Episode 1057 Scott Adams: Talking With Joel Pollack About His New Book Red November, Then Victim Mentality, Priorities, Persuasion
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Special Guest: Joel Pollak discusses his new book, Red November
Joel's experiences following the Democrat primary candidates
Current definition of white supremacy
Drama within far left organization, Sleeping Giants
Visual persuasion perfection in Tucker's McCloskey interview
Facial recognition errors and the innocent Michigan man
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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In a moment, I'm going to be introducing a special guest whose book read November already in the top ten of a lot of its categories on Amazon, I was noticing, and is only just out today, I believe.
We'll be talking to Joel Pollack in a little bit should my technology work the way I'd like it to.
But before that, Yeah, before that, we have to do some very, very important stuff.
Something that will change your life a little bit.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
Makes everything better. And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes...
Everything better, including pandemics.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Join me. I feel sorry for all the people who did not take a sip just then, because their relative happiness is now not even close to the people who sipped.
Big difference. Big difference.
All right. Let me turn that off.
People who don't know that I'm live at this time of day, what's up with them?
Let's see if Joel has found his way here yet.
Not yet. Joel, when you find me on Periscope, and I know you're looking for me right now, I will find you back.
And I will cancel this.
Hmm. All right.
Any moment now, my special guest will be here and we will talk about that.
While I'm waiting, I'll just keep my eye on that little indicator there.
And did you know that China is experiencing massive flooding right now?
I was looking at the pictures of it, the aerial pictures.
There's a lot of Chinese cities that are just underwater right now.
And it's this massive You know, disaster.
And I'm not entirely sure if the news is covering it much.
Something of that size is amazing that it doesn't get much attention.
All right, Joel, you will be here any moment, probably searching on Periscope app to find me right now.
And I'll connect you as soon as you're there.
All right. It looks like another day of protesters protesting all of the wrong things.
It seems that the issue of police shooting black people has somehow elevated to the number one topic for black people.
But I wonder if you were to do some kind of a survey and say, all right, could you rank all of your biggest problems?
Could you rank your biggest to smallest problems?
I feel as though the protests are about some of their smallest problems.
There we go. I think I see you now, Joel.
You just appeared and here you come.
Joel, can you hear me?
Hey, our technology is working.
Hey, did your book come out today?
Yes, it came out today.
Read November. I am reading it even now as we speak and loving it, actually.
I love your writing.
Thank you. I mention you often on my Periscopes.
And you, just for people who don't know you, are, according to the Book Jacket, senior editor at large and in-house counsel at Breitbart News.
Is that correct? That is correct.
Now, the thing I love about this book is that you, as a conservative writer, if I can call you that, author, We're following around the Democratic primary folks and writing about your personal experience as well as the fabric of it.
I have to give you a compliment now if you don't mind.
You don't mind, do you? No, not at all.
There's something you do in your writing that this is just sort of a nerdy writer thing that you notice that maybe the regular public doesn't notice.
But you do not step on a joke.
And what I mean by that is that throughout the book, I found myself chuckling at things that were funny, but the way you presented them was completely factual, but the way you set it out just made it funny.
So what I like about it is a bad writer would add the joke to the joke.
But the material was the joke, and my favorite one there, that you added no joke to it, because it didn't eat it, it was just a plain description, was about the so-called pussy hats and how they became popular.
But they had to retire it because the transgender community argued something about the necessity of a vagina and it was not inclusive enough and it went away.
It would have been so easy for you to add a little joke to that.
You know, just a little irony.
Ironically, it went away.
And the fact that you just played that straight, as a writer, I just said, alright, that's some good writing there.
It would have been so easy to step on that, and you didn't.
All right, so that said, your writing style is excellent.
It makes the whole thing work.
I like the fact that I will let you talk in a minute, too.
I know my audience gets mad at me when I do this.
Let me just jump right into that.
As you were following the Democratic primary process around, You had a number of notable encounters.
And I'm interested, how often did you get recognized just visually as being sort of a Breitbart kind of guy in this crowd of liberals?
How often did they spy you?
Once in a while, it became more of an issue the further in we went.
And toward February of this year, That's when people stopped talking to me quite as freely.
That's when I got recognized, yeah.
Now, is that because they were on to you?
What changed? I think what happened was kind of a general paranoia.
It really started at Bernie Sanders events, and I have to say this.
As a compliment to the Bernie Sanders campaign, they were the friendliest toward media, including me.
I never had any trouble with the Bernie Sanders campaign.
They were open to everybody.
But I think they felt like their candidate was getting crowded out, their candidate was getting railroaded by the establishment, and so there was this kind of paranoia that began to set in.
Toward everybody. It wasn't just me.
And Bernie Sanders' supporters became less willing to talk to me the closer we got to Super Tuesday.
Yeah, everybody was getting a little tense by then and a little distrustful.
Now, did you find, let's say, a personality difference in general with the different campaigns?
You mentioned the The Bernie personality, if you will, but was there a Klobuchar personality, for example?
Did the others have a character to the crowd?
Well, it's interesting.
The one that stood out for me the most, I mean, you can imagine Bernie Sanders supporters tended to be young students and aging ex-hippies, for example.
