Episode 1157 Scott Adams: Q*NON, NXIVM, and BLM Cults, Fake Polls, Ridiculous Claims and Trump Optimism
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Yesterdays Anti-Trump rant
Trump hyperbole versus Biden flat-out lying
"Smear campaign"...but no denial it's true?
Is it "Russian disinformation"?
Ice Cube's 13 point plan...Google buried it?
Cult technique insights, NXIVM and Keith Raniere
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Apparently yesterday I didn't tell you what you wanted to hear.
And that was bad, apparently.
But I'm glad you're here now.
Today will be much better than yesterday.
Oh, much better. In so many ways.
Let me count the ways.
One, two. Well, there's so many ways.
I can't count them all.
But how in the world, how in the world can we enjoy this day more than we're going to enjoy it anyway?
Well, I can think of one way, and it's called the simultaneous sip, and all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or 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 dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it's going to happen right now.
Go. Ah, I love a sip from the top third of the cup.
You know, when it sort of hasn't been there very long, it's got that fresh, perfect warmth.
Oh yeah. That's how good a day today will be.
Well, here's a management tip for you.
I know that's why you come here, for the management tips.
It goes like this.
You don't decide what product you're selling.
The audience tells you, or your customer, tells you what business you're in.
That was true when I started Dilbert.
When I started Dilbert, it was a generic comic strip, and only now and then he would be in the office in the early years.
But people would email me and write to me, and they'd say, you know, we kind of like your comic when Dilbert is at home, but we really like it when he's in the office.
And so many people wrote to me and said the same thing, put him in the office, put him in the office, that I changed the comic into a workplace strip.
So that's a perfect example where I didn't decide what my product was.
The customer, in this case the audience, told me what I do.
They said, you're a workplace comic guy.
Make us a workplace comic.
So I did. Likewise, when I started this periscoping stuff, I didn't really have a specific thing in mind.
I didn't know if I was going to be talking about persuasion more than politics or anything in particular.
But the audience said, yeah, give us some more of that non-traditional look at politics.
And so I did. And that's why we're here.
And this brings me to yesterday.
Yesterday, I wasn't in a good mood.
Did anybody notice?
Anybody notice I wasn't in a good mood?
And part of what ticked me off was the news yesterday that's already been reversed.
But the news was that the Trump administration had declined a California request for emergency funding to take care of some of the forest fire damage.
And my comment at the time was that it looked political and Because I didn't see a reason beyond politics, and it looked like it was revenge maybe for California not being supportive of the president.
And I said at the time, if we don't hear a reason for why it was turned down, you have to assume the worst.
And so I did. That was my starting assumption.
I said, if you don't give us good communication, we are allowed, and in fact, I would say encouraged, to assume the worst, that it was just political, at which point it's personal, because I live in California, and at which point I could not support a president, any president who was behind a purely political decision to punish my state.
I certainly couldn't support that president.
But what did we learn?
Soon after I had my periscope, in my grumpy mood, we learned that the story wasn't quite what we thought it was.
The reason given, I guess it was FEMA that actually turned down the request initially, and FEMA's reasoning was that because the fires are still ongoing, they don't know exactly what the right amount is, and you should wait till the end.
Now that's not really a good decision, is it?
Because do you think California doesn't need any money until the fires are out?
That's not how it works.
You sort of need the money as soon as you can get it.
You don't wait for the fire to be out.
If it's a gigantic multi-month problem, you're not going to wait till the end before you start fixing the things that burned two months ago.
And so none of it made sense to me, but it was a typical bureaucratic decision.
Apparently what happened is Gavin Newsom, governor of California, called President Trump and said, what's up with this?
And the president said, what do you mean?
I'm just guessing what that conversation sounded like.
And I think that the president said some version of, are you effing kidding me?
Are you telling me FEMA turned down your money request?
Let me look at my watch.
Yeah, it's almost the election.
So let me fix that.
Because one thing you don't do if you're running for re-election, and it's just a few weeks before election time, one thing you don't do is Is something grossly political, you know, and stomping on the state?
You don't do that.
And so when I first heard the story that the money was denied, it didn't really make sense, because it's not like it's Trump's personal money.
It was obviously better for Trump to give them the money, and any other state, any other state that has a legitimate claim.
The best thing to do, three weeks before election, Give them the money.
That's always going to be the smart play.
And sure enough, that's what Trump did.
And so I drop any prior grumpiness I had about that.
Now, that does leave the question of...
I made the statement that if Trump loses the election...
And we can tell that the reason is because of healthcare and coronavirus.
I would say that I would not be diswrought by that.
It's not my first choice.
Because remember, we don't live in a vacuum.
It's not just Trump or no Trump.
It's Trump or Biden.
Right? There's a choice.
And that choice is not so hot.
So I could certainly prefer Trump.
But at the same time, He knows what his weakness is.
He knows his health care.
He knows he's losing women, maybe because of health care.
And he knows the coronavirus thing is not ideal.
So there's nothing about any of this.
I mean, he knows that if he was more pro-mask, that he'd get better treatment by the press, etc.
So he's making choices.
And here's the thing I would caution you.
Don't assume that if you disagree with what Trump does as a political choice, how he presents himself, what policies he promotes, etc.
Don't assume that you and your wisdom, if you would not have done what he did, don't assume you're the one that was right.
That's the tricky part with him.
Because he became president doing everything that the experts said you shouldn't do in at least half the country, maybe three-quarters of the country.
Because I would think all the Democrats thought he shouldn't act the way he's acting in order to get elected.
And I'll bet you...
At least half of Republicans probably said some version of, eh, he shouldn't be doing all of those things.
We like, you know, the judges and the immigration stuff, but we think he should not be doing this bunch of stuff.
Who was right?
Well, who became president of the frickin' United States?
It was the guy doing all that stuff that all the smart people said you shouldn't do.
Right? Let me give you a perfect example.
So yesterday, Trump did a public appearance speech at a senior citizen facility in Florida.
Now, I saw the crowd picture, and it looked like they put some attention into distancing, but not really.
And I didn't see a ton of mass compliance.
And senior citizens are the most vulnerable group.
Now, if you had asked me, and you said, Scott, I need your political advice.
Should the president, who's been, you know, viciously criticized for putting people at risk with public events, should he have a public event with senior citizens in which they're a little bit too close, or at least it looks like that on the camera, and they may not be wearing masks?
Is that a good idea?
And I would say, huh, easy one.
Easy one. It's a good thing you came to me with all of my wisdom.
Because let me just break this down for you logically.
This is exactly what he's criticized for.
It's his biggest problem.
And so you probably should not recreate your biggest problem in a gigantic visual feast for your enemies.
Right? Wouldn't...
If somebody came to you, if the president or his campaign came to you and asked you the same question, do you think you should do a rally with just senior citizens when they're the most vulnerable and it's exactly your biggest problem?
