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Aug. 12, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams

01:06:25

Episode 626 Scott Adams: Epstein Theories, Bad Media Persuasion, Bad Pattern Recognition

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	Hello everybody, come on in.
	Grab a chair near the front.
	It's time for...
	Coffee with Scott Adams.
	I'm Scott Adams. And you will be enjoying a simultaneous sip with me in mere moments.
	Think how exciting that is.
	I mean really, that's pretty exciting.
	Thanks for the super art, Cameron.
	Hello, everybody.
	If you'd like to enjoy this simultaneous sip and all of the dopamine hit that comes with that, the thing that starts your day just perfectly, well, you know what you need.
	You need a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein and chalice, a tanker, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a vessel of any kind.
	Fill it with your favorite liquid.
	I like coffee.
	Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
	Mmm.
	I hope your coffee is warmer than mine was.
	Mmm.
	Still delicious.
	All right. Uh...
	More good news disguised as bad news.
	Here's the good news disguised as bad news.
	Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in a jail cell or someone killed him in a jail cell.
	That's what we're talking about.
	That's pretty good.
	That was pretty, pretty good.
	So, that's our bad news for the day.
	If that's what we're talking about, and then blaming each other for gun violence and blaming each other for white supremacy, even as bad as those things sound, this is still the golden age.
	When your worst bad news, at least what's in the stuff that makes it to the headlines, when your worst bad news It's not so bad relative to, let's say, World War II and Holocaust and stuff like that.
	But, lots of stuff to fix.
	Let's talk about Epstein and the evolving psychosis around that.
	The Washington Post says that Epstein's prison was understaffed.
	A lot. They were very understaffed.
	They hadn't checked on him in hours.
	Now, what was my thing that I warned you about?
	I said, if you have two hypotheses, one is a very clever plot involving murdering a high-value target in jail at exactly the right time.
	Maybe. I'm not going to say that didn't happen.
	Can't prove a negative.
	But it's kind of complicated and it's out there.
	And then the other hypothesis is jails are like every other big organization in the world, way more incompetent than you could ever imagine, unless you were the author of the Dilbert comic strip, which writes about big organization inefficiencies and incompetence for the past 30 years, in which case, sort of top of mind for me.
	So, whose theory would have predicted the future?
	If your theory was that he was murdered by a highly capable plot that got to him even in prison, would that have predicted that the prison was also deeply understaffed?
	We wouldn't have predicted it or not predicted it, but mine would have.
	My hypothesis of basic incompetence Would have predicted that as soon as you drill down, you'd find a pretty good evidence of massive incompetence.
	And understaffing is maybe not the fault of the staff.
	It's not their choice to be understaffed.
	It's bigger decisions that probably happen toward the top.
	But that sure looks like incompetence.
	So I would say that yesterday, if you were going to judge the likelihood of the The two possibilities that mostly people are talking about.
	There's some in-between possibilities that people are focusing on.
	He was murdered by the Clintons, or some powerful people like them, versus he killed himself because the jail was incompetent and they couldn't keep him alive.
	Which of those did you think was likely 24 hours ago?
	24 hours ago you said, oh my god, there's no way this could have happened in this highly capable prison situation where everything's controlled and they know just what they're doing.
	That's what you thought 24 hours ago.
	24 hours ago I was saying, no...
	Incompetence is still your top theory.
	It's always your top theory.
	Until you've got a photograph of somebody strangling that guy, it's still your top theory.
	Because of odds.
	The odds of incompetence explaining things are really, really high, just in general.
	So, now again, I want to say very clearly, I'm only talking about probabilities.
	If tomorrow somebody produces a photograph of Hillary Clinton sneaking in in a jailer's outfit and strangling him in his cell, I'm going to say, whoa, I got that one wrong.
	You know, at least statistically, I thought it was the other way.
	Let's talk about some more here.
	Apparently, his roommate was mysteriously reassigned.
	His roommate, and here's a weird thing, his roommate...
	was a convicted murderer who had been an ex-cop.
	What are the odds that Jeffrey Epstein would get a convicted cop?
	Now, I suppose the problem is that the cop also was in danger of being killed in the general population?
	Was that the problem? Perhaps.
	But there was some suggestion, just speculation, I think, that Epstein needed to get away from his roommate because he was afraid his roommate was going to kill him.
	Now, that feels like a reasonable thing to be afraid of, but it also feels like the sort of thing that Epstein might want to have tried to manipulate himself.
	So, for example, let me ask you this.
	You're Epstein and you're really, really good at this stuff.
	This stuff means manipulating people to believe things and do things you want them to do.
	That's what he was good at.
	Now imagine that you want to kill yourself and your roommate is, wait for it, I'll be the first person who's ever said this.
	I'm going to add a piece of understanding to the puzzle that I'll bet you nobody else will say today except me.
	You ready for it?
	If Epstein wanted to kill himself and his cellmate was an ex-cop, who would be the most capable person of stopping him and reviving him?
	You know the answer.
	The ex-cop is trained.
	The ex-cop knows CPR. The ex-cop, even though he was convicted of murdering somebody, the fact that he was a cop at all, probably tells you that he at least has some leanings toward the legal system, even though he fell afoul of it in the worst possible way.
	He's probably the most likely roommate who could try to prevent you from killing yourself, even if he hated you.
	I mean, he might have prevented you from dying just because he knew that living forever in the cell was worse.
	So, you know, that's possible.
	But a cop who knows at least basic medical procedures for emergencies, he's the last person you'd want as your roommate.
	Now, the other possibility is that the cop was so bad the cop was a danger to Epstein as well.
