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Aug. 11, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:08:02
Episode 625 Scott Adams: Jeffrey Epstein, Donny Deutsch, NRA
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
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All right. The big news today is that Jeffrey Epstein is still dead.
How long do you think we're going to be talking about this?
A while, but while it's still fun...
Now, usually, I do not find pleasure in anybody's death.
Osama bin Laden was an exception.
Jeffrey Epstein is another exception.
Given that 100% of the people in the world, including Jeffrey Epstein, wanted him dead, I can't generate any empathy whatsoever.
Let's talk about a few things.
Yesterday, I was saying that Trump critics Who are calling all Trump supporters white supremacists or white supremacist enablers, which is the same thing, that they're despicable.
And I call them to Donnie Deutsch in particular.
Who has of late been saying that Trump is clearly a white supremacist and anybody who votes for him has that same stain on them.
So, you know, don't pretend you're not a white supremacist if you voted for Trump.
Now, I likened Donny Deutsch's approach to creating a race war and driving the country apart.
Based on largely believing in the Charlottesville hoax, which is the alpha hoax, which makes you believe all the other stuff was true too, and that's confirmation bias.
So I was likening what Deutsch was doing on a moral plane to Jeffrey Epstein.
Well, it turns out that I know somebody who knows Donnie Deutsch, and he did not appreciate being compared to Jeffrey Epstein, it turns out.
Now, you know what I don't appreciate?
Being compared to white supremacists.
I don't appreciate that.
Do any of you appreciate that Donnie Deutsch goes on television and tries to set you up to be murdered?
Let's call it what it is.
Donnie Deutsch, when he calls you a white supremacist, is making it dangerous for you to go outside if you're identified as a Trump supporter.
So, from a moral perspective, is putting a target on 60 million people's backs for liking Trump for whatever reason, usually taxes or Supreme Court picks or whatever, Calling them white supremacists and marking them for death, because that's what it does.
Let's be honest. In the United States, in 2019, if you label somebody explicitly as a white supremacist, you're marking them for death.
There's no other way to put that.
Now, just the fact that people have been beaten but haven't actually died yet, that I'm aware of?
Maybe there's an exception. That doesn't mean that he's not marking you for death.
So when I say that from a moral perspective, what Donnie Deutsch is doing is identical in badness on the moral scale, because they're both tens, they're both as bad as you can get, you just can't get worse than either of those two things.
I think it's a fair comparison.
Donnie Deutsch apparently had some trouble with that comparison.
That's a whirlwind. If you do something that makes you look just like the worst person in the world, people are going to interpret it that way.
I believe that's Donnie Deutsch's point, too, except his worldview is based on a hoax.
So his gullibility took him down the...
Well, he's still at the top of the Charlottesville fine people hoax funnel.
He probably still thinks that the president was calling the neo-Nazis fine people, even though the record clearly says the opposite.
Anyway, let's go on.
Let's talk about everybody who's theorizing about Epstein.
And I know you want to hear my theory.
Because mine is the best one, all right?
Now, I tweeted yesterday that, later yesterday, I said, I like a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone, which is true.
I really like my conspiracy theories.
I don't believe them most of the time, but I like them.
I certainly enjoy them on lots of different levels, and so do you.
That's why they're so popular. So I said, I like a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone, but if the other theory is simple incompetence, I go with the odds.
Now, at the time I wrote this, I didn't yet know if there would be a legitimate second theory that there was some incompetence involved and it wasn't what we think it is.
But it turns out there is now a smart person with experience who has exactly that theory.
It is...
Oh, then somebody reacted to me saying that it might be just simple incompetence.
And because this is Twitter, somebody interpreted my statement this way.
Somebody said, what does Scott Adams know about the Clintons?
I don't think he wants to become a member of the hashtag Clintons Body Count Club.
No, I didn't tweet that to save my life.
Thank you for asking.
I tweeted it because...
I'm the guy who wrote the Dilbert cartoon, still do, for 30 years.
If your job is writing the Dilbert cartoon for 30 years, what do you see first when you see a large organization and something went wrong?
My job for 30 years, and then plus my corporate experience before that, which informed my cartooning, If you were to tell me something went wrong in a large organization, be it IBM or be it a prison system or the justice system, what is always the top explanation?
Incompetence somewhere.
Given that, in general, that's always going to be your go-to explanation, if you have one explanation that requires a clever conspiracy and lots of steps and things had to happen and there was smuggling and cameras were turned off and rules were violated and we'll never look into it.
If your second theory is that, but your first theory is, well, looks like it's like every other organization in the world.
Which one of those is more likely?
I don't want to ruin your fun, but one of those is more likely.
Now, I want to be as clear as I can, because most of you live in this black and white world where you think I'm saying it's definitely that.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying if you're going to play the odds, it's probably 20 to 1.
That it's incompetence.
But there's still a solid 5% that something, you know, suspicious happened.
Now, there's something in between where there might have been somebody who just, let's say, turned around, or somebody who was a little late on their rounds intentionally, and So there's probably some kind of middle ground where it wasn't incompetence, but it was a willful dereliction of duty to get something done.
So I'm not sure if that's a big plot.
Let's say the only person involved was the prison guard.
What if it was just one person, it was a prison guard, and it had nothing to do with anything except that he happens to hate pedophiles?
So he looked the other way for a little while.