What would you have said?
I don't think you would have said yes, would you?
Not all of you. I know some of you would.
Would you have been right?
See, this is the tricky part.
It seems so smart to say, well, no, why would you do a big visual presentation of your biggest problem?
That's exactly what you should be running away from.
But again, Trump became president by doing everything you thought was wrong.
It's not an accident.
That's what I write about in Winn-Bigley.
A lot of the things that you think are accidents are technique, and he knows it.
He knows how to control attention.
He knows how to match the public.
He knows how to be like the public.
He knows how to make the public like him.
At least enough of the public to get elected president.
Probably enough to get re-elected.
So here's the thing.
Forget about the logic of it.
If you thought about the logic of having a seniors event during a coronavirus pandemic, there's no logic that makes sense, right?
You can't logic that one out.
You just have to say, how does it feel?
That's it. You can't go beyond that to decide if Trump made a good decision politically or a bad decision.
You can't go beyond, how did it feel?
How did it feel?
It felt like he was giving attention to seniors, Right?
You could feel that.
He went there. Okay?
So that felt right.
It looked like they all had free will.
They all had choices.
They were all, I assume, they were all well informed about what a coronavirus is.
So it was a bunch of senior citizens in one of our freest states exercising their freedom and their free will, taking a risk management decision, Fully transparent, doing a little bit to protect themselves.
Maybe you would say not enough, but they were happy with it.
Probably the people who were the least healthy, I'm guessing they stayed home.
Probably not all of them.
But, you know, people had a choice.
So he got energy, he got attention, he brought some love to senior citizens, a group that he needs to boost, and he was consistent with his story.
Which is that this is America, and we take chances.
Right? How does that feel?
If you say, he's putting people at unnecessary medical risk, you're like, whoa, that's a mistake.
But if you say, it's America.
In America, everything we do has a risk.
You get in your car, it's a risk.
You play a sport, you get in a relationship, Anything.
It's all risk.
We only live in a world where things are risky.
The food you eat, basically everything, has a risk.
This is more of that.
And the president is trying to train the country into accepting that risk.
Now, if you throw a number on it and say it's 200x thousand died, it could be another 200,000, you might say to yourself, whoa, whoa, the numbers are so big.
You know, this is different.
The numbers are big. But we all know the numbers.
That's the thing. We know the numbers.
And if we choose to take that risk, knowing the numbers, but also knowing that opening the economy has a benefit that has to be counted as well, is that wrong?
Is the president wrong for giving America the choice of freedom?
How does it feel? How does it feel being told you have to wear a mask versus being told, you know, if you elect me, you're going to have freedom?
Not even close.
It's not even close.
The way it feels is like freedom.
Right? The way it looks is bad risk management, putting people at risk.
That's the way it looks.
That's the way you'd write the article.
That's the way the details look.
That's the way the spreadsheet looks.
But when you see all those senior citizens who are sad, do you mind if I swear?
Give you a little warning, okay?
There will be an unpleasant word coming up next.
So turn down your sound, send the kids off to Zoom school, and it goes like this.
What I saw was the president promoting freedom, standing in front of a bunch of senior citizens who earned freedom.
They earned it.
They got to this point in their life.
Productive citizens, they earned it.
And every one of those citizens who went there knew the risk.
They knew what the benefit was.
They get to see the president.
They knew what the risk was.
And every one of them said, fuck it.
They went to see the president.
They just said, fuck it.
Who do you like?
How do you feel about a whole bunch of senior citizens who said...
I hear what you're saying. Fuck it.
I'm going to go see the president.
Makes you feel good.
Makes you feel good.
Now, if you tell me that Trump got the politics wrong, I would caution you that you've thought that before.
And he is so tuned in to You know, the average American, if I can say that.
And so, not on the frequency of the pundits.
It's a very appealing package.
Because you really don't want the slick packaged, pundit-appropriate, you know, Pete Buttigieg kind of guy.
By the way, Pete Buttigieg is a solid guy.
I kind of like him. You know, if he had become president, I don't know, I could live with that.
You know, he might not have the policies I prefer, but seems like a solid, rational guy with good judgment, etc.
But he's kind of like a pundit's candidate.
He's a little artificial, doesn't quite connect with me.
I like him intellectually, you know, I like him being pro-science and all that.
But Trump just connects at a whole different level.
And you saw that. All right.
So how was that?
Do you like the optimism better?
At the moment, we have less visibility about who's going to win this than maybe any race ever.
Or it just feels like that.
It probably just feels like that.
We've had lack of transparency before.
But even last year, when Trump was behind, There wasn't really more than two weeks of the entire campaign, right around the pussy-grabbing part of that, that I thought, maybe you won't win.
The whole other time, I was just sure you'd win, to the point where I bet my entire career on it, and that worked out.
This time, there's something really weird going on with the polls.
The polls are so wildly not believable, That it's either the...
I'll tell you what it is.
What it feels like.
It's one thing to have shy Trump supporters.
And if people were just afraid of consequences, you would expect there would be some distortion in the polls.
But there's another effect on top of the shy Trump supporter.
Two other effects.
Maybe they're the same.
And it goes like this.
Do you like dad jokes?
You know what a dad joke is, right?
It's that sort of joke that I tell all the time.
If you're a certain age, usually you're a white guy, but I don't think that's necessary.
But, you know, there's this kind of joke that dad jokes are these sort of obvious, straightforward...
But I happen to be a big fan of dad jokes.
A good dad joke is hilarious.
And part of dad jokes are practical jokes.
What would be a better practical joke than distorting the polls so badly that every Democrat went into Election Day thinking, we got this.
You hear me?
As funny as 2016 was, it wasn't a practical joke.
2016 just happened.
Nobody said, hey, let's play a joke and fool the pollsters.
It just happened. But 2020, when you see the gap growing to just really a ridiculous level, sort of ridiculous, the level, I mean, it looks so not true, that it just seems like either the pollsters are playing some kind of a fundraising game, because there are two possibilities here, and they might actually both be true.
One is that the polls are intentionally rigging the polls.
The pollsters are rigging the polls.
Not all of them, but enough of them to change the average.
And that they're doing it specifically for fundraising.
Because if you thought Biden was going to lose, would you give money to him?
Because you'd say, that's wasted money, he's just going to lose anyway, right?
But if you think he's on a glide path to winning, And all he needs is a little extra money to make sure that he nails it down.
Well, then your wallet gets a little looser, right?
You're like, oh, this is productive.
If I put money into this campaign, I can really, it's like insurance to ensure he makes it.
He's already ahead. Don't want him to get behind.
We better bump up those TV ads and stuff and make sure that the Congress gets in there so that when he's in there, He'll have a Congress that can do what he wants.
So yeah, this is a good time to donate.
If I had to guess, I would say that the main reason the pollsters are faking the polls, and I feel like we can just state that as fact at this point, right?
