Episode 812 Scott Adams: James Woods is Back, Donny Deutsch Gets Cancelled, Optimism is High
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
President Trump's victory speech after he wasn't impeached
Young healthy Doctor who reported coronavirus, died of it?
Donny Deutsch and Elizabeth Warren's "packaging"
Chernobyl fungi that eats radiation
Nancy Pelosi's hinge
Bette Midler's ALL CAPS fear
Kudos to Aaron Rupar for his 48 Hour Rule, public apology
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
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Well, I think you've all noticed by now, if you're on Twitter, for even one second, you know that James Woods is back.
Now, and he's back with a splash.
Let's just say he's back and he's not shy, so the fun begins.
Now, I can't think...
Of a better way to cap off the best week this president has ever had.
I mean, by far, this is Trump's best week of all time.
And maybe best month of all time, if you look at the outcomes.
And there's just something perfect about James Wood coming back in time to enjoy this coming election season.
So welcome back, James Woods.
We're happy to have you.
And let's enjoy the ride together.
All right. You may have heard that there was a whistleblower in China, a doctor, who was essentially saying that China wasn't taking seriously enough or wasn't accurately reporting the coronavirus deaths.
That doctor, ironically, in treating people, got the coronavirus.
But here's the weird part.
He died of it.
Now, is it a coincidence that one of the most dangerous critics and whistleblowers in China is one of the rare people, the 1%, or whatever percent it is, who die from it?
Now, I saw a picture of him.
It looked like he was getting good medical care, and that's one of the biggest factors about whether you survive or not, is if you get medical care.
The other big factor is if you're old or you're compromised with your immune system.
Well, I saw a picture of this guy, and even in the hospital, he did not look like he had any kind of compromised immune system.
He looked like he was 30 years old.
34, somebody says. He was 34 years old.
What is the total number of 34-year-old people in perfect health Who are receiving medical attention on time, who are they themselves doctors, so they know if anything's going wrong, they're sort of a second check on things.
How many people like that, that fit into that category, are going to die of the coronavirus?
It's pretty close to zero, I'm guessing, right?
So the reputation of China continues to decline, right?
Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse.
Man, do we need to decouple.
We need to decouple hard.
Let me ask you an outrageous question, just to keep this in the back of your mind.
China, quite impressively, I must say, we're all impressed, that China built in record time A bunch of hospital-like facilities for keeping all of the infected people quarantined.
So now they have how many tens of thousands of new hospital beds that are not total hospitals, but they're good enough for now to just keep people away from the rest of the public.
What do you think they're going to do with those after the coronavirus is done?
So when there's no more coronavirus, Do you think they're going to dismantle those facilities?
Or, I'm just going to put that out there, are they going to use them to store some more Uyghurs?
Or some more dissidents?
Which one do you think is going to happen?
Do you think they're going to waste a perfectly new building that is good for detaining people and having guards to make sure they don't escape?
Do you think they're going to waste that?
After they don't need it for the coronavirus?
I don't think so.
I think it's the beginning of something that might get a lot more evil based on history and recent history.
All right. Funniest story of the day?
Pundit Donnie Deutsch, who you know from appearing on TV, especially MSNBC, and saying that President Trump is the worst person in the world, the worst person in the world.
And It looks like he's getting cancelled by his own team now.
And when I say cancelled, I don't mean just his TV show gets cancelled.
I think that already happened.
But he's getting cancelled as a person, basically, the way the left cancels people, for saying the wrong stuff.
So apparently what he said on Morning Joe this morning, and he became a trending hashtag on Twitter, is that Elizabeth Warren can't win because she's, quote, Too strident and not likable enough.
Now, what do you think happened to Donnie Deutsch when he said on TV that Elizabeth Warren, in his words, was too strident and not likable enough?
Oh yeah, you know what happened.
People were hopping mad because he was being misogynistic.
But was he?
Was he? I hate to do this, but I am now about to launch into a full-throated defense of Donnie Deutsch's opinion.
Not Donnie Deutsch.
He can defend himself as a human, and he can defend all of his other opinions.
That's on him. I'm just going to defend him totally on this one point, and I'll do it this way.
If it were true that there were no such thing As women in the political sphere who are not too strident and are likable in addition to being effective, wouldn't that make Donnie Deutsch seem right?
