the problem is, there's probably no way to get rid of it.
And here's the other loser thing.
How many times are people going to say this stupid ass thing?
And again, I'm going to talk about both sides.
Everything I'm saying so far is equally applicable to the left and the right, pro-gun, anti-gun, and everybody in between.
Just making universal statements.
It is loser think, meaning an unproductive way of thinking, to imagine that finding the cause helps you find the solution.
It's a big, big problem and you see it all the time.
In other words, let's say you imagined that the problem was white supremacists.
And let's say it was true. Let's say it was a world where you only had one variable and it was that.
Does that mean that the fix involves only, doesn't mean that the only way to fix it is to go after a white supremacist.
Well, you might want to go after them for, you know, other reasons.
But the thing is, it might be that the problem is the white supremacists, but the solution is a gun law.
I don't know which one, and I'm not promoting anyone in particular.
I'm just saying that if you think the problem has to be directly related to the solution, that those two things have to be connected, then you're not smart enough to be in the conversation, because they never need to be connected.
The problem could be Trump's rhetoric.
The problem could be video games.
And again, I'm not saying there's ever one variable, but even if you imagine hypothetically there were one variable for the shootings and you could identify it.
Let's say the one variable is mental illness or the one variable is guns, whatever it is.
Even hypothetically, if you could identify it, it wouldn't tell you what to do because the solutions are often unrelated.
So the solution might be just preventing access to something or, you know, who knows.
So you've got to decouple what's the problem from what's the fix.
And if you can't do that, you're probably a political candidate.
You'll notice that the political people can't do that.
But they're trying to sell to you that it makes sense to even think of it that way.
If you can't even frame the problem correctly, well, you're not really qualified to be a leader.
Somebody says, firearms are far harder to obtain today than in 1965.
What happened?
Here's my theory.
At least a theory that goes to the ARs and the scary looking rifles.
So I hear the argument that you can do as much damage with handguns, you know, if you're determined to do that.
So I can hear the gun experts saying, it's not the gun, it's the person.
But let's go with that.
Let's say it is the person.
Is the person separate from the gun?
Can you ever say that the person is an entity completely separable from the gun?
Well, you can in a legal sense, because a gun can't commit a crime.
A human can commit a crime with a gun, and then they go to jail.
So in a legal sense, you can absolutely separate them.
There's a clean, total, universally agreed separation.
guns don't create crimes, they're just tools.
So, it's so hard to read your comments and think at the same time.
Every now and then I'll lose my train of thought, so it'll take me a minute to get back.
So what I was saying here was that you can't really separate the person from the gun because people choose guns for emotional reasons.
Let me say this. If ARs, if those AR rifles looked like a nerd weapon, would there be as many mass shootings with those weapons?
Nope. I'd be willing to bet that that's not the case.
The coolness of those weapons, in other words, the awesomeness of the look and feel and how it makes you respond to it, It's like the weapon and the person sort of become one entity in a sense.
And it might be more useful to think of it that way.
Because here's an idea that I've heard nobody suggest.
Which is to make rifles less awesome.
No, I'm not suggesting that.
I'm just saying, why hasn't that been in the conversation?
Because if you tell me that a 20-something-year-old male, let's just say 20 years as sort of an average for shooters, if you tell me that a young male is going to want to do a mass shooting with an unmanly weapon, an awesome-looking weapon, I'll tell you, not unless they're severely mentally disturbed, in which case anything goes.
But you can't separate the feeling that people get from an AR from their actions with it.
The person and the gun sort of become one entity because they're compatible in that way.
The gun is perfectly designed to have an effect on the user.
Because remember, guns have been made for a long time, and the natural evolution of gun design is if a gun maker makes a gun that doesn't have a cool look, people won't buy it.
Because you have a choice of lots of different guns, and so you choose the ones that makes you feel a certain way.
You know, on top of function, you want it to feel a certain way.
Now, could this be tested?
Is there a way to test this hypothesis?
I don't know. It might be.
But the point is that if we say there's one thing and we're trying to separate it and say that's the problem, it's either the person or the gun, look at what you've missed.
As soon as you say it's either this or it's this, you've missed the fact that the gun and the person are one unit, that they work together.
The gun changes the mind of the user.
You don't think so? Because I'd love to see anybody debate this.