The Biden personality tended to be someone wearing a union jacket, that sort of thing.
But there was one personality that changed over the course of the campaign.
When Pete Buttigieg started, it was very gay, his campaign.
I mean, his supporters tended to be very much from the LGBT community.
But once Elizabeth Warren faded, what was interesting was a lot of the soccer moms that supported Elizabeth Warren migrated over to Pete Buttigieg.
And wherever I went in Iowa, Pete Buttigieg was surrounded by middle-aged white ladies.
He had this incredible magnetism.
And so that changed.
That was interesting. Wow.
And you had some tense encounters with some candidates, including Joe Biden.
For people who didn't see that in the news, because you made news with that, can you tell them about that?
Yeah, so at the Iowa State Fair in August last year, I had an opportunity to ask Joe Biden about the fine people hoax, because remember, he launched his campaign claiming that Donald Trump had called neo-Nazis very fine people.
Which viewers of your Periscope will know never happened.
And I said to him, are you aware that you're misquoting Donald Trump?
And he insisted that this happened and he got red in the face and he confronted me and it was this viral video moment.
It went everywhere. And by the time I bought my fried Oreos or whatever I ate as a snack after that press conference, you know, you've got to buy something fried at the Iowa State Fair.
The video had gone everywhere.
But it didn't have any effect on Biden.
He still sticks to that fine people hoax even to this day.
Yeah, there's no effect to information.
It just bounces right off of everybody.
Now, I'm very interested, since you got to see Biden live a number of times, and up close, because you were literally talking to him in that exchange, and now you've watched him through his basement Biden phase.
Is it my imagination, or is it obvious that he has faded even since January of this year?
Is that my imagination?
He has faded and what's interesting is the degree to which people haven't reported it.
But there's one moment that stood out for me.
I was in South Carolina covering Joe Biden and he was in a town called Spartanburg, which is a very nice place.
And he gave his stump speech, and then it was clear he forgot to conclude.
Whatever he was supposed to say at the end, he had left out inadvertently.
But they had already started playing the music to end the presentation, and people were already filing out of the room, leaving.
And he grabbed the microphone back and said, wait a minute, wait a minute.
And then he started shouting over everybody.
People are already leaving, but he's sort of shouting the conclusion that he forgot to add.
And I looked at this and I thought, something's really not right here.
This is just the strangest thing I've ever seen.
But could you put a descriptor on how you think he might have changed?
The sort of non-sentences and the confusing stuff, is there more of it now?
There is more of it now.
I think he's just having trouble remembering words.
There was a point last week he wanted to criticize Donald Trump for America first, and Biden couldn't remember the word first.
He sort of says, well, America, America...
The same thing he did with the Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
You know, the thing, the thing.
So there's that, and...
I think he can manage it for short stretches.
It's not consistent. He can do the debate for about an hour, but then he starts to fade.
And what was interesting to me, and this again is not reported anywhere other than, you know, in my book basically, but Joe Biden never did a single spin room after any of the debates.
There were 11 or so debates, and Joe Biden did not linger after the debates to talk to reporters even once.
And I think that's partly because he was afraid of gaffes and his campaign was steering him away from reporters.
But also because it was just too late at night, it was past his bedtime, and I think it was a real concern for the campaign that people would see he had deteriorated.
Yeah, did you see him walking, and did he have any trouble just walking on his own?
He can walk fine, can he?
Yeah, he can walk fine.
He's physically okay, for the most part.
There was that moment where he had a burst blood vessel during, I think it was the climate change town hall, and his eye sort of seemed to fill with blood.
So he has a few physical things going on, but walking he seems okay.
A few physical things is probably an understatement.
I'd love to see his medicine cabinet.
I have a feeling that's bristling with stuff.
Which of the candidates, let's say, surprised you the most when you got up close?
Was there anybody who jumped out and you said to yourself, you know, this person could have been president, they just didn't make it to the finals?
That would be Amy Klobuchar.
She had the most presidential quality.
She was a very serious candidate and she actually lasted right through to the end even though she had no money and very little support from the media and from the party.
And in a way she suffered from the impeachment because the impeachment kept Yeah.
party interfered in their own primary.
So while Pete Buttigieg could walk around Iowa for weeks on end, Amy Klobuchar had to sit in the Senate listening to these endless presentations.
And it happened right at a point when she was surging in Iowa.
So it really cut her campaign off before it could blossom.
She peaked eventually but she peaked too late.
Well it sounds like systemic white supremacy because they let the white guy who didn't have a job wander around and get elected or at least win the primary while the well-employed A woman had to go to work.
Well, it's terribly unfair.
Did you find that people had, let's say, arguments that they wanted to bring you when they would see you in the crowd, or did they just have hate?
Actually, most of my interactions with people right up until the end were positive.
And it was reassuring to discover that the people in the audience at Democratic campaign events weren't really that different from people in the audience at Republican events.
They just had a different mental map of the world.
But people are basically the same.
The one really hysterical thing that happened in terms of audience interactions was Beto O'Rourke had an event At an historically black college, Benedict College in South Carolina.
And I went there and I tried to find the event.
It was on campus somewhere. The students were incredibly helpful.
People showed me where it was.