	But you could imagine Epstein wanting to get rid of that roommate and perhaps Perhaps he may have been part of the manipulation to do that.
	The other hypothesis is that, of course, you get rid of the roommate, because that's how you make it easy to murder him.
	So that fact would fit both hypotheses.
	Now, behind most people's assumption...
	That the people who believed it was a conspiracy and he was obviously murdered.
	Behind that is the assumption that prisons are competent places.
	Right? Because that's sort of necessary to make sure that you only have one hypothesis you think is likely.
	Because if prisons were competent, then you would say to yourself, oh, if they wanted to keep them alive, they could have done it.
	Because they're competent.
	But have they ever had a prisoner like Jeffrey Epstein?
	Probably not. They usually have people who are not as good at getting away with stuff.
	So if you had a system that was designed to keep people from killing themselves, would that system be designed so that it was good for the best manipulator in the world?
	Or would it be designed to get 99% of the world?
	If you had a system that protected 99% of the people who wanted to kill themselves, would you say to yourself, okay, I think we got it.
	It's 99% effective.
	Meaning that 99% of the people wouldn't be smart enough to figure out how to kill themselves in that system.
	What we know about Epstein is that he was totally capable of doing that.
	He was unusually capable of manipulating people and smart, and he was a math whiz and had a high IQ and all that.
	So, would a system that was made to prevent 99% of people who are typical prisoners from killing themselves, would it have stopped Epstein?
	Maybe. But it's also easy to imagine that he would be the exception.
	Now, especially when you add all the incompetence into the system, even if it had been designed well, it wasn't managed well because they were understaffed.
	Here's something you have not assumed to be true.
	Why do you believe that the prison would have given Epstein special attention for his presumed or risked suicide?
	Why would he have gotten the special attention?
	Because you say to yourself again, hey, it's a very capable prison.
	They've got everything else under control.
	This new risk comes in, so obviously they want to fully control this as well, just as well as they fully controlled all the other risks in the prison.
	What? That's not a thing.
	A prison is just full of problems.
	Do you know how many people in that prison probably wanted to kill themselves that day?
	Probably a few. Do you know how many other potential problems there were that you needed staffing to keep other people alive?
	How many places you needed to keep the staff alive?
	You probably needed a lot of people.
	So Epstein wasn't the one problem that prison had.
	A prison is a building full of problems.
	That's sort of what it is.
	If you imagined Epstein was the only new problem and everything else was taken care of efficiently with precision, then yeah, it would make sense that, okay, this looks like an outlier.
	This one thing they didn't do right when they were doing everything else correctly.
	Do you think that's what it really looks like if you were an insider?
	If you worked in that prison, would you just say to yourself, you know, it looks suspicious even to me.
	I work in this prison and I happen to know we do everything right.
	So this one time, we don't do it right?
	And, you know, that's suspicious.
	But I doubt that insider would say that.
	Again, 30 years of writing Dilbert and working at big companies tells me this.
	Probably the insiders would say, you know, this doesn't surprise me a bit.
	Everything we do is messed up here.
	We're understaffed. Management is terrible.
	They don't even know where to put the resources.
	We ask for stuff. They don't give it to us.
	We're overworked.
	We're exhausted. Yeah, I took a nap.
	I think it would look like that.
	But we'll find out.
	Here's a question for you.
	Would this be murder?
	So, would the following scenario be considered murder?
	Suppose some of the important people associated with You know, these high-profile people who might have been exposed, whoever you imagine that is.
	So I'm not talking about the Clintons necessarily.
	Just imagine there's some high-profile person, some billionaire, some politician, who thought they had some risk because of Epstein staying alive.
	What if they got to him in jail through, you know, somebody talking to somebody who talks to him, and said to him this, you know, Jeffrey...
	It's almost like things would go worse for you if you stayed alive.
	Because there's some powerful people who want to cause some real pain to you while you're in prison.
	Now, let's say they said it more indirectly.
	You know, there are some powerful people who have a lot of friends in the prison system.
	And I can't tell if you'd be better off alive or dead in this situation.
	And let's say that the person telling Epstein is somebody credible, who knows that there are important people, who will make sure that his time in prison is worse than the worst thing it could possibly be.
	Whatever is the worst thing you can imagine, it'll be worse than that.
	Suppose they tell him that.
	We're going to make sure that if you live in this prison, you're going to wish you didn't.
	Now, what if that encourages Epstein to go kill himself?
	Is that murder? Is it?
	Because didn't somebody get convicted of manslaughter?
	I don't know what the exact charge is.
	I'm not a lawyer. For encouraging somebody on social media to commit suicide?
	I think we just had that case, right?
	Where there was somebody who got in trouble for encouraging somebody else who actually committed suicide.
	So somebody's saying it's not.
	I don't know the answer to that. I don't know if that's chargeable, whether it's murder or something.
	I don't know. So, here's our current situation.
	I'm going to make a prediction based on the incompetence theory.
	The incompetence theory says that you will discover that the way Epstein was treated was similar to the way they probably would have treated anybody else.
	Meaning that, even though you say to yourself, he's a high-profile prisoner, is he more important than every other person on suicide watch?
	Can a prison, a prison management, can they pick favorites?
	Can they say, I got one guy on suicide watch who definitely looks like a big risk, but he's an ordinary person.
	I've got another one.
	His name is Jeffrey Epstein.
	It's a bigger picture situation because there might be other people implicated, etc.
	But he's just another human.
	Does the prison system get to choose which one of those two they keep alive if they're understaffed and they know one of them is going to get more attention?
	I don't know if they can make that choice.
	Should they be allowed to make that choice?