In other words, if Donnie Deutsch said every woman who ever got into politics was unlikable and too strident, I'd say, whoa, whoa, Donnie Deutsch, I'm out.
I'm out. That's not true.
There are Plenty of women who don't have this alleged problem of being too strident or unlikable, things that get blamed on, you know, we say this about Hillary Clinton, you said it about now Elizabeth Warren, but if it doesn't apply to all women, or even most, because nobody's putting a percentage on it, I don't know, you know, it could be rare that That these politicians are unlikable.
But let me give you some examples of people whose politics I very much do not agree with, but I find likable.
Are you ready? You're not going to like this.
This is the part you don't like.
Tulsi Gabbard.
Is Tulsi Gabbard likable?
Totally. Totally.
You can hate everything she says about politics, and you still say, oh yeah, but she seems like a nice person.
How about AOC? Now, you might not like her.
I realize there's very radical different opinions about her, but in my opinion, I don't think you could call her unlikable.
You could hate her opinions about You might even hate her in some way because of her opinions, but she's kind of likable, right?
How about, here's the worst one.
I'm really going to challenge you on this one.
Ilan Omar. Ilan Omar has some of the worst opinions I've ever heard.
I don't think she's good for the country.
I have a very negative opinion of her as a politician, but she's kind of likable.
I hate to say it, but she has a likable vibe about her that is completely at odds with her messaging, which is so vile you can barely stand it.
But she's a likable person.
Am I wrong? I mean, just her vibe.
All right, here's another one. So this is a non-politician, but I want to make the point that it's not even about your physical attraction to the person, because I want to make that distinction.
We're not talking about somebody who's attractive on a biological level.
What about Alan?
So Ellen, we assume, has very left-leaning opinions.
Probably you don't agree with them.
But would you ever think that Ellen was strident or unlikable?
Let's say she ran for president tomorrow.
You'd like her, right?
It has nothing to do with being a woman or not being a woman.
Ellen, or even not, you know, whether you want to, you know, in your primal brain, if there's something thinking, well, I would want to mate with that person, even without that.
Ellen's very likable.
Am I wrong? Here's one, getting into a little grayer area probably.
What about Klobuchar?
Maybe your mileage might differ, but I don't find her strident.
And I don't find her unlikable.
She seems like she'd be kind of fun.
Again, I'm not that attracted to her policies.
But isn't Klobuchar...
She seems like a pretty nice person.
Now some of you are saying no because there's rumors that she's bad to her staff and stuff like that.
But I haven't seen it. In terms of the way she presents herself on stage, seems likable to me.
Now... Let's take it to the other side of the aisle.
What about... So here's a TV pundit.
I'll just use her as a good example.
Tammy Bruce. You've probably all watched Tammy Bruce on Hannity.
She's on Fox News a lot, etc.
Conservative. She identifies as lesbian.
And if she ran for office tomorrow, forget about what party she runs for, it doesn't matter.
If she runs for office tomorrow, would anybody call her strident or unlikable?
Not a chance.
Not a chance. She's totally likable.
Compare that to Judge Jeanine.
Now Judge Jeanine has a popular TV show, physically attractive, But she's a little bit strident, wouldn't you say?
So if somebody, you know, she ran for office tomorrow, and somebody said that Judge Jeanine is, you know, she's a little too strident for me.
I don't think that's likable enough.
Would you say that was unreasonable?
Or sexist?
I wouldn't. I would say that, you know, she puts on, you know, everybody on TV who's a pundit, they sort of put on, let's say, an exaggerated...
It's part of the show.
And if somebody said, I don't know, she's a little too much for me, I'd say, that seems reasonable.
But I wouldn't think it had anything to do with her gender.
And we should also realize that Donnie Deutsch's base of knowledge, and what he is speaking to, his advertising is what he's famous for.
So Donnie Deutsch, very successful advertising You know, executive entrepreneur.
So he knows advertising.
Say what you want about his other opinions.
Say what you want about him personally.
But he knows advertising.
He knows that people are responding on biological reflex level.
So when Donnie Deutsch says that Elizabeth Warren is too strident and not likable enough, that should be regarded as him speaking about her as a product, In the same way when you open up a product from Apple, the packaging is so delicious and just so tactile and fun to look at, fun to touch, that you have this great first impression of Apple products.
It's a very similar thing that he's saying about Warren.
He's not talking about the quality of her policies.