Maybe. Maybe. So we got those possibilities.
Let's see what some smart people say about those two possibilities, incompetence versus master plan and clever plot.
So here are the things we know based on the latest reporting.
No foul play is suspected in his death, a federal official told CNN. So a federal official...
Who, I would assume this federal official is not going to be exactly the same person who's in on the plot, unless it's such a big plot that the very first federal official you ask about it is in on it.
What are the odds of that?
The one person they got a quote from is also in on the plot?
Maybe. Again, that's not impossible, but it's unlikely.
So this federal official who was talking to CNN, this is CNN's reporting, the Bureau's release called it, quote, an apparent suicide.
What? How can it be ambiguous?
You ask yourself, how many ways can it be ambiguous?
Because didn't you think he hung himself?
Wasn't that what you thought?
Now, if he hung himself...
Would that be ambiguous?
I suppose so, because somebody else could have hung him, right?
It's possible. So the authorities believe Epstein hanged himself, a law enforcement source said.
And the medical examiner hasn't yet determined his manner of death.
Okay. It said it's not clear.
So in July...
When he had his first event that was maybe an attack and maybe a suicide, his first attack apparently they decided wasn't necessarily suicide.
So if you're asking yourself how could a person who had attempted suicide so recently not be on suicide watch because apparently he wasn't, the answer is they determined he didn't try to kill himself the first time.
Now here's the piece of evidence that I've not seen introduced, which I will introduce.
It's sort of something you already know, but nobody's mentioned it yet.
Epstein is not like a regular prisoner in lots of ways.
One of the ways he's not like a regular prisoner is that he's really smart, and he's manipulative, and he's one of the best con men Of all time.
Based on what he managed to do, based on the way he made his money, based on how many people he manipulated to be part of his plan, based on everything we know about him, he would be one of the most successfully manipulative people of all time.
Now, if one of the most successfully manipulative people in the world was asked, did you try to kill yourself or did somebody else attack you?
And he said, I didn't do this to myself.
I was attacked. Could he convince the jail that that was true?
Better than probably anybody.
I'll bet he could convince a jail authority of something that a regular prisoner could not.
We're talking about a world superstar of persuasion in all the bad ways.
Against a jailer who's seen a lot of people lie, but they've never seen anything like this guy.
Somebody says, now you're reaching.
Hold on. I'm just laying out the evidence.
Would you disagree with the statement that he would be more able to lie and manipulate than an average prisoner?
Would you accept that he would be way above average in manipulative lying ability?
So if you just took that as the fact, would he be able to convince people that he wasn't a risk?
Let me ask you this.
If I wanted to kill myself, And you know I can be pretty convincing.
And I wanted people to think I did not want to kill myself.
How persuasive would I be making the case that although it's true, there was this thing that looked like a suicide, it wasn't really, I was just attacked.
How hard would it be to convince authorities that I had no intention to harm myself?
Pretty easy. Pretty easy.
I can imagine that dumb people can't do it.
I can imagine that people who are distressed and have mental problems, etc.
I can imagine that they'd be bad at convincing people that they don't mean any harm to themselves.
But the most manipulative, one of the brightest people who's ever been in jail, could he?
Could he convince people that he didn't mean to harm himself?
Yeah, he could. I know he could, because I could.
I could absolutely convince my jailers that I did not mean to hurt myself, and it wouldn't even be that hard.
So, we don't know if that happened.
I'm just saying most successful persuasive manipulative con man of all time versus an ordinary prison authority, you know, employees, he would be pretty persuasive.
All right, here are some other things that I haven't heard mentioned.
How many pedophiles do they put on suicide watch?
We all know that pedophiles are at special risk for suicide.
How many of them, as a percentage, are put on the suicide watch?
Because it's expensive, isn't it?
Don't you think the suicide watch is pretty expensive?
Because you get cameras, extra authorities, you have to use special facilities.
I would assume, without knowing anything about the system, that there are probably more people who need suicide watch than there are facilities to provide it.
Don't you imagine that there are plenty of pedophiles in that same prison who are not being on suicide watch, and yet we all know pedophiles are at high risk for suicide.
So, if he was considered for suicide watch and then talked them out of it, it would probably be business as usual.
Does the prison system have an obligation to treat him fundamentally differently than they would have treated every other pedophile?
I don't know how much of his outside risk, et cetera, they can consider once he's in jail.
Once you're in jail, aren't there a set of rules?
They're the jail rules.
And don't you use the jail rules on everybody largely the same?
I would think so.
So if the jail rule is that you must satisfy this certain set of, you know, checklists in order to get the expensive and rare facilities to be on suicide watch, if you don't check the boxes, I'll bet you don't get the suicide watch.
And what would be one of the boxes to check?
Does the person express any interest out loud in suicide?
And what if Epstein has never expressed it?
What if the first time he was found injured, he said, are you kidding?
I don't want to kill myself.
I'm going to win this case.
He might have been lying, but you can easily imagine him saying that.
So, let's take that fact into consideration that there's an economic element to this.
There are rules, probably.
Somebody says, you're wrong.
So, for those new, I'm blocking the person who said the two words, you're wrong.
Because even if they're joking, my rule for years has been, if you say those two words with nothing else, given that there's enough room to give an explanation of what you think is wrong, if all you say is you're wrong, you get blocked.
Because I don't need people like you in my life.