Let me give you a mental experiment.
Let's say you're pro-gun, but you don't own a gun.
So here's the scenario.
Just imagine that you're pro-gun in general, but you've never owned a gun.
Most of you can't imagine that because I think most of you own guns.
But just imagine you've never owned one.
You're just not opposed to them.
And then somebody gives you, let's say it's a gift.
I don't know if that's even legal, but let's say you acquire, you buy an AR because your friends have one and you just wanted to own a gun for safety or whatever, so you get an AR. Now you're a person who had not thought of any Bad uses for the gun.
But now you've got it in your hand.
And you're looking at yourself in the mirror.
Do you think in the history of people who have bought ARs, is there even one person who ever bought an AR and did not look at themselves in the mirror holding it?
Probably never. I'll bet in the history of those rifles, no one has ever bought one.
Took it home, unwrapped it, and not stood in front of the mirror.
Because that's what you do.
Now, once you're standing in front of the mirror with an instrument that is able to kill lots of people, does it change how you think?
Of course it does.
Because everything you do changes how you think.
Everything you focus on changes what you think.
So if you stand there with a gun and you play with it enough, you are automatically going to be thinking about shooting mass numbers of people.
And you and the gun become sort of one mind.
The gun is not separate from you.
The gun is changing who you are in real time.
The gun is rewiring your mental processes simply by standing in front of the mirror and looking at yourself, holding it.
Did you know that?
You can check it.
I mean, I don't know how easy that would be to check, but common sense and the way the mind works tells you that every experience rewires your brain.
That's what experience does.
And that specific experience takes your mind to a very dark place and instantly.
It does. So, think about the complexity of the situation when you see anybody saying it's one thing.
Just know that they're lying or stupid.
I'm seeing people talk about how many mass shootings there were under Obama.
But every time I see that, I do not see a compared.
And why not? Don't make the point if you're going to make your point look like you're lying.
Here's a point that looks like you're a liar even if you're not lying.
So if you have the facts on your side, don't present the facts in exactly the way that sounds like you're lying.
And here's what I'm talking about. So people will say, under Obama there were X number of mass shootings.
Okay, that's just a fact.
Now, if you don't compare that to the first, you know, three years or whatever of Trump, so we can see, okay, is it going up?
Are they the same kinds of shooting?
Are the body count going up?
Is there a different ideology?
What's different? If you haven't done that, just shut up about it.
Because showing us that there were mass shootings in the past has no use.
Unless we're comparing them to the present.
And even then, you might be seeing something you can't explain.
It doesn't mean, therefore, it's the president, because that's just one of the variables that have changed.
A lot of variables have changed.
The president's just one of them.
There's a question about whether white supremacists are mentally ill.
Was it Elizabeth Warren who said that in a tweet, that white supremacy is not mental illness?
And so I asked myself, is that true?
Where do you draw the line at mental illness?
Because I would say mental illness would be, if you're looking at, I would define mental illness as if somebody says, hey, look at this coffee cup.
And you look at it and you say, no, I see a frog.
No, it's a coffee cup.
And somebody else, no, I think it's a frog.
And everybody else sees a coffee cup.
Well, you say the person who sees a frog might be mentally ill.
And so I ask you this.
In my life, which is very, very long, I've met good people and bad people of all types.
I've met people I would consider racist, even people who would consider themselves racist.
But here's what I have not met in my, let's say, in 20 years.
In 20 years, I've never spoken to a single person, and trust me, I've spoken to bad people.
I've spoken to people who have committed every kind of crime, who have the worst thoughts, the worst...
I've really...
Trust me, I know some bad people.
But even I... And it's part of my philosophy that I will unreservedly spend time any way I want, with anybody I want, no matter how bad they are, no matter how good they are.
So I hold that as an absolute freedom of which nobody can...
I won't let anybody interfere with that.
But in all of that, I've never met a white supremacist.
Maybe I'll end my career by saying this.
So let's see how this goes.
I've never met a white racist who thought that white people were better at sports than, let's say, black people, just to pick one example.
Nor have I ever met a white racist who thought that white people have the highest IQ. Among the various ethnicities.
Because they generally say that's, you know, Asians have higher IQs.
This is what the racists say.