He's saying that the packaging, just the packaging, not quite As friendly as it needs to be.
And he's sort of on a biological reflex level.
Is that sexist?
Well, it would be, again, if he said that about all women.
Or he had a problem with all women running for office, and there's no indication of that.
None at all. In fact, I'm sure it's the opposite.
Without reading his mind, it's safe to say, given his other policies, that he's pro-women, pro- I think that's fair to say.
So while Donnie Deutsch rubs me the wrong way, I have a really negative reaction to Donnie Deutsch.
It's not sexist, is it?
I'm a man, Donnie Deutsch is a man, but God, does he rub me wrong when I'm hearing him do his political talking.
So I would say the same thing is true of Donnie Deutsch.
If he ran for office tomorrow, he would seem like a little too much.
Now you might, because of gender, it's entirely possible that people would use different words to describe it.
When you're describing a woman and she's just rubbing you wrong, there's just something about her presentation that's bugging you, maybe you use words like strident and not likable.
Maybe if it's a guy, you say he's a jerk, he's an a-hole.
So you might use different words, he's a bastard, but it's kind of the same thing.
All right. So there, I've defended Donny Deutsch's opinion as, I think, being totally reasonable, and I think the Democrats would be smart to listen to him, frankly, because he's talking about the thing he is really an expert on, which is how to package a product, in this case, a candidate.
All right, so... It was an interesting story.
Somebody said this is an older story, but I only saw it today, so I tweeted around.
Apparently, at Chernobyl, they have discovered a type of fungi that eats radiation that's found inside the nuclear reactor.
What? That's right.
A fungi that eats radiation as its food.
Now, Can that be, you know, commercialized?
Is it an answer for storing, you know, spend fuel?
I don't know. I don't know.
Probably there's a lot of, there might be a lot of, you know, obstacles to actually using this.
But it's the sort of surprise that you can guarantee will happen between now and the next hundred years.
In other words, in this whole realm of climate change and nuclear energy and fuel in general, This is exactly the kind of surprise.
Whether this one turns out to be meaningful or not, we don't know.
But it's the sort of thing you're going to see a lot of.
People are going to say, what?
Suddenly, we have new options.
So nuclear looks better.
President Trump tweeted, I think yesterday, that he was supportive of the people in Nevada who did not want to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.
Now, I don't know a lot about the You know, the topic, except that nobody wants nuclear waste stored in their backyard.
And the President mentioned that they were looking at innovative alternatives.
Well, one innovative alternative would be to find an organic way to put your nuclear waste somewhere and have the mushrooms eat it.
I don't know what becomes of the mushrooms.
I assume they develop superpowers.
And eventually secret identities and fight crime.
That's good, too, because we have too much crime.
So if your fungi eat the radiation and become superheroes and fight crime, well, that's a twofer.
You've got two things there. The other thing, and I love saying this, because every once in a while you see something that completely changes how you feel about something, and Mark Schneider did this to me on the subject of nuclear waste.
That the current nuclear power plants, when they create waste, it's a solid.
It's not a liquid.
I guess when nuclear weapons create waste, the weapons do create a liquid waste, and our minds process the difference between a solid waste and a nuclear waste, you really feel like the risk is different, don't you?
And I'm not sure this is logical, but the way you feel about it is different.
Because when you think it's liquid, you think, well, how good are those containers?
Couldn't a little liquid get out, and like acid, could it chew its way through the bottom of the barrel?
Seems kind of scary.
But if I tell you it's solid, like a solid rod, you say to yourself, okay, well, that's not like acid, probably.
They probably figured it out.
Now, I have no reason to believe...
That the solid, from an engineering perspective, is more protected than the liquid is.
They're probably equally protected.
They're probably just fine in both cases.
But the way you process it is really different.
The liquid just seems scarier than the solid.
So it's worth knowing.
The other innovative way to take care of nuclear waste is, of course, Building more Generation 4, or building them in the first place, that use that spent fuel as their fuel.
So if you can get to Generation 4 quickly enough, you have a way to eat up that fuel without storing it, or eat up the waste, because it would be used as fuel.
And between now and then, apparently it's fairly common to store the nuclear waste on the same site as the nuclear power plant.
I guess that's a normal way it's done.
Which makes me ask, what's wrong with just doing that?
If you've already got a nuclear power plant, isn't the local population already as scared as they need to be?
I mean, they're already not building their house next to it.