If you have a reason, I want to hear it.
If there's something that I haven't considered, et cetera, I'm all in on that.
But talking in that way, you're wrong.
That's an insta-block.
All right. Let's talk about some more facts, see if we can sort this out.
So there's a criminal defense and constitutional lawyer based in Atlanta, Paige Pate.
And he's got an opinion because he's got a lot of experience in this kind of prison.
Some people are testing me to see if I'll block them for saying you're wrong.
And I hope you're happy with your test because you just got blocked.
So the criminal defense lawyer says, and I quote, but I don't think that means that the prison guards or staff intentionally look the other way.
While Epstein killed himself.
So the lawyer says, in my practice, so he's talking from experience here, in my practice, I have often been frustrated by the incompetence of certain BOP correctional officers and management.
So he's often been frustrated about incompetence from the very people that we're talking about.
And remember, I said, if one of the theories is incompetence, It just is automatically 20 to 1 most likely.
It doesn't even matter what the situation is.
It's just always the likely one.
While it is possible, this is the lawyer continuing, while it is possible something more nefarious was at play, that's the same thing I say, it's possible.
He says, I think it is much more likely that Epstein's suicide was the result of negligence and not some grand conspiracy.
CNN has reached out for comment from the facilities people.
Now, so here's somebody with experience in this very realm who says, incompetent?
Oh yeah. It's an incompetent organization that is commonly producing a lot of incompetence.
So, what are the chances?
Given that this feels very credible to me, because what this lawyer is saying is, I have experience, and I can tell you that they're incompetent often.
That is a thing.
So I think that's reliable information because he's not making a specific claim.
He's talking about his experience overall.
I feel like we could trust that.
If somebody says something differently, later if somebody says, you know, the Bureau of Prisons hires the finest employees, you would never guess that.
But we have the best hiring and we hire only the finest employees.
Does that sound like that would be true?
Do you think that the people who, I hate to say this, but I'm going to, Do you think that the people who go into that profession and they say, let me ask you this.
I'll put it in the starkest possible way.
When somebody is considering all of their career alternatives and they decide that their career move is to be inside a prison all day with all that that implies, does that tell you that that's a person with good decision making?
Well, sometimes, yes.
They might be people who, you know, maybe they're on a career path toward being policemen or something.
Police officers, I should say.
Maybe, you know, maybe there aren't many jobs in their town.
Maybe they're just doing it for a little while until they do something better.
In all those cases, they could be top-level employees, but they're just passing through.
But in general, if you're looking at all the career opportunities in the world and you say to yourself, you know...
I'd kind of like the one where I'm personally in prison, literally in prison, all my working day, every day.
I don't know. Does that tell you that those are the most capable people in the world?
Maybe. Because like I said, I'm not going to make a broad statement about all of them.
I'm sure that many of them are highly capable.
But as a rule, in theory, I'll use the shoe salesman's rule to make my point.
I have a theory that most men who sell women's shoes have a foot fetish, or at least a shoe fetish, because they're the ones who would be willing to work for the least amount of pay.
So over time, you would expect that that profession would attract a lot of people with foot fetishes.
Why wouldn't it? I mean, it just makes sense.
That doesn't mean every shoe salesman has a foot fetish, but over time, it should attract more people who do, than other professions.
Likewise, pedophiles are attracted to, you know, being Little League coaches and scouting leaders and stuff like that at a greater level than, you know, other professions would, because why wouldn't it?
All right. So, there's that.
But let me give you a counter.
A counter of that. The counter comes from a convict who had been in those same facilities.
So Fox News talked to a person anonymously.
We don't know his name. It doesn't matter.
But he's got a lot of experience in being in the same prison.
So apparently he's been in this prison more than once.
All right. So the first person who says, I think it's probably incompetence, is a highly trained lawyer with lots of experience.
So his credibility is highly trained lawyer.
This next guy is literally a convict.
Who not only thought that committing crimes for a living was a good career move compared to his alternatives, but also got caught more than once.
Which one of these is smarter?
Is the constitutional lawyer smarter and more credible than the convict Who couldn't even get away with his crimes.
So the convict who couldn't even get away with his crimes points out that between the floor and the ceiling is like eight or nine feet.
There's no way for you to connect to anything.
So he's talking about the ability to hang yourself.
There's nothing to connect to.
You have sheets, but they're paper level, not strong enough.
So he was 200 pounds, so it could never happen.
This is good inside information.
When you're on suicide watch, oh, here's the problem.
The convict is describing a situation in which you're on suicide watch.
Epstein wasn't.
That's the problem, that he wasn't on suicide watch.
So everything that this convict is reporting that says it would be difficult or too impossible, because the convict says it's impossible.
If you're in one of these suicide watch facilities, no way, because there's just too many people watching, and you don't have any materials in there that could ever be used to kill yourself.
But let's say that Epstein was in some kind of a cell that maybe was not monitored with cameras.
Maybe he wasn't watched all the time.
But perhaps they put him in a cell that had been specially constructed to have no good suicide materials in it.
Here's the next question.
If this convict...
Who was so dumb that he can't even commit crimes without getting caught, and he's been in this facility multiple times and keeps committing crimes and getting caught, so he goes back to that facility.
If that guy couldn't figure out how to use the materials in this room to kill himself, Does that tell you that Epstein, by every account, extraordinarily smart, one of the smartest people who's ever been in that prison, doesn't mean that he couldn't figure out how to do it.