And they say that Azur, Azur, Jews or whatever have high IQs.
And so, I've met racists, but I've never met a supremacist in the last 20 years or so.
Because your eyes are telling you white people are not supreme.
Like, here's my coffee cup.
It's not a frog. If I turn on the TV and look at sports, you know, the highest level of athletic prowess, I'm not seeing white people dominate, are you?
I'm seeing the opposite.
So certainly white people are not dominating in any physical way.
If you look at mental...
Well, how do you measure that?
If it's college, Ashkenazi Jews was the phrase I was looking for.
Thank you. Somebody help me in the comments.
If you think IQ is how you measure intelligence, even the races say we're not anywhere near the top.
And here's the even more weird part.
If you were a white supremacist, what exactly would you look to To make the determination that you were awesome.
Well, usually they look to people who invented things and, you know, people who did great things in the past, you know, and they say, hey, look at all the things that were invented by white people.
But those white people are not you.
They're not me. I invented Dilbert.
I didn't change the world. I didn't invent the light bulb.
I didn't invent the computer.
I didn't invent... I didn't invent a car.
I didn't invent much of anything.
So, in my opinion, there probably is no such thing as a white supremacist except people who have some mental problems.
There are definitely racists.
Ordinary racists who just say well, you know every every group has some advantages and disadvantages That would be what the racists would say, but I just prefer you know my people for whatever reason Those people exist plenty of those people and they're in every group but But I've never met a somebody who literally Thought that white people, in some general way, were superior to other groups.
I just haven't met that. And so I question whether they exist, but if they do exist, I don't know how they could not be considered mentally challenged, because the evidence just refutes it so cleanly.
All right, so there's that.
So I'm reading a fascinating book.
That I haven't finished, so I'll have more to say about it.
But it's called Nations.
Or what's it called? American Nations.
And what they talk about is the founding of the country and how it was really made up of lots of little cultures and types of people.
And we don't really get that history.
You know, you get the simplified American history.
Oh, there were 13 colonies and they were all awesome and they banded together to fight Great Britain and And then you hear people like Steve King say, Western culture is awesome.
And people say, well, you must be a racist because you like Western culture.
And until I started reading this book, I said to myself, hey, that's not fair.
You know, I can't read Steve King's mind.
I'm not going to defend everything he's ever said.
Isn't it Steve King?
Yeah. Senator, or Congressman, I mean.
I'm not going to defend everything he said, but there's certainly nothing wrong with saying that Western culture has some advantages, whether you agree or disagree.
Because it's culture, it's not ethnicity.
But then I read this book, or I read this much of this book so far.
And here's one of the things that sort of changed how I think of the founding of the United States.
Turns out that there were two Western cultures, maybe three.
And so when you say Western culture, you're not talking about one thing.
Because you had the Puritans come in, And the Puritans were trying to get away from the oppression of Europe.
And they came and they said, how about treating everybody equally, but you have to be religious, but otherwise everybody's going to be somewhat equal.
And then you had the people who came to the southern states, and some of them came from a culture in which there were Sort of the special people, the rich, the royalties, and then everybody else was below them and they were essentially slaves.
And one of the things I didn't realize is that the African slave trade happened because those white people ran out of other white people to enslave because that's what they did first.
They were literally enslaving poor white people and they just didn't have enough.
So they ended up having to look elsewhere for their slaves.
But think about this. The original slaves, they were actually indentured servants, but in many ways they were essentially slaves, that the first slaves were white people by other rich white people who were part of Western culture.
So I'm now changing my opinion.
So my opinion used to be, what's wrong with Western culture?
Looks pretty good.
You know, a lot of democracy and capitalism and, you know, I think of those things.
When somebody says Western culture, I think of, you know, maybe the church and the good things of the church and, you know, freedom and equality.
But it turns out that is not Western culture.
Indeed, the people who brought those qualities to America, wait for it, were escaping from Europe because they didn't have those qualities.
In other words, the stuff we like is American.
And calling it Western culture is sort of overselling the European contribution because it sort of was an American invention to treat everybody equally.
You know, you could say similar stuff was happening in France, but there's no such thing as sort of a Western culture.
It was just a whole bunch of good and bad.
Some of the good stuff stuck with us.
Some of the bad stuff stuck with us, too.