Wouldn't you agree? We can just state that as fact, that these are rigged polls.
Not all of them, but it looks like some number of them.
And Sure enough, Biden is having the biggest fundraising bonanza of all time, because people are smelling the victory.
So that's one thing, and I think that's actually happening.
I feel confident that that's what's happening.
But the dad joke explanation could be happening at the same time, and when the pollsters are calling, it might not be just people who don't want their name known to an anonymous pollster.
Because indeed, probably, you know, as a percentage, there can't be that many people who are afraid of it.
Yeah, maybe two, five percent, something like that.
But how many Trump supporters, if they saw the opportunity, would go for the dad joke?
And the dad joke is lying to the pollster and say, yeah, yeah, I'm a big old Biden supporter.
Count me down for Biden!
And how about those Democrats running for Senate?
Yeah. Love me some Democrats.
Put me down for Biden and all the Democrats.
Do you feel it?
It's the world's greatest dad joke.
And if Trump pulls this off, and at the moment I still believe he will, if he pulls this off, it will be No doubt about it, the world's biggest and best dad joke.
Now, I'm not saying that moms aren't getting into the fun.
I'm just saying it has that feeling of a dad joke.
You know what I'm saying, right? And it's irresistible.
I don't know how you could be a Republican and resist the temptation to lie to the pollster just for the dad joke.
It's irresistible.
All right. Even Jen O'Malley, the Biden campaign manager, says that the polls are bullshit.
So even Biden's campaign says, don't believe these polls.
I don't know what's going on with these polls, but our internal polling doesn't show what they show.
And plus, you don't want to be fooled by the national numbers.
You want to look at the state numbers.
Let's talk about that nodding woman who was behind Trump at his town hall.
Now, I have to admit, I watched the town hall, and I never noticed the woman behind him, because I was sort of listening, not watching.
And so it took me a while to sort of catch up to the story.
But I'll just add this in terms of persuasion.
Persuasion-wise, it is a great idea to To have somebody who looks like the audience you're trying to persuade nodding along with the president.
So if she wasn't put there as a plant, and I think she said she wasn't, I think she says, I believe I saw a little snippet of an interview in which she believed that because she's black, That they put her behind the president because she would not be happy with him.
But it turns out she's a supporter.
And that is a strong technique because we're all very influenced by other people.
We're all imitators.
So if you see the president talking and over his shoulder you see somebody that feels like you, it's like, oh yeah, I'm sort of like that person.
And they're nodding along, oh yeah, oh yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh.
It will definitely influence you.
So persuasion-wise, it's a It's a smart play if they can reproduce that.
Alright. Biden apparently won the TV ratings for the town hall.
But, of course, I'm not sure that means a lot.
Because, number one, if you had a choice of seeing yet another minute of Trump versus Biden, who you don't see as much, one of them is a novelty, and one of them you're going to feel like you just saw three versions of him in the last 24 hours.
So some of it is, and I admit that I was feeling this at the time, I was thinking maybe I'll watch Biden because I just don't see as much of him.
And there's more of a possibility of a wreck.
Some people watch car races just to watch the wrecks.
I might have watched Biden just to see if he would decompose, because you kind of know what Trump is going to do.
He's going to say three provocative things that make news, but otherwise it's going to be exactly what you think it is.
But with Biden, you've got this extra level of mystery.
Will he fall over?
Will he forget his name?
Will he have a A senior moment.
So I can see why he would be more interesting in this specific case.
But I want to add this conspiracy theory to the mix.
When I turned on the TV to look for the Trump town hall, I knew it was on NBC, and I know what number NBC is on my dial.
So I turned on Comcast, that's my cable provider, and And does Comcast own NBC? They might.
Anyway, so I turn on Comcast, and I go to the channel guide, and there I see on ABC, I guess it was, was it?
Yeah, ABC. I see, you know, the Joe Biden Town Hall, or whatever it was labeled.
Very clearly, and it lasts for a few hours, so it's like blocked off.
You can't miss it. Joe Biden Town Hall.
A couple of slots above it was NBC. NBC said local news in a tiny little slot that would be too short for a town hall, followed by local news, followed by local news, followed by local news.
Now, I, of course, eventually, you know, just I said, screw that.
It's probably on MSNBC, but I don't remember where that is on my cable.
And I'm not going to go looking for it because it's already time to watch it.
So I picked up my phone, which I knew, you know, with two buttons I would be on NBC because I've got a phone app.
And so I watched it on my phone.
Now, here's the question.
If you were sort of ambivalent, you didn't know if you were going to watch Trump or Biden, and you were thinking, eh, either one.
They're both interesting.
Maybe I'll tape one and watch the other.
If you only saw the Biden one, And you're a senior citizen, and you're not going to go to your phone app, do you pick the one that says Town Hall?
I think you might.
So I heard, I got some pushback when I said that on Twitter.
Somebody said, Scott, everybody knows how to find NBC. Everybody knows it was going to be on NBC. True.
But what have I taught you about friction?
Any friction reduces behavior.
And that was friction.
I couldn't as easily find it on my TV guide.
I think some people, maybe 2%, whatever, probably made a difference.
All right. Have you noticed?
I'm curious about this, so I want to see your answers in the comments.
When I watch a Trump speech or town hall, and then I watch a Biden speech in town hall, they have one thing in common.
They don't say a frickin' true thing the entire time.
Now I'm exaggerating a little bit.
But are you aware that almost everything that Trump says is not true?
I'm just wondering. Because most of you are Trump supporters.
But you do understand that, right?
That almost everything he claims about Biden is not true.
Now, some of them are true.
Some of them have a different context.
Some of them are over-interpreted.
Some are hyperbole, etc.
But when you watch Biden, it's also true that Basically, 100% of what he says looks like a lie.
So there's the stuff you know is a lie, and then there's the stuff that looks like maybe he won't really do what he's saying he would do.
But do you get the impression that neither of them are doing anything even in the ballpark of truth?
They should be doing that.
So here's the part where I'll surprise you.
If they were not lying completely about everything, they just wouldn't be a good person for the job.
If somebody tried to run against either one of those candidates by only telling the truth, they wouldn't have a chance.
They wouldn't have a chance.
Because the lies are just more effective.
That's why they do it.
So when you see Biden, he lies at almost 100% of what he says is a lie.
And then Trump, of course, is still Trump, and he uses his hyperbole, etc.
Now, I have said from the beginning that somebody says no.
So seriously, there's somebody watching the Trump campaign speeches, and you're not finding anything untrue in that?
And people are asking me, what isn't true?
You really have to check your news sources.
Because if you think it's only the people on the left that don't know what's going on, if you're not watching both news sources, you're just having the same problem as the left, but you're having it on the right.
For example, well, you don't need any examples.
Let me just say that the major claims by both sides are probably, if I had to put a number on it, I'd say 75% false in both cases.