They've got a little bit of space there, but it's not their biggest problem.
If it's a nuclear power plant, the thing people are worrying about is the nuclear power plant, unfortunately.
Now, if it's one of the newer ones, like Generation 3, none of them have ever had a nuclear meltdown event, but people still worry about it.
So we have some options for the waste.
All right. Let's see what else is going on.
Rachel Maddow is sounding the alarm, as others have, that the voter turnout in Iowa, the number of Democrats who actually went and voted, was quite low by historical standards.
Now, it's hard to compare anything to the Obama situation, because Obama was sort of a hundred-year flood himself, or maybe more.
Obama was more like a thousand-year flood, if you look at it historically.
We assume that that flood will happen more often now.
But until you had your first black president, that was a long flood, or a long drought without a flood.
But what does it mean that Democrats are not turning out in droves for the very first one?
Well, you know, there is something special about the first one, right?
Do you think that the people who normally vote in the Iowa caucuses, do you think that...
That there's the kind of people who would be apathetic in general.
I don't think so. Iowa is very dialed in.
Clearly, they have great energy around their special role as the first election-like thing.
So the fact that that turnout was low, I think it probably means something.
Somebody saying that it was the black turnout that made the difference.
I don't know how big the black population in Iowa is.
It's 90% white.
So I don't think that was all the difference.
It might have been. Could have been.
All right. So that alone, it could turn out that that variable alone is all you needed to know.
Could be. Because remember, all of the Democrats that we think are among the pool of people who might become the candidate, I know people say Hillary's going to jump in and Michelle Obama's going to jump in.
That's not going to happen. This pool are the ones that someone is going to be picked from this pool.
And I say that because if somebody came in at the last moment in a, let's say it's a You know, and negotiated a contested convention and they just broker it and pick somebody who's not even in this group, it would destroy the Democratic Party totally.
It would.
Am I wrong? If these candidates did all this work, had all these supporters, you know, they worked for, what, two years, some of them, and got to this point, and then they picked somebody who wasn't even trying?
That's the end of the party, wouldn't you say?
That's really the end of the party.
So I don't think that's going to happen.
So if you couldn't generate enough excitement with the people who are going to be, one of them is going to be the candidate, that might be over.
That might be everything that you need to know about the election.
There's no other questions to be asked.
All right. There's a lot of chatter about Trump's so-called victory speech yesterday.
After he was not impeached.
Let's see what I did there.
I hope you're all in on the prank.
The prank is that we just keep saying he wasn't impeached.
Because it's true.
In the sense that Alan Dershowitz, famous constitutional scholar, says, no, if you're accused of something and then you're acquitted because the accusation didn't hold, the accusation is expunged.
You're not guilty of a thing after being found innocent of the thing.
So by that model, you have every right to say he was not impeached.
But the fun is not whether it's true or not true, or it's the right words or not the right words.
It's just going to drive Democrats crazy.
So just think of it as this long-running practical joke in which you never argue it.
You just say it's the fact.
Don't debate it. Just say it wasn't impeached.
It didn't happen. It will make them crazy.
It already is.
Alright, so of course the perpetual critics of the president said he was unhinged and it was so unusual and inappropriate or something.
And I guess he, at his speech, not a guess, I watched some of it, he went hard at his critics.
He was very insulting to his critics, and he was funny, and he said things that presidents don't say, and he said bullshit about the Russia collusion thing.
Or was it about impeachment?
It would apply either way.
And people kept acting shocked, and I don't know, what else?
And so I tweeted this.
Note to pundits.
So here was my tweet.
Acting shocked that real Donald Trump insults his critics and enjoys his victories is so 2016.
In 2020, it's okay to acknowledge that the only impact of it has been to entertain us.
It would make perfect sense, and I would say it would be a reasonable thing to say, if this were back in 2016, to say, hey, a president who acts this way and insults his critics might cause some problems.
That would have made sense, because you'd be speculating.
Well, I don't know exactly what problems, but it feels like when things are changed, there was nothing broken before.
I mean, there was nothing to fix, right?
Presidents acting presidential was totally working.
So if the president acts non-presidential according to his critics, well, that would be changing something that was working fine.
So it's adding a little risk.
I would agree, wouldn't you say?
Wouldn't you say that if something's working fine, which is hundreds of years of presidents acting presidential, Every bit of that works.
We're all on the same page.