	Should the prison system be allowed to look at the big picture, or are they only allowed to look at the little picture?
	Let's say you're the guard. You're not making management decisions.
	You're just a guard. And if it's your job as a guard, and you've got two people who are at risk, and you can't be in both places, how do you choose?
	I'm not sure the guards...
	Prioritize people by the outside circumstances.
	I think they just have to keep them all alive.
	So I think the assumption that he was a special case may not hold.
	Once you get in prison, there might not be any such thing as a special case.
	There might be special places they put you, but once you're in that special place, I imagine you'd be treated like everyone else who's ever in that special place.
	Somebody says, man, that's naive, Scott.
	Now, I know some of you are thinking of El Chapo.
	Well, let me address whoever said that's naive.
	I'm talking about it from the perspective of someone with lots of large organization experience.
	If you say I'm naive, you'd have to match me for that level of experience.
	I'm literally a recognized expert on this, management incompetence.
	In fact, if you were going to do a national story about management incompetence, who would you most likely want to quote from?
	Me. So, I hear you when you say I'm naive.
	But I hope that you hear me that I am maybe one of the most world-recognized experts on this topic.
	Now, not about prisons in particular, but about any organization.
	And my take is this.
	It's very likely that there might have been some management people who said, let's treat this as a special case.
	We don't want to lose this one.
	It would be pretty embarrassing. But that doesn't mean that the staff cared anything about that.
	The staff has to keep everybody alive.
	I doubt that they were making political decisions at the staff level.
	Probably not. So if they didn't have enough resources to do their job, they were just going to do whatever they were going to do, and they probably didn't give a flying F about Epstein living or dying.
	They probably didn't care.
	So Sarah Silverman had an interesting admission.
	Turns out that she was once fired from a movie role that she had already got, got or gotten, she had already acquired, for they discovered that she did a skit in her past wearing blackface.
	Sarah Silverman, one of the greatest critics of President Trump, she has their photographs in the public domain of her wearing blackface.
	She says in her defense that she's not that kind of comic anymore.
	Okay? Now, I do not judge her harshly for that.
	Because I try to stay consistent to the following rule.
	It's the same reason I do not and did not judge Kathy Griffin harshly.
	Because if you make a joke and it offends people, but you know it's a joke...
	That's different. You know, that's not being a terrible person.
	That's being a comedian who pushed the edge and went a little too far.
	That's not the end of the world.
	You want your comedians to push the boundary.
	And if you've got lots of comedians pushing lots of boundaries, the boundary is just going to keep getting bigger and bigger because everybody's sort of pushing it out a little bit.
	Somebody's going to overshoot it a little bit.
	Or somebody's going to do something that used to not look the same, but now it looks worse, which is also a risk.
	I think that's the case with the blackface.
	I think when Sarah Silverman probably did her original blackface skit, people probably said...
	Oh, it's Sarah Silverman.
	We already know she's not a racist, so she's making fun of racism or something like that.
	I think people put it in context and said, it's not racism.
	It might be offensive if you didn't know who she was.
	But if you do know who she is, and she's joking, and she's trying to get a reaction, and you know that she's the most liberal person in the world, she definitely doesn't have bad feelings about black people.
	She's making fun of the situation of blackface, not so much black people.
	You let it go. But then the times change and suddenly something that didn't look that offensive because of its old context gets fast forwarded into a new context and then your hair catches on fire.
	So I give Sarah Silverman My professional humorist pass.
	Not that she needs it, right?
	I'm sure she would not appreciate that I said that in any way.
	But same thing I said for Kathy Griffin.
	Same thing I say for Sarah Silverman.
	Same thing I'm going to say for the next humorist who gets in trouble, which is you took a run at it.
	It didn't work out that time.
	I would hope that I would be judged the same way.
	All right. So I guess the Washington Post today, in the print edition, they...
	They listed in this big wall of names the name of every mass shooting victim since 1966.
	And, of course, the idea of it is to turn visual something that's a concept.
	Visual, so you just see how many people got killed in mass shootings.
	It's just all this tiny print across the whole page.
	It practically blackens the whole page.
	And it's effective.
	So on a persuasion level, it's effective.
	But is it reporting?
	Is it in context?
	Is it fair?
	It's true? You know, the facts are probably true, or true enough.
	But is it fair?
	Well, as the critics pointed out, I guess Robert Traczynski tweeted, this is, and I don't know how to pronounce this next word, you know those words that you read but you never have to pronounce?
	Here's a word I've read a thousand times.
	I've never said this word aloud.
	I will now mispronounce it for your pleasure for the first time.
	Virulent? Virulent?
	Virulent? V-I-R-U-L-E-N-T Virulent?
	So, whatever that word is.
	Virulent? Let's go with that.
	This is virulent innumeracy, colon, trying to make a comparatively rare event look much bigger than it is by the way you print it.
	And that's...
	I think you nailed it.
	That's exactly what's happening on.
	Now, I wouldn't call it virulent innumeracy, In part because when you say virulent innumeracy, you sound like the biggest douchebag in the world.
	So if you want to sound like the biggest douchebag in the world, next time you're talking to your friends over a drink, just say to yourself, you know, this looks like a case of virulent innumeracy.
	You will lose all your friends if you say that.
	But in the context of a tweet, since you just have to read it, They're pretty cool words.
	I'm not making fun of Robert Chisinski.
	They're actually excellent words in a tweet.
	They only sound wonky when you say them out loud, and he used them in the correct way, which is in the tweet.
	So no problem with that.
	All right. And then he said, did he say this or somebody else?
	I think he said this. Trzynski said, figure out how many of these pages it would take to print the names of everybody struck by lightning since 1966.