But they tend to be directionally true, at least in Trump's case.
I think in Biden's case they are not directionally true.
For example, Trump has lots of claims about the Bidens being swampy.
Are all of the specific claims exactly true?
Probably not. But is the general idea that the Bidens have some swampiness to explain, is that true?
I would say yes.
I would say certainly the laptop emails confirm that, yeah, there's some swampiness there.
And the president is right in theme, he's right.
Now what about Biden's lies?
Biden does the fine people lie about Charlottesville.
Is that directionally true?
Nope. It's directionally opposite of what's true, because this president has been very good for the African-American community, and there's no evidence of whatever that lie would suggest.
So Biden is a little more likely to just plain lie, whereas Trump is more hyperbolic, And even if something doesn't pass the fact checking, which happens, it's still in the general idea of where the country would like to go and what we would like to think of things.
Now, you could probably come up with a counterexample to that, but that's the pattern that I recognize.
But you really need to check yourself if you said, I've never heard Trump say anything that wasn't true.
There really is a lot there that's not exactly true.
So just be aware of that.
That doesn't mean he isn't the best president we've ever had.
And by the way, I would say, I heard somebody say this recently, I forget who it was, maybe Geraldo or somebody?
But somebody said that even if President Trump did not get re-elected, his one term would be the greatest one term of any president.
And I think that's a completely defensible statement.
I've been saying it for a while.
What he accomplished in his first term, I mean, even if the only accomplishment had been the judges, you know, the Supreme Court, that would be enormous.
But it's way more than that.
You know, beating ISIS and trade deals.
Getting rid of regulations we didn't need and all kinds of stuff.
So yeah, no matter what happens, he will go down as the most successful president.
The coronavirus will be a stain, but the rest of the stuff looks good.
All right. I wonder if Trump will ever do a debunking speech where he just debunks the lies that Biden tells.
I'd love to see him just do a speech where he says, look, here's what Biden says about the fine people hoax.
Now let me read the transcript exactly as it happened and Google it.
You should go home and Google this.
And by the way, if you look at the transcript and you found out that Biden is lying about the central theme of his campaign, you should assume that that's who he is.
That's who you're voting for.
You're not getting an honest candidate, or even close to it.
I don't think Trump will do that.
That doesn't sound like his style, but it'd be fascinating if he did.
I have to get back to the story about the Mexican former defense minister who got arrested for helping the drug cartels when he was in office.
Now, he was in office until 2018, This is really current events, and I would say this is another example of Trump building the wall.
Trump promised he'd build the wall, and at various times he said it's not just a physical wall, it depends on the It depends on the situation.
It doesn't have to be a physical wall.
But this is another case of him building the wall.
Because if you arrest the guy who was the defense minister of Mexico just two years ago for working with the drug cartels, you're kind of putting the pressure on Mexico, which in the end, I think, would have an effect on immigration as well.
So I think that's all, you know, generally speaking, part of building the wall.
Bo Erickson of CBS was asking a bunch of Trump supporters at a rally what they thought of...
Oh, no.
Bo Erickson asked Joe Biden, what is your response to the New York Post story about your son?
And Biden's response was he called it a smear campaign.
And then he started going after the reporter himself with insults.
Now, let me ask you this.
If I were to say to you, have you colluded with foreign powers to make money or something?
Or let's say, if I say, did you do this specific kind of corruption?
What would you answer?
Would your first answer be, this is a smear campaign?
Or would your first answer be, no, none of that's true.
This is a smear campaign.
But if you say it's a smear campaign, and you leave out the part about it not being true, it feels intentional.
I think Biden has a problem here that's pretty big.
He can't deny that it's true.
Apparently there's one person who has copied on the emails Who has confirmed that at least the one he got was real.
There's more coming out about this.
And here's the funny part.
When you have to lie a little bit, if you want to tell just a little bit of a lie or shade the truth, you can depend on all of the pundits on CNN to do that work.
So if you need to make Trump look bad, you need to take a story and spin it a certain way, any pundit will do.
You could just throw a dart at a bunch of pundits and whoever screams, you say, you!
You're coming on TV tonight and you're going to spin this thing so it looks bad for Trump.
Easy stuff. But sometimes you've got to call in the big guns.
Sometimes your ordinary pundits are not going to be sufficiently capable of lying at the level you really need to lie.
And I saw something interesting in the comments there about Christopher Wray, but I'll have to read up on that before I comment on it.
So it looks like CNN brought, or at least the Democrats, went to their A players.
So they went to David Korn, who wrote an article in Mother Jones, and they went to Clapper.
They had him on CNN. Now, if you need David Korn...
And Clapper to be your designated liars?
That means you need some nuclear level, you know, military quality No regrets.
No embarrassment.
You need the real lying.
I mean, the real good stuff.
And you have to watch Clapper tell his lie that this looks exactly like Russian disinformation, because apparently there were reports that Russia was going to try to use Rudy Giuliani to siphon disinformation through to get to the president.
Now, is that true?
Do we really have a report that says Russia was trying to do that?
I doubt it. I doubt it.
Because I don't trust anything out of our intelligence agencies, do you?
I mean, we just watched them being completely corrupt for, you know, three years.
So I wouldn't trust any report from our intelligence agencies.
That doesn't mean it's untrue.
But it doesn't mean you should believe it.
They have no credibility.
And on this exact topic, Russia disinformation...
It is their least credible thing, period.
There's nobody and nothing that's less credible than our own intelligence talking about what Russia is doing.
Nothing is less believable than that.
So they send Clapper out to do it.
And he says, listen to this exact wording.
This is Clapper. He goes, to me, this is just classic textbook Soviet-Russian tradecraft at work.
And he says, blah, blah, blah.
Now, let me ask you this.
I'm no expert on Soviet-Russian tradecraft.
And I would trust that Clapper is a better authority on Russian-Soviet tradecraft.
But I'm no Russian disinformation expert.
But let me tell you how I would have played it.
If the allegation is that the three laptops dropped off with the semi-blind repairman, that that was Russian disinformation, I'm just going to suggest the following.
One laptop would have been enough.
Do you feel me?
If you're a high-level Soviet, not Soviet, but Russian disinformation person, Would you say, I think I'll give them three laptops, three broken laptops, two of them don't count, so that they'll find that third one and they'll find this stuff on it?
Or would you keep it simple and perhaps only drop off the one laptop that's the one you want them to find something on?
Again, I'm no expert on Russian disinformation, but I don't think they want to complicate it by making it hard to find what's on the one laptop by having three of them.
And why would you take the chance that two of the laptops might have some indication on them that they weren't right?
One laptop, it's the least amount of information and the least amount of mistakes you could make.
Three laptops is not Russian disinformation.
Right? Would you agree with this basic statement that if it were Russian disinformation, they wouldn't drop off three laptops?