And I'm in this room. There are about 200 black students in the room waiting for Beto O'Rourke.
And then one of his campaign staffers came over and basically ejected me from the meeting.
And for no reason, no explanation, but they found out I was from Breitbart and they called the police officer over and he escorted me off the campus.
And, you know, there was no negative interaction with the people in the room whatsoever, but later on, when reporters said to Beto O'Rourke, why'd you kick the Breitbart guy out?
The campaign said, well, because we felt he was threatening to the students.
And I'm just like, you know, sitting there.
And in a way, it was this weird moment because CNN, which hates Breitbart and would like to see us out of business, CNN actually defended me, and they gave a very negative portrayal to Beto O'Rourke's Kicking out of this Breitbart reporter, and in a way it was the beginning of the end of the O'Rourke campaign, because he had campaigned as a great champion of press freedom, and here he was kicking people out of an event at a black college.
Now, was the CN defending you, or were they, let's say, wanting to get Beto out of the race because they had a favorite?
It could have been that also, yeah.
Beto was definitely an early favorite.
They gave a lot of coverage to him on the day he launched.
But then he started jumping on tables and waving his arms around, and I think they decided this wasn't going to work.
Yeah, they figured that out early.
Alright. What is your best explanation of how Biden made it through the pack?
Well, the simplest explanation is just the party establishment decided they did not want Bernie Sanders, a non-Democrat, taking over the party the way Donald Trump, a non-Republican, had taken over the Republican Party.
And Bernie Sanders, going into South Carolina, had won the first three primary contests.
He was the first candidate of either party to win the popular vote in the first three contests of any primary.
He won Nevada on February 22nd with almost 50% of the vote.
So he looked completely dominant.
He was doing incredibly well among Latino voters.
And the Bernie Sanders supporters were already talking about his cabinet picks.
I was in the spin room after the Nevada debate, and Jeff Weaver, his advisor, was saying, well, it's a little too early to be picking the Secretary of Education and all this.
You know, they were almost there.
They could taste it. They could feel it.
And I think the party establishment, which at the time didn't believe they were going to win the election.
Now they think they are going to win.
But I think at the time they didn't think they were going to win, but they thought, you know what, if we're going to go down, we're not going to go down with this guy running the party.
We want to maintain control of the Democratic Party.
So they united against him and decided that even if they were going to lose, they were going to lose with a Democrat, not with a socialist.
Do you think there were any dirty tricks that the Democrats played against other Democrats to get Biden through?
Did the Democratic Party put their finger on the scale?
Oh yeah, there were all kinds of leaks against Sanders.
Once Sanders became a threat, there were all sorts of things that were leaked, including allegations of Russia collusion, that he had been briefed by intelligence agents that there were some efforts by Russians to infiltrate his campaign.
That story came out and it was reported in the mainstream media as if it was happening in real time, but in fact it had happened several weeks before and Sanders had been briefed about it and it wasn't something for public consumption.
But they basically went with the Russia collusion narrative to try to take down Sanders.
But I don't think, you know, as I think about it, I don't think Bernie was taken down by any news.
Like, it doesn't seem like there was a news report that necessarily moved the needle.
Because, you know, facts don't really change things.
So it feels like something else happened.
Like, you know, maybe...
Who was the big recommendation in South Carolina?
It was James Clyburn.
He's the House Majority Whip and the most senior African-American leader in Washington today, and he came out in favor of Biden.
There were also a couple other things that happened that were interesting.
You know, when Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he also had to deal with South Carolina.
And there, the Democratic Party establishment is very strong.
They've got union groups, church groups, and so forth.
And Clinton, Hillary Clinton, had all of those groups wrapped up.
So Barack Obama went to the rural areas, and he spoke to black voters in the countryside.
Bernie Sanders didn't do that.
Bernie Sanders was still sticking to the urban centers and the college campuses, and so it might have been a strategic mistake on his part.
But also, he just had trouble really closing the deal with black voters in South Carolina.
But James Clyburn was huge.
I mean, Joe Biden had never won a primary in three presidential campaigns, had never won any state until James Clyburn came out and said, you've got to vote for this guy.
So it felt like when Clyburn gave his recommendation, he was kind of saying that you're not voting for Biden, you're voting for all of us, sort of the established Democrats.
It sort of felt like that was the change in the frame there.
That was exactly what happened, and he gave a long speech about the civil rights movement and all sorts of things that Joe Biden had very little to do with, and all of that was to be defended by voting for Biden.
And to be honest, when I went to events in South Carolina, it did feel a little bit like a family reunion around Joe Biden.
That he was kind of the legacy of Obama, even though Obama hadn't endorsed him.
It was kind of like bringing the old band back together, the good memories of that Obama campaign.
And so Biden represented that.
And that's one of the reasons he had a connection with his electorate, which was new, because Biden had really no constituency in the black community before Barack Obama plucked him out of the sidelines and put him on the ticket.
But that's what it was in South Carolina.
It was a sense of familiarity and a connection to Obama, too.
Let me ask you about a little bit of a process.
What the heck is it like being an author who has a new book that just came out, which I'll show again to my audience?
Read November, Joel Pollack.
Excellent. I'm reading it right now and enjoying it very much.
And what's it like doing a A book tour when you can't do all the normal things you would do.