	None of the people jumped in and said, all right, now let's see the page of people who drowned in swimming pools.
	And, you know, every other disaster died in car accidents.
	Then somebody had the total mic drop.
	How many people died of opioids today?
	Yeah, it's a lot of printed pages there, isn't it?
	So, would you say that that would be journalism?
	Is it journalism to take a statistic, which is by its nature rare compared to all the problems in the world, it's rare, and to turn it into something that they know your mind will register as a gigantic problem simply by the way they printed it?
	Is that journalism? I don't think so.
	Looks like brainwashing to me.
	Now, it might be brainwashing toward a good end.
	It sort of depends where you are here.
	If what comes out of this is that we do a dig, you know, a deeper dive on guns and gun control and both sides, you know, grudgingly find something to try that's different and that different thing makes things better, I would say this is brainwashing that has a good purpose.
	But I don't know that that's likely to happen.
	It might happen. Optimistically, it's possible.
	But we can say for sure it's brainwashing.
	We can't say if it'll work out yet.
	All right. Here's another one.
	So the New York Times did a similarly Weasel-ish thing.
	They said, and I quote, this New York Times, there is a striking degree of overlap between the words of right-wing media personalities and the language used by the Texas man who confessed to killing 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso.
	There's a striking degree of overlap in words.
	Meaning what?
	Now, the implication here is that this is evidence of brainwashing, essentially, or influence, let's call it, meaning that these people were influenced by right-wing pundits.
	Now, striking degree of overlap.
	Couldn't that also mean that they just have the same political opinion?
	And that people who have the same political opinion are likely to use the same words.
	If you thought that the massive number of peoples coming across the border were all good, you're likely to say, huh, lots of people coming across the border.
	Excellent people, and mostly they are.
	Some, I assume, are bad people.
	See what I did there.
	But mostly great people.
	In fact, all of my experiences was immigrants to this country.
	I'd say far more positive than the population that was already here.
	But that's just my experience.
	And So if you're pro-immigration, what words would you use to describe it?
	You'd say immigrants.
	If you wanted to be more, let's say, legalistic, you'd say undocumented immigrants.
	You'd say great people who came to this country for the same reason our ancestors did.
	You'd use words like that, right?
	Suppose you were afraid of it because you thought there was too much of it that was uncontrolled and Could lead to, you know, lower standard of living here if you let it go forever.
	What would you, if that was your opinion, what words would you use?
	Meaning the government is putting effort on controlling it with armed guards, people with weapons, and we can't stop it with militaristic and we can't stop it with militaristic border security.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	What word would come to your mind that would most describe that situation if it was your opinion that it was a dangerous amount of it happening and it was violating our armed borders?
	Well, if you called that an invasion, which was the word that, I guess, one of the main words that they found overlapped between the pundits and that at least one shooter, should you be surprised that people who have the same opinion use the same words?
	I don't think so.
	Now, I think it would be fair to say that people might pick up the words from the pundits.
	But picking up the words of the pundits, is that the same thing as saying, therefore you cause them to shoo people?
	Can you make that leap?
	Because what this is, remember I used to talk about, I've used the word, not used to, I often use the phrase word thinking, where we imagine that the association between two words means something in the real world, and it doesn't.
	Sometimes just words remind you of other words, but that doesn't make them logically connected.
	This is another one of those examples.
	It is word association.
	Somebody on Twitter said, why don't you stop calling it suggested instead of calling it word thinking, which people don't immediately know what I'm talking about.
	Somebody said, why don't you call it That people are using word association instead of thinking.
	And I saw that tweeted suggestion, and I immediately said, damn it, that's way better than what I've been doing.
	But I also used word thinking in my upcoming book, and it's too late to change it.
	So, you know what I'm talking about.
	So when they do this kind of analysis, it's sort of like the Bible code.
	Let me tell you about the Bible code.
	If you've never heard of the Bible code...
	I'm going to make a big statement.
	And then when you check on the Bible code, and I'll tell you what that is in a moment, when you check on this, you realize that my big statement, this seems too big when I say it, it isn't too big.
	Here's the big statement.
	If you don't understand what the Bible code is, the story of something called the Bible code, and I'll tell you what it is, if you don't know that story, you don't understand the reality that you're living in.
	It's a pretty big claim, right?
	If you don't know this one anecdotal story, you don't understand the reality that you're living in in general.
	I'm not saying that you don't understand something about that story.
	I'm saying you don't understand the reality that you think you're experiencing.
	It's all wrong if you don't know the story of the Bible code.
	Here's the story.
	Some years ago, I don't know, a few decades ago, there was somebody who wrote a book called The Bible Code.
	And what the Bible code was, they imagined that they had found all these secret messages in the Bible.
	And what they would do is they'd run different programs or algorithms against the Bible, and they would find, for example, Hey, I'm making up this one, but it's roughly, roughly what's happening.
	They would say, if you took the first letter of the third word on every page in this chapter, and you just went to the third word on every one of these, it would spell out a message of something that actually happened.
	So you'd say, okay, the third word of every word in the Bible, in this section of the Bible, says something like, plane hits 9-11 tower.
	Actually, the book was written before 9-11, so it wasn't that.
	But let's say, Kennedy assassinated.
	Or, president shot.
	Or a president shot with two numbers that represent the year he was shot.
	Now, you can find that in the Bible.
	Not that specific example, but it's a whole bunch of examples of that kind.
	Where if you take the fourth word, but you line them up, or you do some things, and you can find all of these predictions in the Bible that the author claimed were God talking to us and telling us what was going to happen.