One maybe. And even one stretches credulity, really.
If it were Russian, they would just hack it, right?
If it were Russian, you'd just have the digital data.
I don't see them bringing in the laptop, the fake laptop, that the Bidens could simply say, no, that's not our laptop.
And indeed, the fact that nobody has denied that's a real laptop, and nobody has denied that the emails are real, if that were Russian disinformation...
Isn't that the first thing the Biden campaign would say?
That's not our laptop.
That laptop doesn't belong to us.
Must be Russian disinformation.
Somebody says that they brought three but only left one.
Why would he do that? And why would he bring three and leave one?
Even that doesn't make sense as Russian disinformation.
Alright. So...
The other thing that you need to know about this Hunter Biden story is that apparently, and I don't think the New York Post reported this, this is something I think David Korn said in Mother Jones, That there was something in there, one of the emails said to one of the foreign people that wanted to get an introduction to the big guy, I think. I think there was something in the email saying that we're not going to try to influence on policy.
So something Hunter or his partners wrote said clearly, no, we're not going to try to influence the government.
But they did in another email say that introductions were in order.
Now, the thing you don't know, maybe, is that especially in, let's say, China, it's a big, big deal to get a photograph of you in the White House or shaking hands with the president, and a vice president would be pretty good, too.
So there are foreign entities that would pay enormous amounts of money just for the photo.
That's it, just for the photo.
So there could be a photo element in this that's the big deal.
But we don't know if Biden met with anybody.
I'm guessing he did.
I noticed that Biden in his campaign speech yesterday used the wrong name for his running mate.
Trump got criticized for calling Matt Gaetz or Rick Gaetz, which is bad enough.
But that's something we've all done.
Not exactly shocking.
But there's so much attention given to how to pronounce Kamala.
And I'm told that if you think of the comma, like punctuation, a comma, if you think of that first, that helps you pronounce it right.
So it's Kamala.
It's not Kamala.
It's not Kamala.
And I heard Biden mispronounce her first name.
So, that's not good.
Alright, there's a cool story about CNN and Ice Cube.
So, Ice Cube, the rapper, he has this 13-part plan for black America, specifically only for black people in this country who are descended from slaves.
He explicitly says he's not talking about people of color, per se, but only black people descended from slaves.
And he thinks the problem is that black people don't own enough capital.
That's one of the big problems.
And he's got this 13-part plan.
Now, when I heard that, and I guess part of the story is that both campaigns contacted him.
So the Biden campaign contacted him and said, yeah, we'll talk to you after the election.
And the Trump campaign talked to him, called him and said, yeah, we'll talk to you right now.
And do you have any ideas?
And apparently he had some suggestions, which allegedly became part of the Trump campaign platinum plan.
You're not hearing much about that story, which is pretty big.
I'd love to know what exactly he added to the plan, but he says he did.
And I'm reading this story on CNN, and it references Ice Cube's 13-point plan, and I thought to myself, whoa, that's productive.
That's productive. Finally, we're having somebody come out with specific things that we can debate, and that's progress.
You might not like those 13 things, but at least it's a starting point.
We can have a conversation about that.
So I go to click on the 13-part plan, because obviously, if CNN writes a story about Ice Cube's 13-part plan...
Obviously, they're going to link to the plan so I can go look at it.
Uh, nope.
No link. So I said to myself, well, no problem.
I'm a modern person in a modern world.
I don't need a link.
I know what it's called.
It's IceCube's 13-part plan.
So I Google it.
Couldn't find it. What?
Ice Cube is apparently the most productive person helping black America at the moment because he's the only person who had a specific idea that's already been adopted by the administration.
He's already, you know, of all the people doing anything, he's already number one because he's done more than everybody put together because he did something.
Everybody else put together didn't do anything.
But he did one thing, and he's got at least 12 more things to look at.
That's great. You can't even find these on a Google search.
Now, when I say I can't find it, I mean it didn't come up in the first few pages.
I don't know if I spent more time on it, I could have found it.
But shouldn't that be a little bit easier to find?
I'd like to talk about that.
And Ice Cube, of course, is getting...
Ripped apart for helping the Trump administration, which isn't exactly what he did.
What he did was helped black people in America, and he gets attacked for it.
What's that tell you?
That really sort of highlights the problem with black America, doesn't it?
Here's a guy who only wants to help.
He's not being political.
He'll work with whoever can help black America.
He puts the work in.
He's not some tourist celebrity who came by and says, hey, make everything better, Black Lives Matter, see you later.
He's not that guy.
And I've told you before that everybody mocks celebrities who get into politics, including me, but I don't think it's all the same.
I think... Alyssa Milano is a serious person who does the work and gets into the politics.
And while I might not agree with her on most things, she should be taken seriously.
She's putting in the work. She's a patriot.
She's a concerned citizen.
She's doing what we all should do, which is try to be useful.
Ice Cube is like that.
He's not a worthless celebrity.
He's got a 13-point plan that I'd like to see.
He's already talked to both campaigns.
He's made a difference.
Let's hear some more of that.
I might not like it, but I'd like to hear it.
Here's my assumption.
The assumption that he's being disappeared in terms of the details of his plan and only being mocked, I believe he's being disappeared by the Democrats because the last thing they need is solutions.
It is not good for Biden to see that black people have ideas and they're not so bad and that maybe they could even be implemented.
That doesn't work because they need the grievance.
They need the anger.
They need the energy of the problem.
They don't need the solution, but they certainly need the problem because the election's coming.
So I don't know if Ice Cube has deduced that yet, that he's being...
Cancelled by his own party because it was never about solutions.
If you remember back when Kaepernick was initially doing his, when he was still in the league and he was doing the kneeling and everybody was complaining, you may have remembered that I did the opposite.
And I said, hey, how about I'll even help you come up with your plan.
And I'll even help you argue for your plan.
I'll help you persuade With the best of my ability, so that you have the best argument for the things you think need to be done.
If they don't get passed, at least you have the best argument.
And at least it was a serious thing.
At least we were working together.
At least we were on the same side.
At least we were being good people about it.
So that was my initial take.
And I eventually learned, and even worked with Black Lives Matter a little bit through Hawk Newsome, And eventually learned that solutions were not popular.
And that was like a gigantic red pill for me.
Because I kind of, at that point, I still thought, well, obviously you want to solve the problem.
You don't want to just have a problem.
You want to solve a problem. But no.
There is not energy for solving the problem.
There is energy for keeping the problem.
And I think Ice Cube has proved that.
Let's talk about some cults.
I tweeted that if CNN and others are calling QAnon a cult, wouldn't Black Lives Matter be a cult?
Because I have trouble finding the difference.
So you've got QAnon who sees pedophilia everywhere, even maybe where it doesn't exist.
Then you've got Black Lives Matter who sees racism everywhere, including some places that might not exist.
In both cases, you can join the organization and leave the organization.