All right, so that changed entirely.
So from now on, if somebody says Western culture is good, I will regard them as uninformed, as I regard myself as uninformed, meaning that until you learn a little bit more about what this Western culture brought us, Such as slavery, of both white people and black people.
I mean, just the worst possible thing.
Until you accept that, it's hard to be a big fan of this Western civilization.
Even the religious people were killing people in the name of religion, etc.
All right. Let's talk about Trump condemning white supremacy.
So I guess he talked about video games being a cause.
We talked about that. And then he condemned white supremacy.
I think he used the word white supremacy once.
I grade his performance an F, failure.
For my critics, who just continually like to say the same dumbass thing, Scott, well...
I don't have Dale with me today, so I'll have to make do.
Scott, why is it you only say that the president does good things and you never criticize him, so therefore you are not a credible person?
To which I say, apparently you've never listened to me, because I criticize him all the time.
Criticize him on healthcare, criticize him on immigration, and on race relations.
This is a perfect example.
How did the president do In healing the nation and getting out of this, you know, everything's about race and the white supremacy stuff, how did he do?
I would say a complete failure.
I'd give it a solid F. I'd love to give it a D minus.
I'd love to say, well, you know, he barely got it right, but it was right.
I want to say that, but he didn't.
He didn't even come close.
It was a swing and a miss.
It was a miss by this far.
It wasn't even close. If you wanted to even pretend that you're trying to heal things, it wasn't even close.
And so I think to myself, what would make a difference?
And by the way, I do see your comments that you think he did do the right thing, but I would argue that he only did the right thing to the people who were already on his side.
In other words, he was sort of talking to the bass, and the bass didn't need to hear it anyway, but it helped them that he said it so that they could repeat it and they could say, oh, he said it, the right thing.
But he didn't say it in a way that was persuasive.
He didn't say it in a way that could ever help.
Complete failure. And I hope everybody hears me say this, because I don't want him to fail.
In fact, I didn't want any president to fail.
I was supportive of all presidents.
Once they're in office, I support the president, period.
Unless something really weird happens.
So, Michelle, I see you disagree with me.
But here's what I would ask you.
Is there anybody you know who changed their mind based on his speech?
If not, then it was 100% failure.
Because I think only the people on the right said, at least he said the right words so I can repeat them when people come after me.
That's not enough. It's not even close.
Not even enough.
And so I thought to myself, what would be enough?
And you've seen that I've been working on this, debunking the fine people hoax.
And it is such a sticky lie.
The lie, of course, is that the president called the neo-Nazis fine people in Charlottesville.
Indeed, he said exactly the opposite.
His actual quote was, they should be condemned totally.
And he called them out by name at the same time.
But if you show the first part of the video, let me summarize this.
I have a long-form blog which debunks the fine people hoax.
You've seen that Steve Cortez has done a great job of continually debunking it.
He did not only, I think it was Real Clear Politics, did a long article, did a great job of debunking it, and then he just did a PragerU video, which again, terrific work, debunking it.
Here's the problem. I think that everything that Steve has done, everything I've done, everything that Joel Pollack wrote in Breitbart, which is on the same topic, all of us have made the same mistake.
It's a big complicated topic.
And people can only hold little bits of facts in their head, and it's just, it's too hard to explain how they could be so wrong.
Because people say things such as, well, I saw it with my own eyes, or heard it with my own ears, and therefore everything you say after that is just blah blah blah to me, and unpersuasive.
So here's how I suggest shrinking down the argument To its smallest point.
And maybe if carpe domptum or somebody wants to do a meme on this, it would tell the story.
We need three screens.
And you want to tell the story in...
I think you could do it in 12 seconds.
Because you need to compress the complicated thing down...
To a point where everybody can consume it with the audio on or the audio off.
So that's the other thing.
It has to have subtitles, so it can be consumed with or without audio, and the entire story can be told in 12 seconds.
Here's how I suggest doing it.
So the first three slides says, this is what the media told you happened.
And then you show President Trump saying, there were fine people on both sides.
Then the second screen says, this is the part they don't show you that happened at the same time.
Cut to it. The next thing he says, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists.
They should be condemned totally.
And again, you've got subtitles, so you don't have to have the sound on.
Third screen, wait for it.