	But here's the problem.
	We couldn't determine what was going to happen before it happened.
	You could only find it after it happened.
	So you could never look for a code and then find it and then look to the real world and then find that real thing happening.
	It was all in the past. But secondly, some critics took War and Peace, which was not written by God, And they ran the same algorithms against war and peace.
	And guess what? War and peace, in every other large book, has lots of accidental codes in it.
	The accidental codes, where if you, depending on how you cherry pick what you're looking at, I'll take the second letter of this word, but then the next word I'll take the third letter, or whatever your algorithm is.
	You will find all of these Predictions, if you want to call it that, of things that you can verify happened.
	Now, because it works on every book, we can conclusively say, okay, there's nothing about the Bible except that it's a big book, because it works on every big book.
	Somebody says, you have this wrong, Scott.
	All right. J. Miller, Doc, you have one chance to tell me what was wrong, or I'm going to block you, because for those of you who knew...
	You get blocked for saying you're wrong or you're naive on this podcast or this Periscope.
	The reasoning for that is not that I don't like competing opinions.
	I do. But I want the opinion.
	I don't want the conclusion.
	I don't want to hear you tell me I'm wrong.
	Tell me I'm wrong because you've got plenty of characters here.
	You don't have to give me a detail.
	You can say, you know, Scott, you're wrong.
	Have you seen, you know, this person's analysis or, you know, there's some fact.
	You don't have to give details. You've got plenty of characters to tell me why I'm wrong.
	But if you say I'm naive or I'm wrong and that's all you say, then you're in the blocking category.
	Just want to make that clear. And that's mostly just for the viewing pleasure of everybody here.
	We don't need the unreasoned negativity.
	I just, I don't have any patience for it.
	All right. The Bible Code is a lot like numerology.
	That is correct. It is a lot like numerology.
	So, here's why, if you had never heard the Bible Code, then everything else you see lately would look different.
	Like? Let's say, for example, the mounds and mounds of evidence that proves that the President of the United States colluded with Russia.
	How much evidence was there for that?
	Tons. Tons of evidence.
	But it was all kind of sketchy, wasn't it?
	And it turns out that if you added it all together, it didn't add up to anything.
	Now, if you knew of the Bible Code, you would know that humans can routinely be surprised and fooled by stuff that looks like a whole bunch of evidence and is just coincidence.
	That's what the Bible Code teaches you, that we are a species that can't tell the difference between coincidence and real life.
	When you look at the Democrats telling you that President Trump has said, they like to say, a thousand different ways he's proven he's a white supremacist.
	And you say to yourself, what?
	Why is it I haven't seen even one of them?
	How could it be a thousand?
	I read the news every day.
	Why haven't I noticed any?
	And then the Democrats will say, let me list them all.
	And they will list one thing after another that you say to yourself, Okay, I see what you're saying, but that looks just like a coincidental choice of words, like anybody else would have done.
	It doesn't look like a pattern to me, right?
	Now look at Jeffrey Epstein.
	Oh, this is the part where I lose you, right?
	Look at Jeffrey Epstein.
	Why do you think he definitely got murdered by powerful people or the Clintons or whatever you believe?
	Why? Because look at all the coincidences.
	Man, that many coincidences?
	How could so many coincidences be meaningless?
	Because of the Bible Code!
	Well, not because of the Bible Code, but understand the Bible Code.
	A whole bunch of coincidences means nothing.
	Nothing. The moment you say, can't be that many coincidences, you've lost the trail of reason.
	You're not on the trail of reason if your best reason for something is a whole bunch of coincidences.
	Because that is exactly how the American public is fooled by the media.
	They package coincidences.
	You know, each side does it.
	So, take the birther situation.
	Didn't seem like there were a lot of coincidences there, right?
	Why is it a coincidence that, you know, he happens to have, you know, Barack Obama happens to have a Muslim-sounding name, and he happened to have something irregular about the birth certificate?
	Isn't it a coincidence that when he was first asked for it, it took him a while to produce it?
	And you could come up with probably 12 coincidences that would tell you, oh, he must be a Muslim sleeper cell who was really born in Ethiopia, or whatever the hell it was, I don't care.
	By the way, just to be clear, I never bought the birther thing.
	Obama's a citizen, always was, etc.
	But consider how often...
	Packages of coincidences are sold to the public, and it's all Bible code.
	It's Bible code all the way down, just like turtles.
	If you don't learn that lesson, it's going to be a hard life.
	All right. There's a question about whether Trump's rhetoric causes white supremacist shooting.
	What do you think I'm going to say?
	Do you think I'm going to say That President Trump's rhetoric is a contributing factor, because there's never one variable.
	But do you think President Trump's rhetoric about immigrants is a contributing cause of the white supremacist shooting in El Paso?
	What do you think?
	Do you think it's a contributing cause?
	Your comments are sort of backed up, so I can't see it in real time.
	But I'll give you my answer.
	You're not going to like it.
	The answer is yes.
	Yes, the president's rhetoric, in my opinion, there's no way to prove this, but in my opinion, it does make this type of crime top of mind.
	Same, and I'm going to make the same argument as I made for video games.
	Now, this doesn't mean that the president should stop talking the way he's doing.
	That's a slightly different topic.
	Here's the case I'm going to make.
	People do the things they can think of to do.
	This is a great rule.
	They should just always keep in mind.
	People don't do things they can't think of to do.
	Tomorrow I will not go out and play the tuba.
	I'm not even thinking about it.
	You only do the things you think of.
	So one of the reasons I've said that the violent video games where you're shooting mass numbers of people is a causal element of mass shootings, not because it brainwashes them to become shooters.