Because if you think about it, those rooms are sort of like escape rooms.
You've seen the commercial escape rooms where they put you in a room.
I haven't done it, but I understand.
They put you in a room with certain materials and then you have to figure out the puzzle of how the group of you get out of the room.
So this jail cell was sort of like an escape room that required a certain level of IQ to escape.
Just because this convict was well below the IQ level that would allow him to figure out how to use the materials in this room to kill himself, does that tell you much about somebody with Epstein's IQ? Not that much.
Because, honestly, I've got a feeling that somebody with Epstein's IQ would have a better shot at putting those materials together in a productive way to kill himself.
I mean, didn't he wear clothes?
Are you telling me that the convicts don't have clothes on?
Or are the clothes made out of tissue paper?
Because somebody says if you pee on your boxers, you can hang yourself with them.
Okay, well, I'm not going to test that, but I'll take your word for that.
That's a thought I wish I'd never had in my entire life.
All right, so, he wasn't on suicide watch.
He probably could have talked people into the notion that he wasn't worth their limited resources for that.
We don't know if that's the case.
So, Remember, we're in the fog of war about this whole situation.
I guess Attorney General Barr is having Justice look into it.
He's even having the IG look into it.
And they're pretty serious about finding out what the F happened.
So I think all the right people are going to look into it.
Here's what I expect.
And I want you to...
Compare your predictions to mine.
Remember, let me give you some context for those of you who are new to this Periscope.
I present a worldview and a filter on reality based on persuasion and based on the limits of human perception, let's say.
And I try to make predictions when it makes sense.
And then I try to do it publicly so that you can see if my filter predicts better than whatever filter you were using before.
And that's all I'm doing.
So I make predictions.
I see how well they predict.
So I'm going to predict counter to the primary belief.
The primary belief, I think here, is that there was something sketchy that happened.
My filter says that a big organization is always incompetent and that this level of incompetence even as obvious as it was that there should have been people watching this thing even as obvious as that is a big organization is simply not competent in general for everything and the odds of somebody like Epstein taking advantage of that incompetence Pretty good.
Pretty good. So I'm going to put my bet on, ultimately, there will be incompetence.
There may still be some question about why somebody was incompetent.
That may never be answered, because you can't prove a negative.
So if it comes down to, you know, this guard or this official should have done X, but they did Y, and Y is incompetent, was it intentional?
Probably never know.
Because if it was just incompetence, you can never sort that out from somebody who acted incompetently intentionally because they had a payoff.
Now, could you check the financial records or something else of the person who is responsible and find out if they had taken a payoff?
Nope. Because if they accepted cryptocurrency for their payoff, can you track it?
If a prisoner says to a guard, hey guard, I'll give you a million dollars in Bitcoin if you look the other way, and the guard's going to say, I don't think you can do that.
And then Epstein says, I'll tell you what, open up a crypto wallet and you give me your numbers.
Or better yet, here's a phone number.
Call my assistant.
And just say, my name is Bob, and I've been asked to call and give you these numbers.
Just give you these numbers.
And he gives out the code for his wallet.
Then, Epstein's assistant, behind the scenes, takes Epstein's super secret crypto and sends a million dollars to the guard.
No record. Right?
Now, maybe somebody who knows more about crypto than I do can answer whether I'm speaking correctly.
I'm not the expert here. So, could you make a crypto, let's say Bitcoin, bribe that was undetectable in the normal scheme of things?
I think so, right?
Let me know if I'm wrong about that.
All right. Let's talk about...
So the U.S. State Department, I don't know if you saw this story, but this is really interesting.
They updated their definition of anti-Semitism.
So apparently, I didn't even know this, but there's an official...
There was a 10-point...
Checklist of whether you're being anti-Semitic, and they increased that to 11.
The explanation is that it's in response to Ilhan Omar's, U.S. Representative Omar's anti-Israel machinations.
And so the new definition has added.
So this has been added to the existing things that say, if you do these things, you're anti-Semitic.
Anti-Semitism now includes, quote, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
So if you compare Israel to the Nazis, you're anti-Semitic.
Now, not Israel, but Israel policy.
So I want to be very clear.
It's not a description of the people.
It's a description of Israeli policy compared to Nazi policy.
So if you do those things, you are anti-Semitic.
Now, and the leader of the U.S.-based pro-Israel organization praised the move.
So here's what I'm wondering.
Given that Israel is a big supporter of President Trump, and President Trump is a big supporter of Israel, especially Israeli policy, is Trump complaining about Israeli policy?
Maybe in some ways, but I don't know that he is.
I don't think he is, right?
I don't know that President Trump disagrees with anything important on Israeli policy.
In fact, President Trump is one of the most strongly supportive of policy.
He moves the embassy, declares Golan Heights, part of Israel.
He seems the most pro-Israeli policy person that ever was.
Now, what does Donny Deutch Call the most pro-Israeli president of all time.
He calls him a white supremacist.
Basically, Hitler. Doesn't that mean that by the State Department's definition, Donny Deutsch is anti-Semitic?
Because if you're criticizing the person who is most pro-Israel, and pro-Israel policy in particular, because it's the president, so it's really policy that he's dealing with, And you're calling that person literally white supremacist, which I think we all equate with Hiller.