Are you trying to do it mostly remotely?
Yeah, you have to do it remotely.
And the only good news is if you want to make the bestseller list, everybody else trying to sell a book is also in the same boat.
So you're all on a level playing field in that sense.
But the other interesting thing about it is people have time to read.
So the market for books is still there because people are at home and they're looking for interesting things.
But just in terms of process, you know, balancing it with an everyday job, I have to say that your approach, systems rather than goals, is really how I got this book done.
You know, you can do anything if you break it down into small enough pieces, and just doing it day by day allowed me to get it done.
You know, I was also impressed at how you found a way for your day job and your book to, you know, be part of the same process so you could double up on your productivity there.
So that worked out really well for you.
What is there about the book that I haven't asked that you would...
This is the ultimate bad interviewer question.
I'll tell you the worst book interviewer question since I've received them all.
You can't see me, but I'm opening your book on video to a random page and then I say, You talked about Zelensky's predecessor on page 143.
Can you tie that to the larger Biden theme vis-a-vis Bernie and socialism and how that relates to Black Lives Matter?
Go. It's like, I don't know, that's nothing about my book.
I like to ask this because often an author will say, all right, I got my three anecdotes and I'm looking for the place to fit them in.
And if I didn't give you a place, you might have an anecdote ready.
I'm just giving you that opportunity.
Well, you have the smartest audience in political media, so I could go on and talk about the likelihood that Democrats would bring about a socialist revolution after November, and I actually believe that.
On your periscope, you break it down beyond left, right, Democrat, Republican.
You really get to the underlying meaning.
So I actually had something I wanted to draw your attention to specifically when I thought about what I would say on your periscope.
And I talk about this a little bit in the book, but one of the reasons the Democratic Party moved so far to the left was because of the media, and specifically CNN. And Republicans like to criticize CNN because They hate Trump even though they're supposed to be neutral, so it's kind of a running gag, it's fraudulent, whatever.
But they did something, I think, that had a uniquely destructive effect on the Democratic Party without meaning to.
And that was they held a series of issue-based town halls.
Every network holds town halls with candidates.
That's fine. You can ask the candidates questions and so forth.
But CNN decided they were going to devote air time to specific issues.
Like they had a climate change town hall.
They devoted seven hours of programming to climate change.
They also had an LGBTQ town hall.
And the problem with doing these issue-based town halls is that the people in the audience, in the room, are the activists on that particular issue.
And so the candidates compete with one another to please that audience.
And so they become more and more extreme in the things they say.
So the stuff that was coming out of the Democratic candidates, even the smarter ones like Andrew Yang, on the climate change town hall, for example, was just crazy.
I mean, you had Kamala Harris talking about plastic straws and Andrew Yang talking about forcing everyone to buy electric cars.
It was nuts. And it was just basically creating campaign material for Donald Trump because he could just show how crazy these candidates were.
And the moment of all...
Go ahead. Well, how much of that is just because there were so many of them and they needed something to break through.
So they had to violate expectations or else they would disappear.
I think that's part of it. I also think it's part of the way the Democratic Party is constructed.
It has a lot of different interest groups, and if you don't pay them enough attention, they claim that you're silencing them.
So, you know, there was this moment in the LGBTQ town hall where, you know, CNN had done a special event around these issues, and there was a black trans woman who got up, in other words, someone who's biologically male but identifies as female, who got up in the middle of someone else's presentation Ran to the front, seized the microphone, and started screaming about how CNN was ignoring black trans women.
Well, it was hilarious, and Republicans had a good laugh because it was sort of a strange window onto the Democratic Party, but that's what happens.
If you don't give every little interest group its platform, then people will complain about it.
Well, I'd like to amplify that criticism, which is CNN does not give enough time to black trans people.
So I think they need to answer for that a little bit.
All right.
Joel, thank you so much.
Again, it's Red November, available now.
It's climbing up the charts.
And you're going to want to read this because it's a really good read.
I love your writing style.
And thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for the opportunity and back to my simultaneous coffee.
All right. Take care.
All right. That was fun.
Get that book. You're going to like it.
A few other things.
I asked this question on Twitter, and this is a serious question for mental health professionals.
It goes like this.
How can you distinguish between justified anger about a legitimate social issue versus some kind of victimhood mental disorder?
In other words, when does complaining Turn into a mental disorder in the situation in which the thing you're complaining about is real.
And especially if there are people who are experiencing those same real problems, but for whatever reason, they're not bothered by them.
So if some people are not bothered by them, but others have built a life around it and it defines them and it bothers them, etc., at what point does it literally become a mental problem?
Because almost anything that's normal behavior, if it gets extended, that becomes a mental problem, right?
So everybody has anger about normal things you should be angry about, but if you have excessive anger, that would be some kind of an emotional, mental, or health care situation.
Where is the line on victimhood?
Now, I saw some studies, and I tweeted it, in which People who, there is actually, so this is a valid discussion in the healthcare world, at which point victimhood, which is natural and universal,
you know, everybody complains about bad stuff that happens to them, everybody's a victim about something, but there's a normal and sensible way to handle that, and then there's, you know, the mental health problem if you go too far, and I think I think we're treating all of the protesters like they're healthy, and I don't know that that's the case.