	I don't think the evidence is there for that.
	But it does give them the idea.
	And if there were no such thing as any kind of entertainment content that made you think about shooting mass numbers of people, a lot of people would never even consider it.
	It would never even be a thing in their head.
	Now, combine the idea that there is such a thing as mass shooting of people and people have that in their head.
	What's the next thing you need?
	You need a target for whom you are not sympathetic.
	You need a group of people that you can tell yourself, ah, I'm thinking about mass shootings, I'm thinking about suicide, I'm thinking about killing myself in a way that's spectacular and awesome, but I want it to have meaning.
	So I'm thinking about my video games and my mass shootings, I'm thinking about suicide, but I need to attach it to something with meaning.
	What's happening in the world?
	What's everybody talking about?
	What? An invasion from Mexico?
	It's gonna ruin life in this country, say some people?
	Well, there I've got it.
	It's my last element.
	I'm thinking about suicide.
	I'm thinking about mass shootings because I'm spending all my time looking at that content.
	I just need an enemy.
	Does your president give them an enemy?
	Yup, he does.
	Absolutely. Now, should the president change his rhetoric because of this problem?
	That's a harder question, because you could argue that people simply introducing topics influences people in lots of ways, and you wouldn't want to assign blame for the person who introduces a topic or talks about it in a way that they think is honest.
	So the way President Trump talks about immigration I would argue, is honest.
	Meaning that that's how he sees it.
	He sees people pouring across the border that could have an impact on this country.
	He thinks negative, based on just the numbers of them, not the fact that immigration exists, but just the numbers of them.
	And he calls it an invasion.
	Is that anything but an honest opinion that describes the situation we're all watching?
	That's sort of an honest opinion.
	That uses a provocative word, but not in a line.
	I would think that if you think it's a problem, the word invasion kind of fits, right?
	So could you hold the president responsible for simply describing a problem within the domain of his job, one of the most important parts of his job, and characterizing it as a problem?
	I don't think you can blame a politician for describing an observable problem that we're all observing.
	That said, is the way he talks about it a contributing variable to somebody having it in their head that if I'm going to go out and shoot a bunch of people, since maybe I already want to do that, not me, but I'm talking about the shooter, What do I think of?
	Well, you think of what's in the news.
	So I think you can say that the news industry is equally to blame in the way they amplify his language, the way they focus on the word invasion, etc.
	So I think everybody's got some...
	I would say a lot of people are contributing variables, but the way we organize society, we don't attribute blame to people in a legal sense.
	Except for the people who do the crime.
	Typically. It's the people doing the crime that get the legal blame.
	But let's be adults.
	Everything is a multiple variable situation.
	And one of the variables is what did you think of to do?
	And certainly the news and the way it's covered and even what the leaders say is part of that.
	So that's the adult way to look at it, instead of saying it's all good or all bad or he's all guilty or he's all innocent.
	Why can't it be true that there's a little bit of responsibility which is different from saying he should be doing it differently?
	That's a slightly different question, right?
	Let's see what else.
	I have a theory that part of the reason for the two movies on one screen, the world being seen two different ways, is that we're bad at pattern recognition.
	But that's the only way we think.
	We think in terms of patterns, but we're just bad at it.
	Let me give you some examples. Trump uses the same rhetoric as white supremacists.
	So that's part of the claim today, is that the way the white supremacists talk and the way the president talks have some overlap.
	Is that true or false?
	I would assume it's true, because you know what?
	They both use the English language, and there's probably lots of things you could find that overlaps, like the Bible code, So is it true that there's an overlap?
	I don't know. Probably.
	Is there any overlap between the things that Trump says and the local PTA talking about the school board?
	Probably. I don't know.
	There's probably lots of coincidental overlaps in languages, but that's just word association.
	But here's the other pattern.
	Trump uses the same rhetoric as Democrats.
	So, is it true that Trump uses the same rhetoric as white supremacists?
	Well, not identical, but is it true that there's some overlap in the choice of words?
	I would say yes. So what do you make of that?
	If that's the only thing you're looking at, you say, whoa, white supremacists talk this way, President Trump talks this way, there must be some connection.
	But then you lose the other pattern, that Trump uses the same rhetoric as Democrats.
	He overlaps with two groups.
	What do you make of the fact that President Trump uses the same rhetoric as Democrats and white supremacists?
	Doesn't that prove that Democrats are white supremacists?
	Because the President uses the same rhetoric, you know, the word invasion, the word infestation.
	I'm sure there's some, probably a Democrat who's referred to a city as a shithole.
	You don't think that's ever happened?
	I would say the president chooses the same rhetoric as white supremacists and Democrats.
	In other words, we're bad at pattern recognition.
	We see patterns all over the place.
	Here's another one. Critics say Trump goes easy on white supremacists.
	Is that true?
	Yes. Yes, that's true.
	This is my opinion.
	If I watch the type of energy that the president puts into disavowing white supremacists, I say to myself, huh, it feels like he goes harder at Rosie O'Donnell than he does at white supremacists.
	It feels like he goes harder at Nancy Pelosi than he does at white supremacists.
	Now, that's just an impression.
	But remember, I'm on the President's side, and even I think that, even I think he goes lighter on white supremacists than my sense of the way things should be would suggest.
	So if that were my only pattern, I would say what the Democrats said, which is, huh, it does seem that he's suspiciously good to white supremacists, but there's another pattern.
	Here it is. President Trump goes easy on Antifa.
	According to who?
	Me. According to me, he goes easy on Antifa, and Antifa is the one that wants to kill me.
	What do you think I think about that?
	I don't like Antifa.