Have you come close to, or have you accomplished, the State Department's new guideline for what qualifies as anti-Semitic?
Just a question.
Just a question. You can see how troublesome all of these definitions are.
All right. Now, is it fair for me to keep saying bad things about Donnie Deutsch?
Well, Donnie Deutsch has opened the floodgates.
By calling 60 million voters white supremacist supporters, I think that that shows us what the new rules are.
And in my opinion, and by the way, this is an honest opinion.
I'm not making up an opinion for political gain.
In my honest opinion, he is the moral equivalent of Hitler or the moral equivalent of a serial pedophile.
Meaning that it's the worst of the worst of the worst level.
I'm not saying he does those things.
I'm saying that on a moral level, that kind of demonization of a group is the worst thing that you could do.
All right. There's some reporting that the NRA is in disarray.
I guess they've got some leadership problems, some turnover issues.
Etc. I guess their lobbyists quit, and there's some other things.
So it turns out that the NRA may not be as effective as they have been in the past, just because of some internal turmoil there.
At the same time, President Trump has lots of pressure, more pressure than there's ever been, to get something done on guns.
And I can't think of a president who would be more equipped to make something happen.
And I'm just going to put this out here.
Imagine, if you will, that Trump said, you know, I'm going to solve this one thing just because I can.
And he just took the NRA and said, hey, NRA, help me with this.
And after the third time, he asked the NRA to help.
And after the third time, they don't.
And the president says, I'm exposed here.
You don't have a choice anymore.
If you could either help me, that's first choice, or I'm going to tear you apart.
I think the president is on the verge because his own, you know, career and legacy, etc., is being influenced by the NRA and they're not really as productive as he needs them to be.
I think he might destroy them.
Like, actually destroy the NRA. Now, when I say destroy them, I mean that he could do enough damage just from the bully pulpit.
He could just blame them.
Think about it.
This president could say, look, I've been pro-NRA from the jump.
I think they've been valuable.
But I'm asking them for the smallest changes, let's say whatever it is, better background checks or whatever, and I'm not getting it.
We can no longer consider them our friends and just tear them apart.
I think this president could do that.
Somebody says he'd lose his base.
Would he? Would he lose his base if the NRA cooperated?
Let's say the NRA says, yeah, you know, we didn't push for this before, but we do need to make some changes now.
Let's say the NRA cooperated.
Would the President lose his base then?
He's not going to blame the NRA because they gave him 30 million.
I don't think that matters anymore, do you?
Do you think that all of the money from the NRA... Would make any difference at this point.
Because Trump is raising so much money compared to the alternative, I don't think he cares about 30 million.
Trump could throw in 30 million of his own tomorrow, couldn't he?
He could just say, imagine this.
Just imagine this.
President comes out and says, you know I'm pro-gun.
I own a gun. I've been pro-NRA from the start.
But you can't just do the same things that aren't working and be okay with that.
What we're doing now, collectively, all the things we do aren't working.
If you're not willing to change that, get another president.
If you want to stick with something you know doesn't work and is killing X number of people a year, get another president.
Vote against me. I'm going to take them on, and I'm, you know, I'm going to put in $30 million into my own campaign, and I'm going to give them their check back.
Whatever. All I'm asking is these common sense things, and I could even say we'll try it for a while and see if it works.
You could even say, well, you know, it'll be a one-year trial, a two-year trial, whatever, depending on the change.
We'll just see if it works.
See if it ruins the country or makes things better.
Now, I know that the...
Now, here's the thing.
Okay.
If the president goes hard at the NRA and gets a few things changed, That are still within the reasonable category.
I don't think it's ever unreasonable to ask for background checks.
I don't think the red flag laws are necessarily unreasonable.
They all have problems, and I would acknowledge that.
There's no perfect change, right?
Everything has a little friction, a little bit of expense.
But they are reasonable by their nature.
They're reasonable by their nature.
And with the red flag laws, people worry that they'll be used in the wrong way, etc.
Definitely a risk.
But I think we'd see that risk pretty early, and I think we would counter it.
So here's the thing.
If the president pushed hard in the NRA and said, I'll give you a choice.
The country no longer will tolerate no change.
They will tolerate a bad change.
Think about it. This is the first time...
The country has been willing to accept a bad change because the only thing we can no longer tolerate collectively, not talking about myself, is no change.
It's the only thing that's intolerable is no significant change.
We would even accept, collectively, a bad decision.
Just to try it out.
Because, you know, even bad decisions are not permanent.
Just something.
Absolutely just something.
And it's got to be enough to make some kind of an impact.
Now, I think this president could do this.
I would fully support him taking out the NRA if they can't help.
I would fully support that.
But I'm also supportive of the NRA in general.
Now, the NRA has said, and I love this because this is a real strong point.
I believe it's true that none of these mass shootings have happened.
For people who are members of the NRA. Somebody fact check me on that.
Has there ever been a mass shooting of somebody who is a member of the NRA? Because I think there's an opportunity for something interesting here that's good for everybody.
Suppose you said, let us acknowledge the power of your organization to self-police.
And let us say that if you're a member of the NRA, you have perhaps fewer restrictions than other people.
Is there a way to make that happen?
In other words, could the NRA be part of the solution instead of what many people think is part of the problem?
Could you not say that people who join the NRA... First of all, joining the NRA requires you to give your name to the NRA, does it not?