Because I don't know that they're all demonstrating good mental health, but yet we treat them all like they're mentally in a good place, they just have a different political opinion.
I'm not sure that's exactly what's going on.
There are a lot of people protesting, and they have a million different reasons, slightly different reasons, but I think some of it is mental health.
Not that these people are organically damaged, but in the way that, well, this would be a bad example.
I was going to make a PTSD example.
But that doesn't quite fit because that actually is some real damage there, brain-wise.
But I think we should not ignore that the people who are most excited about this stuff might just have mental health issues in a real way, not in a political way, not in a joking way.
In an actual, real healthcare sense, there's something going on that's not healthy.
And I would make this distinction.
It seems to me that people who have an abundance mindset can handle victimhood better.
Meaning they're just as much victims if there's a real social issue.
They're just as much victims.
But it doesn't bother them.
Because they think, well, it doesn't matter how much you have because there's still plenty.
You know, the amount you have...
In no way changes the amount I can get if I follow the same process of studying and working hard and staying out of jail.
Why aren't we talking about an abundance mindset to fix whatever is bothering the people who are protesting fairly directly instead of just listening, which doesn't help, how about fixing it?
There are two ways to fix it.
One way is to fix the base problem.
And to the extent that it's fixable, why not?
Why wouldn't you try to fix it?
Of course you would. But also recognize that the way people are reacting to the base problem, which is real, may not be good mental health.
So there's that.
There's also the problem I talk about a lot of confusing the problem with the solution.
And I think that's behind the mental health part.
Because it's one thing to say, yes, I'm a victim, but my solution to that is not focusing on the problem.
Let's say the problem was racism.
My solution is not where the problem is.
The problem is racism, let's say, but I can't solve that.
But what I can do is change my own mindset and just succeed.
Now, does succeeding fix racism?
Sort of. It sort of does.
Because if you're personally successful, you're far more immune, both psychologically.
If somebody criticizes you and says, hey, you know, there's something wrong with you because of your ethnicity, all you have to do is say, hey, look at my bank account.
How about that?
So success gives you armor against all kinds of attacks, and I can vouch for that.
I always go back to the O.J. quote.
O.J. Simpson was famous for saying, allegedly, that he said, I'm not black, I'm O.J., which is the extreme version of that.
He had made such a successful, until he killed somebody, allegedly, he had made such a successful career that you just thought of him as O.J. He had transcended You know, identity.
But that's the extreme example.
All right.
Today in Dilbert, I'm still trying to get canceled today.
I think I'm getting closer. So I've got a theme this week of the boss character in Dilbert is being accused of being a white supremacist.
And if that doesn't get me cancelled, I don't know what will.
But we're running that right now.
And at the same time, I want to tell you that I've had a bit of an evolution about this white supremacy charge, complaint, observation, whatever you want to call it.
You may have noticed that the term white supremacy has very much changed in about a month.
Let me ask you if you've noticed this.
Is it not true that a month ago, if somebody said somebody's a white supremacist, that the understood meaning from both the person saying it and the person hearing it, they had the same understanding that it meant white people who thought they were superior to other people?
Am I right? A month ago, that's what you thought it meant.
And the people who were saying it apparently thought it meant that too, most of them.
Everybody's different. There are lots of different people with different messages.
Sort of a general theme is that a month ago it was about a person thinking they were superior to other ethnicities.
I spent about a month saying that that doesn't exist.
Saying it would be easy to prove it exists that there's such a person who thinks that white people are superior to other groups in all things that you can be superior in.
And I said, I've never met one and I doubt one exists.
And if you noticed in the last month, nobody produced one.
Nobody said, aha Scott, I only need one example to prove you wrong.
You know, if you say Bigfoot doesn't exist, you only need one Bigfoot to prove you wrong about the Bigfoots.
And likewise, you only needed one example of somebody who would say it out loud and say, yeah, that's exactly what I believe.
Didn't happen. And in that month, correct me if I'm wrong about this, but my understanding is that what white supremacy means now is different.
And it seems to be evolved, and it's evolved to a place where I actually agree with it.
Surprise, right? So the current definition of what white supremacy means in the context of Black Lives Matter and the protests The current, I mean really current, I mean like today versus one month ago, that current is that it really refers to the fact that the system doesn't have all the mobility that you need.
So there's the people at the top who are mostly white.
It's hard to dislodge them and it's hard to get up to their level because you have a system that's a little bit ossified.
It's a little bit It's hard for anybody to work up from having no money to having a lot of money.
It can be done.
It's just not that common.
When it happens, it's a news story.
One of the reasons that I was a news story for decades is that I managed to solve that problem of going from poor to not poor.
I did it with Dilbert, so it became a news story.
And a big part of the story was the success part, not just the comic part.
So I would agree that if you want to use the term white supremacy, it's provocative, and I don't think I would use it, but I understand why it's being used.
It's about a system that just doesn't help people up anymore.
Let me give you an example of that.
When I was...
21 and entering the workforce after college.
You could rent a place for just about nothing and live in the city, San Francisco.
So you could just get a roommate and you could afford your rent and you could eat on a very low-paying job, which I had.