Totally works. Then somebody comes along and says, I'm going to do it differently.
That's a perfectly reasonable thing to say, which is, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Why would you change something that's working?
Doesn't that introduce some new risks?
And the answer is yes, of course.
You don't know what risks they are, exactly.
But changing something that works is always risky.
But it's not 2016.
You don't have to speculate what might happen.
You can just look what happened.
We've got three years of history that I would consider fairly solid in terms of telling us what are the ramifications.
So let me check how the President's insults of his critics have affected me.
Let's see. First I'll check my stocks.
Nope, no impact, except maybe they went up.
Nope, nope. How about, hold on, I've got to check things.
Let me check my coffee.
Because it might taste different because the president isn't acting presidential.
Let's see. No, it's exactly the same.
Weird, huh? All that insulting.
Didn't change my income.
Didn't change my coffee.
How about my health?
Same. It's as if it didn't affect me.
Well, it did affect me a little bit.
It entertained me.
Didn't it entertain you?
It was good for news ratings.
It made stories. It gave me something to tweet about.
I think we know what happens when this president insults his critics.
As long as he stays in that lane where it's somebody who started the fight and he's responding to it.
As long as that's what's happening.
You know, somebody who had it coming.
Somebody who entered the fight willingly.
Not a citizen.
Just somebody who entered the fight willingly.
What about that person?
You know, I mean, so far we can see that there's no cost to that.
So it's time to update your criticisms of this president and just acknowledge that nothing happens because he insults his critics.
Just nothing. Meanwhile, speaking of unhinged, this is probably confirmation bias on my part because, you know, if you want something to be true or you're expecting it to be true and then you see some evidence, you say, oh, there's the proof.
That's how confirmation bias works.
So I will alert you that this might be totally confirmation bias on my part.
But let me ask you this.
Doesn't Pelosi look unhinged?
She looks like she lost it.
If you saw the last interview in which he was responding to the President's attacks on her, etc., it looked like she'd lost a little bit of stability.
Now, I'm sure if confirmation bias is all that's happening, you're going to agree with me.
I see in the comments everybody's saying totally, totally yes.
But It doesn't feel like confirmation bias.
Of course, that's how confirmation bias works.
If you could tell when you were experiencing it, it wouldn't be confirmation bias.
But anyway, that's how it looks to me.
It looks like... And let me put it in a different way.
So this is more objective.
So the next thing I'm going to say is not an opinion, I don't think.
I think you could just say, yes, that is objectively true.
Pelosi has not changed Trump so far.
Are we right? Does everybody agree with me that Trump is still exactly Trump?
He's exactly the same person who took the job.
Am I right? There's nothing that Pelosi or any of the critics did that turned him into something else.
You probably agree on that.
Here's the second part of that same thought.
Pelosi changed into Trump.
Right? Because Pelosi started out being...
I'm the adult in the room.
I will not stoop to insults.
We're just going to keep it professional.
I would never want to be a big old angry clown like this president.
I'm just going to keep it on the straight and narrow.
How'd that work out?
Didn't. Pelosi is a completely different person.
Trump broke her.
He broke her heart.
He's exactly the same, and she has a brand new personality, apparently.
He rewrote her personality.
That's not even a joke.
Her brain is reprogrammed.
Because her actions, of course, are informed by her brain.
It's her brain that causes her to do what she does.
And if she's become a whole different personality, and I think you'd all agree on that, objectively.
That doesn't even feel like a subjective question.
We're just watching her insult the president, when before that never would have happened, at least the way she's doing it, the depth of it.
What about the theatrics, tearing up the document?
If you had asked her five years ago, would Pelosi have said, you know, there's no place for theatrics?
You don't do that in the Senate.
You don't do that in your professional work.
I'm the Speaker of the House.
I don't need theatrics.
I just need a good argument.
And then she goes to theatrics.
So Trump broke her and reprogrammed her into a version of himself.
You can't win harder than that.
Can you? Can you?
Let me tell you, the only person who ever won harder than Trump did by breaking Pelosi, reprogramming her into a female clone of himself, that happened right in front of us.
We all watched it. Only one person has ever won that hard, and that person was a fictional person.
It was in The Silence of the Lambs, in which he would murder his victims And then use their skin for some kind of a hat or clothing or something.
That's basically what Trump did to Pelosi.
So you can't win harder than that.