How can you join the NRA unless they have your name?
And if you've joined the NRA and they have your name and address, they kind of know you own a gun.
They don't know necessarily how many, but actually they probably do.
I'll bet you there's an NRA survey occasionally that says, what kind of guns do you have?
Maybe not. Maybe they don't want that information to exist.
But I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
So here's what I'm asking.
Could it be that we take advantage of the fact that the NRA absolutely does Does seem to, if not cause good behavior, it might at least filter out people who have bad behavior.
Could you say that if you're in the NRA, Maybe you have less restrictions or something like that.
I would be okay with that.
Because I think you could come up with some kind of scheme where being an NRA helps the NRA, helps you as a gun owner, and still doesn't prevent you from doing whatever common sense thing you want to do.
All right. Did you see the video of Candidate Yang...
Crying on stage about the death of a child by guns.
Did you all see that video?
In one way, I think it was a positive because it showed his emotion on a...
So he was pacing, in a sense, he was pacing his base because his base feels the same way he does to the point where it brought him to tears listening to a mother talk about her daughter being shot by, I don't know, a stray bullet or something.
I can't remember the specific situation, but it's some tragedy involving her child.
And Yang broke down on stage and cried.
Now, that's a little bit good because we like people who have empathy, especially if they're running for an office that has power.
If somebody has power, you really want them to have empathy, too.
Because if you have power and no empathy, well, you're Genghis Khan.
You're Pol Pot.
So you don't want to have power and no empathy.
So you ain't got that right.
But here's the thing. Do you want a leader who cries in public?
For anything?
Probably not.
Because, you know, we elect presidents to go over and be our brand, to go over and negotiate with Kim Jong-un and Putin and President Xi.
Once they see your president crying over one death, no matter how tragic, It's one death of somebody he doesn't know.
Now, we applaud him for his empathy, so I'm certainly not making fun of it in any way.
It looked like a genuine human reaction.
Somebody say he was acting. I don't think so.
I just don't buy the explanation that he was acting.
You know, you can't rule it out, but I don't think that's true.
So I don't know if that helped him or hurt him.
Something tells me it might help him to get nominated, but it would hurt him in the general election, should he get so far.
Did Biden have another gaffe recently?
Is his gaffe production through the roof yet?
Oh, I want to try out a new nickname for Biden.
So the president has called him Sleepy Joe.
But as we see more of Biden, you have to ask yourself, all right, is that nickname working?
Is sleepy what you think of in terms of identifying his biggest weakness?
And energy-wise, Biden seems pretty good.
So the few times that we see him in public, he seems to have good energy.
So the sleepy part maybe is not hitting exactly.
So somebody suggested to me this, and I don't think this is the first time you've heard this.
But how about slow Joe?
Slow Joe rhymes, so it's stickier.
There's actually science to that.
Things that rhyme stick in your mind and take on greater weight than they should.
There's actually science that says that if something rhymes, you think it's more true.
That's a thing. That's been tested.
If it rhymes, As in, if the glove doesn't fit, you must have quit.
The rhyme is not just for fun.
The rhyme is functional.
It makes you think it's true because it rhymes.
That is how dumb we are.
The human brain is so dumb that if it rhymes, we think it's true.
I don't mean every person every time, but on average, it's far more persuasive.
So here's what's good about slow Joe, besides the fact that it rhymes.
It slips off the tongue really easy.
Sleepy Joe also comes off the tongue easy, so you want that.
So it's at least as good. As sleepy and sloppy.
Somebody's saying sloppy. So same thing.
They both roll off the tongue well.
So slow Joe works that way.
But here's the other way it works better.
If I say Joe is slow, how do you interpret it?
Let's see in the comments.
If I say Joe Biden is slow, what is your interpretation of what that word means?
So I'm just looking at your comments.
It'll take a minute for it to catch up to what I said.
Slow Mojo, Geritol Joe, Gaffy Joe.
People are giving me new suggestions here.
So people seem to like Slow Joe.
Weekend at Biden. All right, it's taking a while for your comments to catch up.
But here's the punchline to it.
Slow Joe is persuasion perfect because it allows the hearer, the audience, to fill in what they think it means.
That's good technique.
The more specific you are, the worse it is.
So if you said, Joe Biden has a bad vocabulary, That would be the most specific insult to his intelligence, and then if he doesn't exhibit that, or if people have not noticed that, it doesn't connect.
You'd say, he has a bad vocabulary?
I don't know, I haven't noticed.
It might be true, but I haven't noticed.
So it wouldn't really have any persuasive But when you say slow, this is analogous to when Hillary Clinton in 2016 used the nuclear-powered persuasion that the Trump campaign was dark.
The reason dark worked so well is also the reason that that word alone identified that there was a professional advising them.
That's when I assumed That the person I called Godzilla must be advising, or at least somebody who has learned from him.
Chiltini, in this case, would be the Godzilla I'm talking about.
So that word alone tipped me off that there was a professional advising Clinton.
It wasn't just political people, it was a persuasion expert.
And the technique that I identified was that the word dark allowed you to read into it your own thoughts.
That is nuclear persuasion.
Slow allows you to read in your own interpretation.
Does it mean he's too old?
Does it mean he doesn't think fast?
Does it mean he has gaps?
Does it mean he was never smart in the first place?
Does it mean he won't get much done because he has low energy?