My job paid $735 a month and I could have a one-room apartment and rent it in the city and Take public transportation and I could live.
And then I could build my way up.
But I also could afford college.
So I could afford a college and I could afford housing and living while I worked on my career and stuff and learned things and eventually put together enough skills in my skill stack and tried enough things that it finally worked out for me.
That situation doesn't exist anymore.
If you are, I'll just pick for my example, if you're a young person of color, can you definitely go to college?
You could probably get scholarships and stuff, but it's tough.
Could you rent an apartment in a place that was a good job market?
That's tough! So I would agree that there is some solidifying of the rich, mostly white, not entirely, but mostly white, and more men than women.
It is a little frozen.
And if you said to me, is this a system which is stable and should last forever?
I'd say, I don't think so.
I don't think that our current system should be protected.
Surprised? Because the people on the left are saying we want to dismantle everything.
And I actually believe that that is necessary.
But how do you dismantle everything?
How do you do that?
How do you do it without breaking everything?
Well, I was going to prepare a special periscope on that very idea.
Now, I think it would be a gigantic mistake to just break everything without something new and better to replace it.
That would be the worst idea.
But I do agree that you need some way that, to pick an example, a young black man who was born in an urban environment can look at his prospects and say, yeah, I can do that.
I can get an apartment on my own.
I can get the skills and training I need.
That just doesn't exist the way it used to.
So yeah, that's worth fixing.
And I have to say that I have also evolved in my thinking to the point where if you see all the ways the system is stacked against everybody who doesn't have money, you could easily say that that has a racial component.
That is highly correlated to that.
But here's the only thing I want to add to the understanding.
For every person of color who says to themselves, those rich white people in power, you know, they just want to keep their power and they're white supremacists and stuff like that.
Here's the thing you need to know.
Those white men who are in power, they will throw me under the bus much faster than you.
So let me just say that to a successful white man who's rich, he's a CEO, he's a leader, whatever, the least valuable human in the world is me, another white man who is not successful, let's say if I had not been.
Indeed, I've told you this story, when I was a young man and my all-white, mostly male senior executive said, we just got in trouble for having no diversity, and the way we're going to fix it is by punishing unsuccessful or not yet successful white men.
Successful white men threw me under the bus three times in my life.
Three times in my life, successful white men have shoved a stick so far up my ass that I could taste it.
You didn't need that, but I thought I'd throw it in there.
So if you think I love successful white men, you would be very wrong because they're all assholes, if I may be honest about it.
Successful white men, pretty much all assholes.
Now, what would happen if you replaced the successful white men who can be assholes with, let's say, all black men or black women?
It would take about a month before they were all assholes because successful people don't want to give up their stuff.
They don't want to give it up to poor white people.
They don't want to give it up to people of color.
They don't want to give it up to anybody.
The magic trick that Black Lives Matter has played is to imagine that top 1% of successful white people who also do not want to help unsuccessful white people, that the white people are all some kind of team.
We're not.
We're not.
White people are not a team.
The successful people will throw the unsuccessful people under the bus in a heartbeat to protect their position.
What's the best thing you can do if you were Mark Benioff?
Mark Benioff is a successful white guy, billionaire who runs Salesforce.
What would be the most self-interested thing he could do?
The most self-interested thing he could do as a successful white billionaire is to throw unsuccessful white people, mostly men, under the bus.
It's the smartest thing to do.
Wouldn't you do it?
Of course you would. Of course you would.
Because the alternative is you're a white supremacist.
Why would you choose, oh, I'll be a white supremacist, when you could be a hero?
Now, that said, Mark Benioff is actually an awesome person Who is very good for the world, so I have only good things to say about him.
He's genuinely a good person who is just a good force in the world.
But the fact is, you know, white people are not some big unified group in that sense.
All right. I want to thank all the bitter and broken people who had bad comments about my recent wedding.
You know what all the comments were, of course.
It's all age-related jokes.
And, you know, money and beauty and blah, blah, blah.
And it was kind of entertaining, though.
So Christine and I have some fun looking at the haters.
Because, first of all, they're all sexist, which is funny.
So most of the people who complained, well, a lot of them tended to be on the left.
And, you know, there were just people who were my critics in general, so it was just one more reason to pile on.
But one of the most common things they said was that Christina was marrying me for money.
Now, what is the assumption that's built into that?
There's an assumption built into that statement, isn't there?
The assumption is that she didn't already have money.
Where did that come from?
Why would they make the assumption that the attractive woman would not have her own money?
Right? And, you know, it's not for me to delve into my personal situation more than I should, but why would you make that assumption?
You would only make that assumption if you were a sexist.
So the people who are saying, oh yeah, of course she's marrying you for your money, are making a big assumption, which is not in evidence in the facts.
I was watching a Jordan Peterson interview with Who was it?
Ben Shapiro.
Jordan Peterson was making this comment about evolution.
I never heard it framed this way.
It was kind of eye-opening.
He said that men decide which men get to procreate.
And I thought, what?
That doesn't make sense.
And he explained it this way.
That men naturally organize into competitive pyramids where you're competing for a job or you're competing at a sport or whatever you're competing at and it always creates a hierarchy.