Here's another case of elder abuse.
Bette Midler tweets in all caps.
And it's funnier because it's all caps.
So President Trump pinned the Carpe Dunctum famous meme Of showing himself with the years passing by as if he's going to be president for a thousand years, president for life.
And the joke, of course, is that there are literally zero Republicans who would favor him having any kind of a third term.
Zero. Not a single person in the entire right Trump-supporting universe would also support him having a third term.
So that's why it seems like a joke To all the Trump supporters.
But part of the joke is that the other side doesn't know it's a joke.
That's what makes it such a good joke.
And here's what Ben Midler said.
He goes, In all caps, she shouts, you think this is a joke, don't you?
It's not. He means it.
He will change the rules, and his enablers will let him.
If he wins again, he will rule until he dies.
You die, or both.
Then you'll get Ivanka.
Now, the first thing that I would say about this is, well, it didn't sound that bad, actually.
I'm not in favor of Trump having more than a second term, but the way she describes it doesn't even sound that bad, is that we would have more of this president who is, even if you think he's not responsible for it, he is presiding over the greatest period in American history, period.
Not even close. There's nothing.
There is nothing like the last three years.
This is the golden age.
So if you say, we're going to get more of that golden age, and when President Trump goes, well, then the real trouble starts.
You can have Ivanka taking over.
And I'm thinking, were you trying to scare me?
Because Ivanka becoming president, like everything about that I like.
I don't think she's going to run for president, frankly.
But I like the idea.
But anyway. Let me say this as clearly as possible if there's anybody listening who thinks that there's even one, even one Republican who wants the president to have a third term.
If it's not in the Constitution, there is zero Republicans who support it.
That's it. That's the end of the story.
If you don't get that, You don't understand anything.
You really don't.
It's the most basic fact from which almost everything grows out of that.
The entire political thought and disagreements and everything comes out of that one basic fact.
If you're a Republican, you like your Constitution, and you're not going to mess with it.
Now, of course, you can always change the Constitution by having two-thirds of the states vote for it or whatever, but that's not Trump.
Trump can't vote it in, so there's zero risk.
So when I see Bette Midler, apparently legitimately worried about this, and you see the president playing this prank by actually pinning that meme, he's the best practical joker ever.
Of all time. And what's funny is, when I thought about this, I thought, you know, he actually did just become the most effective, you could say best, that's subjective, but I'll say the best practical joker of all time.
And that was just a hobby.
If you take the other things that he's been number one in the world in, he's had a number one best-selling book, He became the President of the United States.
He's had the best, I think it was number one for a while, best television show.
And then he gets into office, and then he does all these things that are the best unemployment.
I think we just reached something like the best economic optimism we've ever had.
It's all these bests.
We've got the best military.
I mean, you just go on and on and on.
How many things...
Has President Trump become the historical best ever at?
Or at least he was number one for a period.
And now he's added practical jokes to his resume.
Kind of funny. All right.
And to that point, there was just a Gallup poll that said, quote, America is happier than at any time in the 40 years that Gallup has done the poll.
What? According to Gallup, who is not known to be any kind of a Trump supporting poll, you know, they're independent, says that in their poll, Americans are happier than at any time in 40 years.
How does that square with everything the illegitimate fake news is trying to tell you every day?
Every day the news is telling you that our society is being ripped apart by Trump.
But every day I walk outside and I don't see it.
I don't see it. Do you?
In your personal life, you know, of course, you don't want to wear your MAGA hat in public because you'll get beat up, but that's kind of a special case, right?
When you go to work, you just go enjoy your life, you probably want to avoid talking politics, but mostly everything's better.
I would say that race relations are better than ever.
I would say that the way society thinks about and treats the LGBTQ community better than ever.
The way people treat the disabled community better than ever.
I don't think there's anything that isn't better.
Literally, just everything's better.
Except, I suppose, the national debt.
But in terms of how people feel, it's pretty darn good.
All right. I asked this question on Twitter.
I put it in the terms of a poll.
You will enjoy the persuasive nature of this.
So it was a poll in which I was curious.
I actually wanted to know what people would answer.
Of course, it's a Twitter poll, so there's no scientific validity to it, but it's provocative and interesting anyway, so I'm going to tell you.
So here's Here was my poll question.
I said, question for Democrats only.
What was your reaction when you learned that the, quote, Trump-called-neo-Nazis-fine-people story was always fake news?