It's whatever you want. You end up putting into it whatever is the most powerful message for you.
You actually design your own persuasion from that stem cell of a sentence or of a nickname.
Now, sleepy is a little too specific, isn't it?
Because if I say somebody's sleepy, I don't necessarily think they're dumb.
I don't necessarily think they might have an age issue.
Not necessarily. I think sleepy.
I think maybe he doesn't show up for enough events.
Not too powerful.
Slow Joe? Really powerful.
Anyway, I'll just put that out there as a possibility.
One thing I can say for sure is that nobody can advise this president on good nicknames.
I just don't think that's a thing.
He is so good at it.
That I don't assume that mine is better or that he doesn't have a better idea.
He's just better at it than other people.
All right. I believe that's everything I wanted to talk about.
And the headlines were very interesting today because it seems like everything that's happened in the past three weeks stopped existing.
Read the headlines on both CNN.com and FoxNews.com so you can see both sides.
And ask yourself if there's anything in the news that was also a story three weeks ago.
And there's almost nothing.
So there's an Epstein thing and then on CNN they have lots of stories about sexual abuse in the military.
Which, you know, there's some topics I just stay away from.
They don't have a persuasion element to them, and they're just icky.
So even dumb, somebody's suggesting dumb Biden.
Even dumb is too specific.
If you said, if you had a nickname for him that was, you know, dumb Biden, That would indicate a lack of technique.
I would see that and I'd say, no, no technique there.
If I saw slow Joe, I'd say, whoa, there's some technique.
That's technique.
Elon Musk supports Yang.
Interesting. Very interesting.
Thoughts on the hunt getting cancelled?
I don't know too much about the movie, except it's something about the elites hunting down and shooting other people or something.
And it's very much like every other movie like that.
You have to... Here's the question.
So we have this rating system which we've all gotten used to since, I don't know, since back in the days of Tipper Gore when she was trying to get music labeled for how profane it was, which I always supported, by the way, because she was not trying to censor anything, although that was the accusation.
She was trying to label things.
And I can't disagree with somebody who wants to accurately label products.
Like, I can't.
How's that wrong? So I always agreed with Tipper Gore wanting to put labels on music, so at least you knew what you were buying.
You could buy it or not buy it, but at least you knew what it was.
And that was hugely controversial.
Likewise, when movies started having ratings, you know, R-rated, X-rated, hugely controversial.
But are you all used to it now?
When was the last time you complained About movies having ratings.
Can you think of the last time you complained about that?
And at one time it was a big deal.
Oh, our freedom is being taken away.
But eventually you just realize it's just a system that gives you more information about what the product is.
That's not a problem. But it does also put some control to prevent some kind of people from consuming the edgier products.
What if... We said that movies and content, whether it's video games, with gun violence are X-rated by definition.
And you have to be an adult to consume it, period.
You can't consume...
Now, maybe you'd put some kind of limit on it.
Let's say you put a limit that says, okay, if somebody gets shot in the movie...
You know, that's still okay.
Maybe that's an R rating.
You know, maybe it's GP-13, whatever.
PG-13. But if it's just, say, one person gets murdered, and maybe they just talk about it, or you hear the gunshot, and somebody drops, and there's one murder that's, you know, the beginning of the show, that it's the crime that gets solved, well, maybe that's not X-rated.
Because it's about an individual crime, it gets solved, there's a happy ending, etc.
But... Movies in which mass numbers of people are slaughtered, I think we should consider making them X-rated.
Now, it would destroy the entire industry.
That's okay. When was the last time you saw a good movie?
Right? It's been a while.
Last time you saw a good movie?
I flew recently.
And, you know, when you're flying, any movie looks good.
Because you're flying and you're trapped for a while.
So I was flying yesterday and I opened up the app on the plane that lets me see all the new releases.
Do you know how many new movies, out of all the movies in the world, do you know how many looked interesting enough to even open up, to even just sample it?
None. There wasn't a single movie, out of all movies, that was even a little bit interesting to me.
Now I'll bet you've had Not quite, maybe I'm a little extreme, but I'll bet you're having that same experience.
I'll bet every one of you who used to love movies have discovered that for some reason they don't work anymore.
And I think it has to do with people changing.
It could have to do with all the movies became too much the same movie.
That could be it. I mean, if you watch, somebody says Fast and Furious was bonkers, but fun.
Um... Yeah, Fast and Furious.
But by the third time you've watched a Fast and Furious movie, or the 25th time you've seen a superhero movie, you're just watching the same movie.
Right? You're watching the same movie over and over and over again.
So I would say that the movie industry is sort of garbage anyway.
The last time I consistently liked movies is when my stepkids were very young, and because there weren't many things that you could do with young kids, we would watch a lot of Disney movies.
The Disney movies were really good.
And they didn't have mass shootings.
The quality of a typical Pixar movie, the quality of a typical Disney film is pretty good.
So I would say let people make any kind of content they want, but we should label it.
And once you're watching mass shootings all the time, I think you have to ask yourself, what's it do to children to have mass shooter content around them 24 hours a day?
I don't think there's any chance that any professional, somebody who knows children, who knows persuasion, let's say a psychiatrist, somebody who's an expert, I don't think you could find an expert who would disagree with me on the following statement.
Massive exposure to gun violence would make somebody who's on the edge more likely to choose that as a path.