	I think he needs to go much, much harder at them.
	He just sort of threw them into a sentence and lumped them with the white supremacists.
	Is that going hard at them?
	No. I think he should be talking about them every frickin' day.
	That's what I think. So we have two patterns.
	One is that the people on the left believe that President goes soft on white supremacists.
	I look at that and I go, I can see that.
	I can definitely see that.
	Two, the President goes soft on Antifa, who I would like him to go harder at.
	I see that too.
	What's the real pattern?
	Do you see it yet?
	Here's the real pattern.
	He doesn't go that hard at Americans.
	If that's the first time you realize that, doesn't it give you a little shock?
	The President never goes hard At American citizens.
	Think about it. Doesn't matter if they're Antifa.
	Doesn't matter if they're a white supremacist.
	Doesn't matter. Wait for it.
	If they're convicted prisoners in prison.
	I mean, he's not the one behind it, but he supported it.
	One behind it, but he supported it.
	The president goes easy on Americans consistently.
	It doesn't matter if they agree with him.
	It doesn't matter if they disagree.
	He does go hard at individuals who are going hard at him.
	So that's the thing. So if somebody has a name, and we know their name, it's Bob, he'll go after Bob pretty hard if Bob goes after him.
	That's what we all observe.
	But if Bob is part of a group, does the president ever go after the group of Americans hard?
	Maybe. There might be an example, but I don't really see it.
	He tends to treat groups of Americans as, well, that's sort of your opinion.
	But individuals he goes after hard because that's always fair.
	They identify themselves.
	You know their name. They said bad things.
	It's part of the entertainment that he goes after them by name.
	So here's another one.
	If you're on the left, you say that Trump routinely insults people of color and women.
	Is that true? Does Trump routinely insult people of color and women?
	Absolutely. All the time.
	If you're not noticing that, you're not noticing anything.
	President Trump routinely does insult people of color and women all the time.
	What's the other pattern?
	President Trump insults all of his critics all of the time.
	All of them. If you only saw the pattern that he insults people of color and women, which is true, you'd say, well, therefore, I guess he's a white supremacist, and he's a sexist and a white supremacist.
	If you know that he insults all of his critics all the time, what would you make of that pattern?
	Opposite. You'd say, are you telling me he's the first president who ever treated women and people of color the same?
	He's the first person who ever gave enough respect to women and people of color that he treats them the same.
	First president to do it.
	It's jarring, isn't it?
	But if you miss that pattern, that he treats everybody the same, you're off on your own little false pattern recognition.
	Here are some more patterns.
	The Clinton body count, that's the pattern, right?
	People who are about to out the Clintons, they end up dead.
	You've seen the pattern?
	There definitely does seem to be a pattern.
	Seems to happen a lot.
	Now here's what you don't see.
	How many people do the Clintons know just in general?
	A lot of people.
	If you knew as many people as the Clintons, how many people that you know personally would have died in accidents and got murdered?
	The Clintons probably know, I don't know, 10,000 people, if you count all the people who have worked for them, their supporters, people who have some kind of role.
	Is the fact that, I don't know, 100 of them died in bad accidents, does that tell you anything?
	I don't know. Somebody says, come on!
	Come on, Scott. Can't you see the pattern?
	Are you listening to this periscope at all?
	All right, here's another pattern.
	That bad things happen in prisons because prisons can't control everything.
	Is that a pattern? It is, right?
	Don't bad things happen in prisons fairly regularly?
	There are prison riots, people killed in prison.
	People die all the time in prison.
	It's probably a pretty common thing.
	Here's another pattern, and here's the one that everybody keeps ignoring.
	True or false, Jeffrey Epstein routinely did things that other people would think were impossible or couldn't be done.
	You forgot that pattern, didn't you?
	That is a very consistent pattern.
	Epstein did all kinds of things that other people would have found impossible.
	Not only did he make half a billion dollars, but he had a massive pedophile ring and got the President of the United States to fly with him on his private island to Pedophile Island.
	Could you have done that?
	Now, I'm guessing that you wouldn't want to do that.
	But if you wanted to, could you have done that?
	And then once you got caught the first time, And convicted.
	Do you think you could have gotten, oh, jail time that doesn't count daytime because you can go to work during the day?
	Do you think you could have gotten that light a sentence for that crime?
	No! Everything about Epstein says that he can do stuff That would appear impossible to ordinary people.
	So, what are the odds that he had the ability to commit suicide in a situation that most people could not have pulled it off?
	The pattern to me looks like he's exactly the guy who could do that.
	Of all the people I've ever heard about in my entire world, Name one who would have been more capable for that specific crime.
	Really, the crime entirely depended on convincing the guards that he wasn't a risk.
	Who is better at convincing people that he's not a risk, when he actually is, than Jeffrey Epstein?
	Nobody has ever been better at convincing people he's not a monster, Then the monster, Jeffrey Epstein.
	All right. It's a pattern.
	I'm going to make a prediction about guns.
	Here's my prediction.
	You will never see a productive gun control debate.
	You'll never see it.
	Part of the reason is that people don't have facts on their side because if you haven't done exactly what is being proposed, it hasn't happened exactly in this country, it's hard to know if it'll work.
	But you're never going to see a long-form argument where somebody says, you know, there are ten ways to approach this.
	You could change this law, you could implement this, you could educate people, you could do this, whatever, change the system.
	There are probably ten at least semi-feasible ideas floating around.
	Do you think you'll ever see any kind of content in which either all ten or even one of them is debated without a time limit, By people who know what they're talking about.
	Will you ever get to watch that happen?
	No. Why?