So that's the question.
And the choices were, you know, I blew my mind, was one choice.
Choice two was I immediately changed parties.
And then the third choice was, what?
Meaning I'd never heard that before.
And then the fourth choice was just show me the options.
And about 3.5% each said that it blew their mind or that they switched parties.
Now, I would assume there's an overlap there, but the way the poll was written, you couldn't answer both.
So there could be people that blew their mind, but they didn't change their party, presumably.
But I think you could add them together.
So around 7% of the respondents, and again, this is not scientific, but if you get 7% answering something, it probably means somebody's in that category.
That there are people who saw that that was fake news and it affected them.
And it affected them in a big way.
Somebody's saying 3% trolls.
Yeah, it's possible that they're just Republicans or trolls or something trying to game the thing.
But independent of the results, which I acknowledge are not scientific, and you don't want to draw too much of a conclusion from them, but here's the part I thought you'd enjoy.
The persuasiveness of the way it was presented.
I'm presenting this as something you haven't learned yet, but other people have.
That is a really strong frame.
If I say to you, hey, your fact is wrong, you say, no, it isn't.
No, my fact is not wrong.
And you say, well, here's a link showing you your fact is wrong.
What do people say?
I was doing this much of yesterday.
I would send people a link of Steve Cortez, his great PragerU video in which he talks about all the proof that the fine people hoax was hoax.
And what did people say When, for the first time, they were hearing that that was a hoax, and then I showed them the link to the proof.
They said, and I quote, LOL, PragerU, ha ha ha ha, PragerU, ha ha ha ha, do you have any credible sources?
Now that, of course, is cognitive dissonance.
You would recognize it by now if you've been following my periscopes.
Because the PragerU, what makes it powerful, and first of all, PragerU is a platform.
They're not the ones who told Steve Cortez what to say.
They're the ones who said, we have a platform.
You've been saying something like this.
Would you like to put it on a platform in addition to the other places you've been saying it?
So in this regard, PragerU is like any other social media platform.
It's like the news that brings on a pundit, etc.
It's just a platform. By the way, I will also be on the PragerU platform in a few months.
I'll tell you more about that, but there's a video that they've asked me to do, and I've agreed.
So more on that later.
The point was that when I put it in the form of what was your reaction when you found out it was fake, I take people into the future so that they can imagine that their minds would be blown because all these other people who are on their team are already there.
Very powerful frame.
So remember this technique.
You make them think past the decision of is this true or not true, And you make them think to the, how did you feel about it when you found out it wasn't true?
And by the way, that is exactly the way the illegitimate host on the last debate treated Bernie Sanders.
Do you remember that? They asked Bernie Sanders, did you say to Elizabeth Warren that a woman couldn't become president?
And Bernie says no. Unambiguously, no, I didn't say that.
And then she immediately turns to Elizabeth Warren and says some version of, how did you feel when Bernie said that?
And Bernie just laughs.
And part of the laugh is that it actually is very effective.
If she hadn't asked the question immediately after he just said no, you wouldn't have noticed it so much.
But when he put it in stark contrast there, it just looks ridiculous.
So anyway, remember that trick.
I might use that again.
And I baited a lot of people into telling me that I was crazy and all the things they say and threatening to boycott Dilbert because I had dared to say that maybe the fine people hoax was a hoax.
And then I waited until they were really mad and they were really sure that there was nothing to it.
And then I gave them the link.
Now, they really hate it.
Whichever link I give them, whether it's Steve Cortez's link of the PragerU thing, or my own stuff on that, or Joel Pollack's writing on that, they always go for the source.
It's like, oh no, that came from you, or it came from Breitbart, or it came from PragerU, so therefore don't have to listen.
And then I point out that all of these sources, Show you the original source.
They show you the actual transcript.
And if you don't believe it, you can just Google it.
Just Google it. You can get the transcript yourself.
It's right there. So, I didn't mess up a lot of people's minds when I did that.
Alright, last item.
A very rare and weird thing happened recently.
There was a Vox journalist named Aaron Rupar...
Who several days ago misquoted, mischaracterized something that Greg Gutfeld said on The Five.
And he misquoted it just egregiously to the point of he was putting words in Greg's mouth like he had said something racist, which is nothing like what he said.
It was just a complete mischaracterization and character assassination.
That part We assume it's business as usual.