How are they different?
I don't really see a difference there.
So what makes one a cult and the other not a cult?
So I asked this question.
So QAnon doesn't have a leader.
Don't you need a leader to be a cult?
That feels like the minimum requirement of a cult.
Now, Black Lives Matter has sort of leaders, but they're more like founders.
It's not like the people marching, or they don't feel that they report to any leader.
There is an organizer, but not really a leader, per se, like a cult.
It's more people independently doing what they want to do.
So you don't have a leader.
That's not cult-like.
QAnon, literally the primary thing that they say is do your own research and make up your own mind.
A cult tries to keep you from the outside world and it tries to keep you from any information that might change your mind.
QAnon does the opposite.
They say, go research.
Go do your own research.
I did my own research. Please do your own research.
That is aggressively opposite a cult.
That's literally saying that white is black, zero is one.
Those are opposites.
Do your own search is opposite of a cult.
There's no argument on that.
And you can leave anytime.
That's as non-cult as you can get.
Now, is QAnon correct in their beliefs?
Well, you already know I don't believe they are.
So I don't believe QAnon's claims passed the sniff test, and I think that's been demonstrated well enough.
But that would be more like a conspiracy theory, more like false beliefs.
That would be the worst case.
And I have to say that the QAnon believers themselves, as I saw some of them being interviewed by CNN, and they were asked about the president not denouncing QAnon, and a number of the people going to the rally agreed with the president and said, no, let people figure it out themselves.
He just wants people to do their own research.
Now, I don't buy into that thinking.
But I did love the people, just watching the people respond to the CNN reporter.
They're all kind of lovable, meaning they don't have bad intentions.
They're anti-pedophilia.
Who doesn't agree with that?
That's what the president said as well.
So while I do not accept their claims as being true, they're quite a lovable group, I've got to say.
All right. Let's talk about...
So I got approached, if you can call it that on Twitter, by Steve Hassan.
Have you ever heard of him? He's a cult expert.
And he said that, Scott, you have lost any shred of independent thinking because I said that QAnon is not a cult expert.
I'm sorry to see, from debunking QAnon to defending it.
So he knows I've debunked it in the past, but now he thinks I'm defending it by defining them as not a cult.
Do you see that? Am I defending QAnon by simply saying that all of the definition of a cult, objectively speaking, and nobody would disagree with the specifics, none of them fit?
Is that defending them?
Well, is a true statement defending somebody?
If you're stuck in that simple little world where saying something true about somebody you don't agree with is defending them, you need to increase your level of maturity.
You need to be able to handle that sometimes your enemies have some good qualities, sometimes the people you disagree with can be right.
It's a thing. People you don't like sometimes can be right.
Duh. So I would think that context would matter.
And given that Mr.
Hassan, the cult expert, knows I don't believe what they believe, I would think that I wouldn't call this defending.
But I would certainly...
Actually, maybe you could call it defending.
In the sense that I'm defending them against a false accusation?
Is that defending?
Or is that just describing?
Well, anyway, this cult expert, Steve Hassan, became a cult expert because he had been in a cult.
He had been a Mooney. So I guess when he was younger, he grew up in the Mooneys, who are called a cult.
And here's a question I would ask you.
This is based on my own understanding of persuasion.
And this is sort of similar to stalkers.
I learned this from an expert on stalkers.
You can't really make a stalker stop stalking, unless their dad are in jail or something.
You can convince a stalker not to stalk a specific target, but they will just get interested later in somebody else and just stalk somebody else.
So the thinking from an expert on stalkers is that once a stalker, always a stalker, You can only change who they stalk.
I wonder, I'm speculating, that if you are the kind of person who has ever been in any cult, aren't you susceptible to being in another one?
Because whatever it was about you that caused you to be a member of one cult, do you grow out of that?
Or is that just who you are?
Because Steve Hassan is quite a Trump hater, And it feels to me like cultish behavior.
I feel as though he just went from one cult to another, and I know that he would say the same about me for the things I say about Trump.
But I would refer him to yesterday's Periscope.
So anybody who thinks that I'm a Brainwashed?
You have to explain why I can so easily criticize the thing you think I'm brainwashed to support, because I can do it pretty easily at great consternation to my audience.
All right, so BLM's a cult if QAnon's a cult, or neither of them are cults if you want to be more accurate.
But I told you I was going to watch this special...
Or a series, I guess, on HBO called The Vow.
And it's about a cult.
I never know how to pronounce it.
N-X-I-V-M, but I think they pronounce it Nexivum or something.
And it's this Keith Rainier fellow.
And first of all, I recommend the content.
It's really interesting.
And part of what makes it interesting...
Is that one of the cult members was also a very good filmmaker.
And apparently was taking film and really high quality audio through much of his experience in the cult and then afterwards.
So it's not just a documentary where they're talking about a cult and maybe they interview some people.
They do some interviews too.
But you actually see inside the cult.
You actually see the footage Of the actual cult leader, alleged, doing his cult stuff.
And so I got to watch that and try to pick out his technique.
And here's what I learned.
And I'll give you this background so when you watch it, you can look for this stuff.
Number one, it looks like he modeled his cult after Scientology.
In other words, he started with the same framework, which is there's this wise leader, instead of L. Ron Hubbard, it's Keith Renier, and started with the same Scientology idea that your problems in adult life are caused by traumas that you may not be aware of from your early life,
and that there's a technique for getting to those traumas and uncovering them and taking the power out of them, Scientology has their little, whatever it is, the e-meter or something where they do the interviews, is that what it's called? But they have a technique which people say, yes, it made me clear.
It got rid of my traumas from childhood, and now I'm more successful.
Now, Scientology is a cult, some say.
But I would say this.
I'm pretty sure the technique works.
Not every time and not on every person.
But what I've seen of the technique, it would work.
Again, not every person.
And so when you hear people say, I went through this technique, changed my life, I'm all happier, I'm more successful, I think those are mostly true.
And my experience with hypnosis and with persuasion suggests that there's actually something going on.
But it's mostly a Mostly a hypnosis persuasion technique, because if you believe the technique works, any technique works.
Now, that's a bit of an over-claim, but believing in the technique gives you what I call the fake because.
And Nexthium did this, and Scientology does it still.
And the fake because goes like this.
You may want to become a different person, but you need some reason that you could look to and say, oh, that's the reason.
This is the reason.
I've now discovered this or learned this or felt this, and now I can become this different person.
In persuasion, that's a thing.
Giving somebody any excuse, and it doesn't matter what it is.
So you could come up with a technique that says, every time I tap you on the head with this pen, You'll get better from your childhood traumas.
You would find people who got better and actually were better.
Now, not all of them, because they wouldn't all believe it would work.
But if you find somebody who believes it works, it kind of works.
It's not quite a placebo effect, but it's in that realm.