I believe there's a poll.
I don't know if it's credible yet, so somebody needs to find out this is a credible poll.
But I believe there's a credible poll that said that 44% of African Americans were in favor of keeping Confederate statues.
Because once you've debunked the fact...
Once you establish that he was clearly not talking about the neo-Nazis being fine people, and that's what the second slide supports, then people always retreat to, well, but why were they there?
You know, there can't be any fine people who support statues.
And that's what the third slide is for, to show that African Americans You know, at least a good number of them also support them and are clearly not racist and therefore it must be true that there are fine people who support statues because nobody is saying that the African American community who is okay with keeping historical monuments, even if they're monuments about something that's ugly, they prefer keeping the history.
That's not a terrible opinion.
That's just a different opinion.
I personally would like to get rid of those statues because I think they're offensive to enough people that they don't qualify as good decorations and they're not even good history.
We get better history from the internet.
So that would be my suggestion.
A meme maker to have three slides.
First part of the quote labeled, this is what you saw.
Second part of the quote, this is the part they edited out.
And third slide, African Americans support the statues by 40% and they're fine people.
I think you might be able to make a dent with that if you also linked maybe to the full story or the full transcript so that people could check for themselves.
Because I think people would think, hey, you've edited these clips to be misleading, so they might have to go check for themselves to see that it's not misleading.
But if you can't make this complicated story into 12 seconds with three slides that anybody can understand immediately, You don't have a chance of making a big dent in that hoax.
Here's what I would do if I were Trump.
Here's how I would attack it.
I would go after the media, and I would go after them directly, and I would say this.
Well, there are two ways to do this, and he didn't do either one.
One way would be to make a much bigger deal of his statement against racism and white supremacy.
What he did looked sort of like, you know, when a 10-year-old is forced to apologize for taking somebody's toy.
He sort of looked like that, like he didn't want to be there.
So you either have to do it, you either have to sell it like you want to be there, which he didn't do, or go this way and say, let me tell you what the media has done to you people.
For two years, you've been hearing that I called the neo-Nazis fine people.
Here's the clip that you keep seeing.
And basically, I'm saying that he could reproduce the three slides.
He could actually have the three slides when he's talking, but he could reproduce them with language.
He could say, all right, let me show you the clip.
Of what you've been seeing.
There are fine people on both sides.
Now let me show you the rest of the clip that they don't show you.
Imagine the President of the United States showing you the two clips.
The one where he says fine people and then the one where he says immediately after that, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the racists.
They should be condemned totally.
And then mentioning, you know, a recent poll said 44% of African Americans want to keep the statues.
Nobody's saying that they're not fine people.
We can disagree with them calling each other racists.
He might continue supporting the statues, etc., but he would be on the same side as 44% of the African Americans who were asked in that poll.
I have a little question about whether that poll is accurate or credible, so I wouldn't do any of this until we find out if that poll holds up.
That would be important.
All right. Let me see.
I think, oh, let's talk about the Dayton shooter and the El Paso shooter.
First of all, when Joe Biden got the two cities wrong, I guess he was confusing them with where the Democrat debates would be.
And I thought to myself, aha, this could be an important turning point where people realize that People realize, somebody says, come on, Scott, why do you think Trump failed?
You just have to show me one Democrat who changed their mind, and then I'll agree with you that he succeeded.
If the only thing he did was tell his base that everything's okay, that would be a complete failure.
And that's, I think, where we are.
So I thought when Biden got the cities wrong of the two latest shootings, that it would be such a sign that he's too old to be president, that it would be a meaningful turning point.
But then, of course, President Trump, I don't know if he had a teleprompter problem or what it was, mentioned Toledo and got a city wrong.
And so, in some ways, I would say that, you know, you have to worry because both of them are a certain age, and you've got to worry about that.
You have to worry about that.
But... Here's my take on the politicization of the two latest shootings.
So we've got the one guy who wrote a manifesto and then the other guy in Dayton.
So the El Paso one wrote a manifesto.
So we know a little bit of his thinking.
And then the Dayton person...
He apparently had mental problems and shot his own sister, who he liked.
So whatever happened in Dayton, even though he was a Warren supporter and an Antifa supporter, it didn't have to do with politics.