So if you create a sport and it becomes basketball then at the top of the hierarchy is Michael Jordan.
So it's a male thing This is Jordan Peterson's explanation.
It's a male thing to compete and that competing has the functional purpose of identifying the people who are good to reproduce with.
Meaning that if you're competing on brains and academic situation, the smartest person will rise up and they'll get Nobel prizes and book deals and stuff.
And then women will identify They'll be able to see which men have been promoted by other men to be the most, let's say, the most valuable mating partners.
So I've never heard that before, have you?
That it's men who decide which men get all the mating opportunities by their competition, and that women are simply responding to what men have presented.
It's like, oh, you men work that out.
And when you're done competing, you'll tell us which ones won, and then we'll choose them for our mating.
And I thought, that's just a completely different frame on things, and I thought, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Makes sense.
All right.
Let's see.
Did you see the story about sleeping giants?
Sleeping Giants is a small organization, far left, and it had two principal people.
What they did was they would try to get advertisers not to advertise on conservative networks, such as Breitbart.
They went after the Breitbart advertisers successfully, I guess.
They went after other advertisers who were associated with conservative content.
They were very successful in being bad human beings.
When I say they're bad human beings, I don't always say that about many people.
That's a pretty extreme statement to say that you're a bad human.
When I say you're a bad human, I mean that you're working hard to make the world a worse place.
That's different than somebody who's in a bad situation and they had to steal to feed the family or something.
So I'm not talking about, you know, crime tends to be situational.
But if you're really dedicating all of your time to making the world a worse place, you're not a good person.
And these two people dedicated all of their time to making free speech less available.
Because even though the government allows you to have free speech, if the market shuts you down, says, yeah, we're not going to advertise on that platform, therefore the platform goes away, it's really working full-time to have less freedom of speech.
Now, I certainly would have agreed with them, or at least supported the idea, that if they were trying to shut down specific messages, like, oh, I disagree with that specific message, That's fair.
But shutting down all speech from somebody who has a certain political view is pretty much Nazi, fascist, bad human being behavior.
But here's the punchline. The two people were a white guy and a woman of color, Nandini Jami.
Apparently, the white guy totally screwed the woman of color, according to the woman of color, and minimized her contribution and acted like she wasn't part of it until she just got disgusted and pushed down to her left or something.
The fact that this super woke organization that exists just to make the world worse had a falling out because even within the two people, there were only two people, and even they couldn't get along racially.
They had a racial problem with just two people who were trying to be the wokest, leftist people in the world.
Neener, neener. All right.
If you want to see a good example of persuasion, man, this is good.
Listen, and I tweeted this so you can find it in my Twitter feed.
Listen to Tucker Carlson interviewing Mark McCloskey, the lawyer who was one of the two people, the couple who defended their home with the guns.
The police came and took their guns away.
Now, it's the second time he's been on Tucker, so if you do a Google search, make sure you get the one that just happened.
Listen to McCloskey, who is, of course, a very successful attorney.
Man, can you see why he's successful?
That was some of the best persuasion technique I have ever seen.
He was really good.
Let me give you just one example.
I always talk to you about visual persuasion, how important the visual part is, but you can do visual persuasion by showing an actual picture, which is visual, or you can describe a story that people imagine it visually and you get the same impact because your imagination gives you the picture.
When he was describing his situation with the police coming, I'll try to paraphrase it, but he described it this way.
He said that the police, this is his first statement, was pro-police.
So first of all, can you beat that?
Can you beat the first thing that comes out of your mouth being pro-police?
No. That is just smart.
It's smart for this case.
It's smart for any future case.
It's just smart.
So he says, the police were very professional.
Then here's the part he says, my wife asked, he said they were almost apologetic.
And you can imagine it, right?
Now he says, the police came to confiscate his guns, but they were almost apologetic.
Can't you see the movie in your head?
You see it, right?
You see the police showing up, you see McCloskey and his wife, and you see their demeanor, Being almost apologetic.
It's like a movie, and you can see it.
And then he furthers the movie, and he said, my wife asked if she could take a picture, but she asked if they would turn around so that their faces were not shown because we wanted to protect them from any ridicule or anything if their faces showed up.
And they agreed.
You see the picture, right?
In your mind, you see the police saying, oh, yeah, we'll do that.
Oh, I get it. Thank you for protecting us.
Turned around, took the picture.
You see the movie in your head, and you're seeing the police loving this couple, agreeing with them, feeling guilty that they have to take their guns, but they're very polite and professional, and the couple appreciated them so much that they had a good interaction.
It was a positive experience.
Oh man, that's just so good.
That's just so good.
And that's not the only thing he did.
He used contrast, he used pacing, his demeanor when he talked about it.
By the way, this is a topic which I've never mentioned, and I keep thinking of it, so I'll put it in this one.
If you sound defensive, you sound less persuasive.
If you sound defensive, You sound less persuasive.
Listen to McCloskey talk, and you don't see anything defensive sounding.
It is a defense.
I mean, he's defending himself, but it doesn't sound defensive.
He is simply talking.
Now, if you can pull that off, if you can pull off the I'm simply describing things, Confidently and with a smile that says, I'm in control, and you just hear it straight, it convinces you that the speaker knows what they're talking about and is credible, and then that's more persuasive.