So the first thing you need to know is that the people in the Nexium cult Make claims that the technique, in this case it was called an EM process, actually worked.
And in their own words, they're saying, yeah, this made me happier, my relationships are better, I'm more successful, and all that.
I believe that's true.
Not every time.
Wouldn't work with everybody.
But I do believe that these people were telling the truth, that they were getting the benefits.
So the first thing you need to know is that both Scientology and And Nexvium work.
I hate to say that, because I don't want to accidentally convince anybody to join one of these groups, but I think it works.
And I've seen enough from hypnosis to know that it's entirely within the conceivable realm.
Next thing you need to know is that the leader of Nexvium, this Keith Rainier guy, I saw enough video of him that I would make the following conclusions.
One, he is a genius.
He is really smart.
And that's part of it, because people can feel that, and then they feel he's smart, so he has more credibility, so it makes him easier to follow.
And he's also really interesting and really provocative, and he does both of those things intentionally, and he said as much.
He said he's interesting and provocative intentionally.
Now, I've told you that half of persuasion is getting and holding people's attention.
So he does that in a Trump-like way.
He says and does things that you can't look away, and then suddenly he's the important thing in your life, and suddenly it's all you're talking about, and suddenly he has power.
So he does all the getting attention stuff right.
Then his EM process, I didn't see enough of it to get the full pattern, but it's something like this.
And he could do it with just a word or two, and you could see him breaking people down into tears with just asking a question or two.
And when you see it live, you can tell that he can do this.
It looks repeatable.
So, for example, somebody would say, I have...
You know, this fear or there's this thing I can't do or whatever.
So they've got some block in their life.
And he would ask questions somewhat like this.
And I may have the exact form wrong, but it's something like this.
What fear would you...
What are you afraid you would lose if you did this?
What are you afraid you'd lose if you had this success?
What are you afraid you'd lose if your relationships were better?
And it's a really good question.
And you can see people get the question, and I think he has a few forms of this question.
And what it does is it gives them the fake because.
And the fake because is the question allows them to, in a very free-form way, solve their own problem, but it's a fake because that they don't know is fake.
So in other words, if they immediately have a thought, and this is part of what he prompts them for, A thought of some childhood trauma and they connect that childhood trauma to what they're trying to accomplish today.
An example would be, in my childhood I was abandoned and now I'm having trouble making relationships or sticking with something today.
Now that doesn't have to be the actual reason that they're having problem today.
This is the important part.
That doesn't have to be real.
If in your head you've connected that past trauma To whatever it is that's giving you fear today and stopping you from being your complete self.
If you believe that trauma was the problem, and if you believe that this cult leader, Keith Ranier, in one question connected that fear from your past to your current problem, you break down crying.
Because it feels like something amazing just happened to you.
You just found the code In the programming of your brain that is all your problem.
Yes, it was that trauma.
I get it now.
That was the trauma that's blocking me today.
It doesn't need to be real.
It doesn't need to be true.
It could be true, but it doesn't need to be.
If you convince yourself that you've identified the source of your fear and you now know that it's irrational and you talk through it, oh yeah, I don't have to be bothered by my childhood trauma.
That's artificial. It's an illusion.
Now I can be free.
You're free. So, when I say that Rainier is a genius, watching him do this in real time It is hypnosis.
I don't know if he's formally studied hypnosis, but it looks like it.
It looks like he's at least read up on it, because he's just too skilled.
I think that was the real deal.
I think that was the real deal.
It's based on maybe an illusion, but not the solution.
The solution is that people were clear.
They didn't have fear. So here's some more of his technique.
That's the biggest one.
He started gradual.
I guess he was doing some small group self-improvement kind of stuff.
And his self-improvement worked, like I just described.
So the people who experienced his self-improvement said, hey, this is great.
And they would tell other people.
And the other people would go and his movement would grow.
But as soon as it started growing and it reached a certain size, he gained a new level of power.
And that has to do with the setting, or setting the table, as we say in persuasion.
Trump does this too. The reason that Trump always wears a suit, always wears a tie, unless he's making a big deal about taking it off or something, is that the look, the feel, the fact that if you go to visit him before he was president, you'd be in these opulent billionaire surroundings.
You feel that people are credible and Based on literally the environment.
So if you were to go to see a CEO of a corporation and the CEO was sitting in a cubicle, you'd say to yourself, not so impressive.
Maybe, you know, I see why you're doing it.
You're trying to be one of the staff.
But they'd lose all their power because they would seem too ordinary.
But if you went into the The top floor of this giant skyscraper, and you have to go through three layers of gatekeepers, and you have to wait 20 minutes, and there's a giant door, and the giant door opens, and you go inside, and it's golden and opulent.
What do you think of the person?
Immediately you think that person has magical powers, because somehow they got in this situation and you didn't.
So after Rainier was successful, I guess he had a building, a compound where a number of them stayed, but not all of them.
And the other people would do the recruiting.
So they would find somebody and they would bring him in.
They'd say, oh, Keith, you've got to meet Keith.
Keith is amazing.
He's like incredible.
And then you see all the people that he's brought in.
You say, wow, I haven't even met Keith yet, but look at all this stuff, all these people, the way they talk.
There's so many of them, and he's growing, and he's making money, and he's building, and they're playing volleyball, and they're doing cool things, and they're all so happy.
I've got to meet this Keith!
So by the time they met him, they had been primed.
So that the people who came in after he had gained some status, they were easier to hypnotize.
Yes, he also had one celebrity, and he also had a number of women who had leadership positions.
And women can talk men into anything, you may have noticed, and women can talk women into things better than men can talk women into things.
So he had these lieutenants, mostly women, and one man who described himself as feminine, interestingly, and they became the salespeople because it was more effective that way.
He also recruited a billionaire, or at least one billionaire, maybe more, so he had finances and resources and connections to other billionaires and stuff.
So it started small and got gradual, and the gradual part of it is what's powerful, because people would gain...
If you gradually ease somebody into something, sort of like boiling the frog, they don't notice it if it's gradual.
And that's actually a technique.
A salesperson will do a technique Where they'll get you to do something small, and you say, can you hand me that?
Oh, sure. Oh, can you get back to me with that information you were talking about?
Yeah, sure. I'll just send you a link.
So a salesperson asks the person they're trying to sell to to do small things.
And if you can get that person to do any small things, it primes them for larger requests.
So the cult...
It was nothing but that.
It was a whole bunch of small things that people were being asked to do, reasonable, and it made them happier.
Why wouldn't you do a small thing that makes you happier?
And then the ask would get gradually bigger.
Until it ended when a subgroup of the cult, I guess there were several subgroups that people formed to do their own thing, and one of the subgroups was a dominant submission subgroup in which they were organizing as slaves, as masters, with a hierarchy, and even that was working.
People were okay with that.
So they got talked into being slaves to other masters within the organization.