In fact, it is the primary tool used by the left.
It is the primary tool, wouldn't you say?
At this point, it has happened so many times, you'd have to say it's the primary tool, is mischaracterizing what someone else said, and then acting like they said something different so they could insult them.
But here's the fun part. Aaron Ruppar apologized.
In public. On Twitter.
And he said this. I guess Greg was on Tucker Carlson's show when he said whatever he said.
So he said, So I tweeted, you know, well done.
He says, apologies go.
This is a good forum. I think it was within the 48 hours or close enough.
And he does the good apology forum, which is he said, you know, he said what his mistake was.
That's very important. And then he said what he did about it.
He deleted it. And then he apologized.
That's your perfect apology form.
If you do that, you're always doing it right.
But why is this so rare?
What was it that caused just this one time Democrats to leave their primary strategy that they all pursue, literally all of them, Usually you can't say something is true of all Democrats, but that's true of all Democrats.
All Democrats take stuff out of context and act like it was something else and then criticize.
All of them. It's 100%.
Now, they don't even always know it, because it's the news and the pundits who first take it out of context, and then the rank-and-file Democrats believe it's true, and then they act as though it's true.
So why would this one guy, on this one time, Abandon the primary strategy of everybody on the left.
I assume he was going to get sued.
I don't know the details.
So I don't know what conversations happened.
I don't know what communications happened.
But for somebody to change their mind like that, there probably was a financial...
I would almost be willing to state that there was a financial element to this, and maybe you wanted to keep his job.
However, I'm going to go beyond that and say, we shouldn't care about that.
It doesn't really matter why he did it.
And I'll say this a million times until you start to believe it.
When people do the right thing, Even if their motives are impure, you should still congratulate them.
And you should still celebrate that.
Because people are what they do.
And by making this apology, he became the person who made an apology.
So I would promote treating him by the apology and not by what you imagine are his inner intentions or why he did it.
But I imagine there's more to the story there.
Alright. Why aren't Democrats ashamed of being wrong but are ashamed of being white?
I don't know. That doesn't sound like something that's generally true of Democrats.
Somebody says, does Dilbert support Trump?
Dilbert is apolitical.
I try to keep him that way.
Just looking at your closing comments here.
Will Pelosi publish her prayers?
Oh, that's Dennis Prager's mantra.
Judge people by what they do, not what they say.
I think he and I talked about that.
I believe we were chatting.
I was on his radio program when I was promoting the book in the fall, and I believe that that was something we mentioned as a common philosophy.
Somebody says their wife just observed that Trump has turned Pelosi into the bad Trump, not the productive Trump. .
Yeah, that's true. Pelosi is the bad Trump.
Follow-up podcast with Sam Harris.
I feel like we need to do that before Election Day, don't you?
When people tell me how they found me, when people are trying to They're asking to connect on LinkedIn, or they're following me on Twitter.
The most frequent thing I hear is that they found me on the Sam Harris podcast.
So that interview has reverberations.
It has reverberated across several years now.
So I guess whatever happened there was very powerful, more so than I imagined at the time it happened.
So Sam Harris, I think that both of our audiences would be interested in an update on that.
So one of us needs to be on the other's show before Election Day.
All right. Follow-up podcast with Joe Rogan.
Somebody says, you know, I don't know that I make a good second guest for Joe Rogan.
Meaning, I mean, I love being on there, and I loved our conversation, got a lot of attention, and so everything about that was good.
And, you know, Joe Rogan's just national treasure, I think.
But I'm the kind of guest that maybe people think they already heard from me, so it would feel like they've already done it.
I mean, I can't speak for Joe Rogan, but it would be normal That that didn't make sense to have me on twice.
So I wouldn't be pushing for that.
But the Sam Harris thing, there's a natural reason for an update.
That's a different situation.
All right. Go with the Varian Machine Particle Accelerator Sublimiter Precision for my polyps.
Huh. I'm going to have to ask about that.
So just a little update.
I am going to go into I have a couple of minor surgeries that I'm scheduling.
So I will try to do at least the simultaneous SIP even between surgeries.
And by the way, they're for nothing.
So you don't have to worry about me.
They're just the most minor thing.
One is a cyst on my leg that needs to be removed and the other is I'm going to have some surgery on my Nasal situation up here.
But they both will knock me out for a little bit.
But nothing important. You don't have to worry about it.