So I think we should just take politics out of that one, because the fact that he supported Warren seems completely unrelated to shooting your own sister.
You don't kill your own sister Over your love of socialism?
I don't know. So it is not fair to say that if the other shooter was a white supremacist, and we're going to talk about that because he wasn't, it's not fair to say that it's balanced out.
There's one from each.
Because there wasn't. There was just one crazy guy.
So that's... Dayton is just a crazy guy.
What about... El Paso.
Was he a political terrorist, domestic terrorist, or was he just another crazy guy?
Well, I read the manifesto, and I will conclude that he was intelligent, but that it didn't make any sense, except that he didn't like Democrats.
So what I read in the manifesto, and maybe fact check me on this, did I miss a part?
What I read is that he thought that immigration would change the electoral nature of this country and make it more of a Democrat stronghold, which would be a one-party rule.
And it was a one-party rule, the kind that he wasn't crazy about.
I don't recall anything in his manifesto about the ethnicity of the immigrants.
I don't even know if he talked about crime, did he?
I think he was talking primarily about it changing the electoral nature of the country and changing it in a way that he didn't approve of because apparently he was not crazy of a Democrat rule.
But at the same time he was talking, as you say in the comments, he was anti-corporations and pro-environment.
Which sounds a lot more like the Democrats.
But it sounded like his major point, you know, the bigger point, was that immigration would give us one party rule, and it wouldn't matter which one it was, that it would be bad.
Now, if you're going to do a mass shooting over that concept, the concept that Democrats would have more power, I don't know if you can call that sane.
Can you? So, I'm no expert.
And we always have to be careful where we draw the line between crazy and sane.
And if you're in a clinical setting and you're trying to decide, let's say, guilt or innocence for a murder, you know, could you, did you know what you were doing?
Were you that crazy? Those things matter.
But when you and I are talking, we're not in the clinical setting, we're not in the legal setting, we're in the trying to understand the world setting.
In the trying to understand the world setting, a person who writes a long manifesto which says that a mass shooting to reduce the number of Democrats in government, is that sane?
Is it sane that he would think that this would make a difference?
Is it sane to think, oh, and therefore I'll kill a bunch of people?
I don't see how there's any sane connection between that, because he couldn't have possibly thought, or did he, that, you know, I'll go kill a bunch of people and that should make, that should give us more immigration.
Did he think that?
Because if he did, he was insane.
So, There is a category of crazy people who can function in the world so well that they would never be institutionalized and they wouldn't necessarily even be on meds if a doctor got a hold of them.
So he was certainly in that gray area where I personally, as a non-doctor and not part of the legal system, would say he was insane.
To put more than that on it, I think, is over-interpreting it.
And it's part of the political process that we're trying to find winners and losers and the left and the right.
So I think anybody who says that either of these were political probably has some explaining to do.
Even though one of them wrote a long political manifesto, that's sort of what crazy people do.
You know, crazy people find a way to express their crazy.
If this same guy had just, say, killed his ex-girlfriend, would we be saying that it was a murder?
Would we say it was a crime of passion?
Probably not. Probably say he's crazy because he killed his girlfriend.
But he does it for politics, and we don't say he's crazy, because he wrote some incoherent stuff on his manifesto.
But I look crazy to me.
So that's all I have to say about him.
And I think that's all I got to say about this.
Shapiro says Trump is all of a sudden ignoring the advice of his aides following his gut instinct.
That's crazy. Well, I don't know if Ben Shapiro really said that, so I'm not going to comment about Ben Shapiro specifically because I can't verify he said that or it might have been a different context.
But I will say that if anybody believes they have, anybody who believes that they understand What's going on in the private conversations in the Oval Office?
That's not credible.
Even I've had a private conversation in the Oval Office.
Do you think anybody knows what I said to the President?
No! Well, it was one person there.
But you haven't heard any reporting on it, right?
How would anybody know...
As it turns out, I did not give the President any advice.
But if I had, how would you know?
And if he had accepted my advice, how would you know?
How would you possibly know that?
The President has private conversations all day long.
How would anybody know whose advice he's taking?
We can't know that.
Impossible. So that's not a credible opinion.
All right. They got you on tape.
Yeah, I probably was taped, but it's not in the public.
It's not in the public domain.
All right. That's all for now.
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