But then one of the women came up with the idea of branding the other women with the initials of Keith Raniere, but not telling people that it was Keith Raniere's initials, because they were sort of combined so you couldn't tell easily.
And they actually got literally branded.
You know, hugely painful.
Now... You might say to yourself, Scott, if you say you're going to brand me, that would be the time I quit the cult.
But they didn't.
Why? How can you get people who are seemingly intelligent, successful people, how can you get them to agree to be branded?
It gets better. Most, if not, I think some, if not all of the women who got branded...
And again, it wasn't the whole cult getting branded.
It was only this subgroup.
Some of them were married and didn't ask their husband about it before they got branded.
And the brand was sort of down in the crotch area.
I mean, just imagine how impossible this is to imagine that you could be in that position and you would have made those same choices.
But... The first thing you need to know is that you wouldn't get in the cult unless you were in the small group of people who could be convinced of anything.
Right? So part of the trick that a stage hypnotist does is that it looks like people are being brainwashed right on stage, but the trick is that 80% of people would not do that.
But it's a big crowd watching the show, so the hypnotist learns how to pick out the 20%, and then you win the amount further Until you've got the few people who don't mind doing weird things in front of a crowd.
So you say to yourself, I wouldn't do that, so there must be something profound going on here, but really it's a trick because it's somebody who doesn't mind.
They are hypnotized also, but it's no big deal to them.
So when you look at a cult, the wrong way to look at it is, Normal people wouldn't do this.
I wouldn't do this. So I don't understand this.
What you have to understand is they wouldn't be in a cult in the first place unless they were that small group of people who could be talked into just about anything.
Now, I'm not done with the series because I guess they got to the point where the cult got busted and then it's going to be a legal process.
But weirdly, I didn't see anything illegal in In the entire episode up till now.
There were things that were lies, because the people didn't know they were getting...
They didn't know that Keith Raniere was actually the head of this dominant, submissive branding thing, because he kept it secret, and people thought it was being run by a woman in the organization.
So that part was devious and horrible, and everything he did was terrible, but 100% of what the people did was voluntary.
It was all voluntary. And the people who got the brands, what do you think they thought immediately after getting the brand?
What do you think their mental process was?
If I've taught you anything, you should say this.
Cognitive dissonance.
Because if you join an organization and you let them brand you, what's that do to your brain?
Because your brain has to explain this to yourself.
That's how cognitive dissonance happens.
If you can't explain it to yourself, you are triggered into cognitive dissonance where you make up some weird world to make it make sense.
Now, since it doesn't make sense on the logical world, what happens is as soon as you're branded and the pain wears off, you imagine it was awesome and that it was all good and you're glad it happened.
Because then you can have a story that doesn't make you look like you're crazy.
Oh, yeah. You know, I conquered my fear.
I showed my commitment.
Yeah, it's all good.
I'm certainly glad I made that choice.
And a little bit of that happened.
The people who had been branded, at least initially, actually had a positive experience, if you can believe that.
I mean, after the pain wore off, it was a positive experience.
Now, of course, they got unhypnotized, and that became the problem.
The other thing that this cult was teaching, and this came toward the end, so I think he started out with innocent self-help stuff and then got into more provocative, dangerous stuff, and they showed the actual video of Keith Rainier explaining to his cult members the following.
Now, this is him talking, not me, okay?
So don't blame me. I'm just the messenger.
I know you're going to want to blame me for this.
You can't. Nothing I say next is my opinion.
This is just the cult leader, okay?
Are we clear on that? It's not coming from me.
He said that the reason that women are unhappy is because they get away with too much because they're women.
And it starts when they're young.
Again, this isn't me.
I'm not saying this.
This is somebody else.
Keith Rainier. And he said that women are unhappy because they don't have, essentially, controls on their behavior.
And that to be happy, you need boundaries.
Now, I buy the part about people need boundaries to be happy.
There's lots of evidence of that.
But where he took this was that the men need to be the protectors and essentially need to be in charge, although his dominant and submission thing that he built was mostly women in charge of other women.
So I guess it didn't matter who's in charge as long as somebody was in charge and somebody was being told what to do.
And if the men were...
And I guess he said that the men were miserable.
Again, this is his opinion, not mine.
He said the men were miserable since early childhood because they're treated as second-class kids, which is true.
So even though boys have lots of advantages in life, as well as men, the feeling that boys have when they're young is that girls are getting away with murder, and they're not.
Right? You probably had that feeling if you were a boy.
Now, I'm not saying that's proper, right, or anything like that.
I'm just saying that that's his claim, that boys feel like they're angry and they hate women all their life, according to Keith Rainier, because they think women are getting away with too much, and then later in life, women can just cry and act irrational, and men will just say, whatever you want, whatever you want, because they've been trained from early childhood to give women what they want and not put controls on them.
Again, if you're just joining, none of this is my opinion.
Just passing it along.
But that was about the time that the cult got busted, so we don't know too much about that.
All right. That...
I'm looking at your comments.
Somebody says, it's not far off.
Somebody says, that is true.
So see how many of you would have agreed with the cult leader.
Right? Somebody says, wow, do boys think that?
Well, let me ask this. Let me ask the men who are here.
When you were a boy, did you think that women were getting away with murder?
Because, not women, but girls.
Did you think that girls were getting away with more than you could because they were girls?
Because you were taught to open doors for girls?
You were taught that if they hit you, that's fine, but if you hit them, you're going to jail.
And all of that makes sense, right?
As an adult, you say to yourself, of course it makes sense that if a woman hits me, it doesn't hurt me, but if I hit her, I could hurt her, so yeah.
These are not supposed to be equal, right?
So your adult brain can process this.
But can a child, can an eight-year-old boy understand that there's a reason that he can be hit but he can't hit back?
Not so easily.
If you're eight years old, not so easily.
So look at the comments. You're saying some no's.
You're saying some yes's. No, no, no.
You're saying absolutely. Yes, I'm fine with it.
Yes, because they cry.
Yes, that's not an opinion.
It's fact. So here's my point about Keith Rainier.
He is a genius.
I'm quite certain of that.
And his insights about humans is really, really good.
I mean, kind of crazy good.
And his understanding of how to, you know, create this situation.
But I would imagine that what happened was, you know, how power corrupts.
When he reached a certain amount of power, he became completely corrupt.
And that's probably what happened.
Somebody says, as a girl, I thought the boys got away with everything.
That may be true.
That may be true.
But it probably didn't damage you, did it?
Maybe he did. So I think that Rainier certainly took things in a bad place.
No doubt about that.
But he had some insights that I wish he had been a, let's say, a more positive force for the world.
Because he actually had some good stuff.
It was just buried by the evil stuff.
So it's dead forever, I think.
All right. That's it for now.
I will talk to you tomorrow.
All right. Thank you for all of your super chats.
I appreciate it. I try to read them as they go by, but I can't always speak to them.