Let me do, if I can, my impression of every unpersuasive pundit on TV. Let's see if I can do this impression.
And I have to have a topic to talk about.
So I'll talk about President Trump had a tweet that was offensive.
I know it's hard to imagine, but imagine that for a second.
Here would be a conservative who's defending it, who is too defensive.
Well, you know, if he does these tweets, blah, blah, blah, you know, and people are getting so excited about, what are you getting so excited about?
It's just a tweet. You see what I'm saying?
That sounded like you're trying too hard.
You're trying to persuade people with your attitude, not with your words.
The lawyer is just giving you words, but man, they're just packed with visual content and contrast and technique.
I mean, he's really, really good.
So you've got to see that.
All right. There was an interesting story of an African-American man in Michigan who was wrongly arrested based on some bad facial recognition.
So that's kind of scary, isn't it?
Now, one of the knocks on facial recognition Is that it has a harder time with black faces.
I guess it doesn't pick up the contrast as well or something.
I don't know. But here's the things that are interesting about this story.
So the way it worked was some facial recognition was used on, I think, some video from a security camera of somebody committing a crime.
They got a match for this man who ended up being wrongly accused.
They went to his house, they arrested him, they arrested him in front of his family, took him into the police house, and then they showed him the security video of the guy that they thought was him doing this crime.
And here's how the innocent black man responded to that.
He took their picture, he held it up next to his face, and now I'm paraphrasing because I wasn't there, but I imagine it went like this.
Do you think this fucking looks like me?
Are you serious? Do you think all black people look alike?
Look at the picture, look at me.
Look at the picture, look at me.
It's not fucking me!
And then they looked at the picture, and they looked at him, and they said, yeah, that's not you, and they let him go.
Now, when I read the story, it was a story about the dangers of facial recognition.
But is that what happened?
Is that what that story told you?
That the facial recognition was bad?
Because here's what I heard in that story.
If those police officers had brought with them to the man's home the picture that they showed him at the precinct, Instead of arresting him to go show him a fucking picture.
Are you kidding me?
They arrested him to show him a fucking picture.
And they couldn't do that when they were at his house.
Nobody had a phone.
Nobody had a photocopier.
They couldn't bring the fucking picture with them to say, I'm looking at you now live.
I'm looking at the picture.
Okay, that's not you.
That's all it would have been.
But here's the second part of it.
So the first part is, when you see a story about facial recognition and picking up the wrong people, ask yourself if it was a human problem or a technology problem.
This was clearly a technology trigger because it had a wrong match, but the problem was a human problem.
Because if the humans could tell the difference When he was in the precinct, they could surely tell the difference when they were standing at his doorstep, and it could have gone a little bit differently, don't you think?
Now, here's the punchline.
Not all facial recognition software is the same.
So, do you think that every facial recognition would have gotten a wrong hit?
It would not. And in fact, I'll bet all of the competitors to that facial recognition software immediately ran his picture through their system and found out whether their system worked or not.
So do not assume that a bad facial recognition software is the same problem to society as one that works.
And there are ones that can identify black people and there are some that have more trouble.
But we need more of a human process.
You don't want to ever have...
Well, let me suggest this.
I've been talking about creating a digital bill of rights, which I'm working on.
One of the digital bill of rights that we need is something about facial recognition, right?
Because it's a big, scary thing, and if you don't get it right, it could be problems.
Here's what I would recommend as...
Potentially a bill of digital rights involving facial recognition.
That nobody can be arrested based on a machine decision.
You get that? Nobody can be arrested based on a machine decision.
Because that's what happened with the black person who was innocent and got arrested.
The machine told the police to go arrest this guy.
It shouldn't have, but it did.
And then they did. Then they found out he was innocent.
That should never happen.
The machine should, at the very most, the machine should tell you who to talk to.
But once you talk to them, you got to bring the photo along and you got to make a human decision.
Alright, you don't look like the photo.
So there should never be an automatic arrest until a human being has evaluated the evidence.
Does that make sense? You can never let a machine Cause an arrest.
It's got to be a human decision every time.
Otherwise, we'll never be comfortable with the technology.
All right. And the last thing you'd want would be, like a machine, would be to generate a bunch of arrest warrants or something and just sort of automatically generate them and the cops just act on it.
You don't want that. All right.
Remember that story about the Russians putting a bounty on American soldiers?
And that was a big story for a few days?
It turns out that the punchline to that is that the intelligence people were not sure that it was true.
So that whole thing was this big national story and the president has to be impeached for the second time and all that.
None of it was really true.
I mean, it was true that it was a rumor, but it's not true that our intelligence people decided it was true.
It was just one of many things that they heard, looked into it, couldn't see that anything was credible there, let it go.
All right. It's amazing.
When you watch that happen, it's hard to think you live in a country with good information.
All right. That is all for now.
I'm working on a micro-lesson on what to do if your spouse has TDS. You'll see that soon.
I also have an idea for fixing socialism and capitalism and making them coexist.
Do you believe it? Yeah.
It's a brand new concept.
In which socialism and capitalism could live side by side in the same country and you'd all be happy.
We'll see if I can pull that off and I'm preparing that even as we speak.