	There does not exist any kind of media platform to support that conversation.
	So the thing that we need more than anything is an adult conversation about what are the options, what can we predict about them, And maybe can we try it for a little while?
	Is there something that we could try small temporarily?
	See if it works. Will you ever see that conversation?
	No. Is our government capable of having that conversation, even internally?
	No. No, they're not.
	They are not capable of doing that.
	Is the news capable of doing that?
	No. Nope.
	Is there any, let's say, famous pundit Who's capable of doing that?
	No. No.
	Because every TV show, radio show, etc., at the very least, they have a time limit.
	So, no, there is no platform to have the conversation.
	So, as a systems versus goal guy, what do I suggest?
	Here it is. Stop working on gun control.
	Just stop. Stop talking about it.
	Until we have a platform to talk about it productively.
	Now, of course, people will keep talking about it because that's what we do.
	But what I'm suggesting is that we should stop focusing on the goal.
	The goal is to have less gun violence, but still protect the Second Amendment if we can.
	So those are the goals.
	But if we keep talking about the goals, You can't get there.
	That's another problem with goals.
	I always talk about systems are better than goals.
	You can't get there talking about goals.
	But if somebody somewhere could create a platform, and let me just give you a suggestion.
	I'll use a real person just because it's easier to talk about real people.
	I don't necessarily think this is the ultimate suggestion.
	Most of you are familiar with Dave Rubin's show, right?
	Now, Dave Rubin is unique because he's a gay man, married on the left, but he talks about a lot of content that would be Trump-friendly.
	Without losing his basic philosophical core.
	So he's unusual in that he can cross lines in the way other people can't cross lines.
	Suppose, and I'm not suggesting this for Dave because he's got his own business that works really well.
	He doesn't need to take my suggestions.
	But somebody like him, we'll just use him as an example.
	He has a show that he can produce whatever he wants, in whatever length he wants, on whatever topic he wants, and he's unique in that I believe he could talk about this topic without you assuming he already has a side.
	Because if you ask me, what is Dave Rubin's view on gun control?
	I don't know, I watch a lot of his content and I have no idea.
	Which is perfect. It's perfect because you don't know what his opinion is.
	He's associated with the left.
	He does a lot of content on the right.
	What the hell is his opinion on gun control?
	He may have said it once, but I'm not sure he ever has because he's not really in the opinion business so much as letting other people give their opinions business.
	So imagine somebody like him saying, all right, there are 10 ideas.
	I'm going to do 10 episodes or whatever.
	And this episode will just be about extending background checks.
	And we'll go as long as it takes, and we'll have somebody on both sides who can do fact-checking in real time.
	So you've got your two debaters, and then each of your debater has at least one fact-checker sitting off screen.
	And somebody makes a claim.
	The other person says, no, that's not true.
	And then Dave says, hold on.
	Fact checkers? We'll keep talking, but you fact checkers, check the claim and show us your sources and we'll double back to that.
	Now let's keep talking.
	Okay, you got your answer? All right.
	Who's got a source? You've got the New York Times.
	You've got this. Now you might not be able to drill down to an answer because even the sources are unreliable, wouldn't you say?
	Would you trust any real...
	It's hard to trust any source when it comes to that, but at least we can find out what is known.
	We can at least get to a deeper level.
	So imagine, if you will, creating some kind of a platform like that and really airing out all of the specific subtopics.
	Yeah, somebody says it's too boring, and I think you're right.
	One of the reasons that you don't have this platform is that it's not a big...
	Probably wouldn't be a big audience scanner unless you had a real celebrity type person doing it, which is another reason, you know, Dave Rubin has a big audience already, so he might be able to bring a lot of attention.
	But you'd want, yeah, Joe Rogan's another one.
	You know, Joe Rogan is a little less political, a lot less political, so might not be the perfect vehicle just because of the type of audience he has.
	But somebody like that The other person who could do it is me.
	What is my opinion on gun control?
	You don't know, do you?
	It's a little unclear, isn't it?
	You don't really know my opinion on gun control.
	I mean, I'll tell you.
	My opinion is, if you can find something reasonable to test small, let's do it.
	Is that a disagreeable opinion to anybody on the left or anybody on the right?
	I think it probably would be disagreeable to people on the right who have the slippery slope problem.
	But keep in mind, I'm just telling you my starting position.
	Like, you know, I'm about as close as you can get to open-minded on this question.
	As anybody. I would say as an absolute no-gun confiscations of, you know, handguns and hunting rifles and stuff like that.
	I mean, the Second Amendment has to stand.
	I think that's a hard line.
	But there's a lot of room to play that won't necessarily take away all your rights.
	And so somebody needs to create a platform to have the actual discussion.
	Otherwise, it's just a big waste of time, and all it's going to be is to see which group can shout the loudest and get the most people elected.
	There's no sense of reason or logic or even a workable system that's even involved in this conversation.
	We're all goal-thinking with no system whatsoever to have a productive conversation.
	All right. Somebody says Brian Lamb of C-SPAN. Don't know about him, but I don't know.
	Can you get enough people to watch C-SPAN? Follow PragerU and watch his short videos.
	The trouble with short videos, they definitely have their place, and PragerU does a sensational job with their videos, especially if you saw Steve Cortez with his find people hoax debunking.
	Last I checked, he got 4 million views, and it's probably much higher by now, 4 million views debunking, this is Steve Cortez, debunking on PragerU.
	With a video debunking the fine people hoax.
	Four million views. That's effective.
	So that might...
	But unfortunately, PragerU is associated with a team, so it wouldn't be the right system to use to have an unbiased conversation.
	All right. That's all I got for now.

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