I don't think anybody would disagree with that.
Now, how much more likely you could have a disagreement?
But if you have millions of people consuming this content and some of them are already on the edge and some of them want to do bad things, as other people have suggested, these mass shootings are basically fancy suicides.
These are people who want to die Having fun, or making a statement, or being remembered, some version of all those things.
These are suicides.
If you can convince the suicide person that the first thing they think of is, well, maybe it's just me, or maybe I should go get some help, which would be the ideal, that would be a completely different message.
It would be the first thing they think of.
Instead of, well, the first thing I think of is massively shooting huge crowds of people because that's all the content I've been consuming every day for the last 10 years.
If you started seeing those movies for the first time, or you hadn't seen many, because there would be some leakage, you'd obviously see a few, but if you didn't get to see them on the regular until you were 18...
Would it have the same impact on your thinking?
I don't know. Maybe.
We could test it. I've seen some statistics, well, not statistics, but an opinion, that said that watching violent video games is not correlated with these shootings.
Because everybody watches violent video games, but not everybody becomes a shooter.
To which I say, oh my God, if you analyze that wrong, here's how you analyze that.
Show me how many mass shooters never watched any of this content.
Because there's got to be somewhere that there's a kid, maybe they're religious or whatever, and they just don't have access to television and movies.
How many people, let's say they're raised in an ultra-religious society, There must be somewhere a religious community in which people are pro-gun, meaning that they have them for self-defense, but they just won't let you watch any Hollywood movies because they're just so depraved.
Those people must exist.
There must be enough of them that we could measure whether or not they produce mass killers.
I'll bet you they produce zero.
The people who have had no exposure to them, I'll bet they have zero mass shooters.
Now, I don't know how many people you could find.
I mean, maybe it would be hard to get a sample, but that's the question I'd be asking.
I'd be asking, if you're having that at the top of your mind, what is the likelihood you'll do it, versus you're just never exposed to it?
They can't be the same.
They just can't be the same.
I mean, I'm willing to find out I'm wrong, but I don't believe they could be the same.
All right. More violent video games in the last 50 years and less actual violence.
On a one-to-one basis, that's true.
So I told you I was reading that book.
American Nations, I think it's called, about the beginning of the United States.
And I'll tell you, the history that you learned about America is so frickin' wrong.
Now, it's not wrong in terms of the big picture.
You know, the history you learned is, you know, on this date there was an American Revolution and America won.
You know, so the big stuff, your history is correct.
But it turns out that the early colonial life It was basically an entire country full of frickin' bastards.
The thought that we would, let's say, turn into heroes, the early founders of this country, you'll lose that entirely if you learn about the actual way the early country was.
These were bad people, period.
The founders of this country were bad dudes.
On the whole. I mean, there were some good ones thrown in there.
But the people who had power, you know, the big landowners, and even the people in the north were slave owners.
They just had fewer of them.
That's it. Not only was there the slave trade that came from Africa, but the only reason that the African slave trade happened is literally the landowners ran out of white people to enslave.
They were enslaving white people until they ran at them.
They just didn't have enough. They had more crops than they had white people to enslave.
In those days, if you were the landowner, let's say the king of England had said, you know, you get Pennsylvania or you get this area, you were the judge and the jury.
You could execute Anyone in your territory because you were the judge and the executioner.
You could just take somebody and say, I think this guy stole my cow and just kill him.
And it was legal, completely legal.
It was legal for the powerful people to murder people who happened to live in their land because they were the judge.
They'd make up the law and then they'd kill him.
So early Americans We're horrible people.
They were routinely massacring the Native American tribes, routinely.
And it's not like there were some good ones, you know, good settlers and bad settlers.
The settlers were just horrible, just horrible people all the time by modern standards.
You know, they seem pretty horrible by those standards, too.
But in those days, the idea that the rich landowner was sort of a god who could really control the lives and deaths, literally life and death, of everybody in their domain was actually accepted because they didn't really have too much knowledge of the alternatives.
And it was only, you know, small sects that had the idea that everybody should be treated equally and get a vote and stuff like that.
But as luck would have it, That was the school of thought that became dominant, and probably because of the Civil War.
If we didn't fight a Civil War, maybe the Southern view that the rich landowners could have a lot of power might have been the way we were living right now.
It might be a bunch of fiefdoms.
The other thing I didn't realize is that all of the colonies hated each other to the point of war.
So the colonies frickin' hated each other.
And here when I say colonies, I don't mean even official colonies, but all the little groups of settlers all around, they were very warlike in general.
So I'll tell you, anytime anybody talks about Western culture...
I now think murderous slavers, because it turns out that if you were to categorize them generally, you know, obviously there were some good people in the group, and there were just people who loved God in the group, and so there are plenty of good people.
But if you were to characterize the average, murderous, racist slavers, that's who they were.
Unapologetically, they were overtly murderous, racist slavers.
Slavers. So that's kind of, and if you say, well, but what about the religious tradition?
There wasn't a religious tradition.
There were people with different religions and they were willing to kill each other because the other ones had the wrong religion.
It wasn't really a religious tradition.
It was all over the board. There were people who were religious, weren't different sects, the Protestants didn't like the Catholics.
There was no religious standard.
Anyway, it's a great book. I'll tell you more about it when I'm done.
That's all I have for now. I'll talk to you later.
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