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Oct. 27, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
56:34
Episode 1167 Scott Adams: Trump is on a Glide Path to Reelection, NXIVM Update, Philly Riots Help Trump, Supreme Court

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Packing the court enthusiasm Poll expectations and predictions Whiteboard: "Leave it all on the field" Philly riots, election impact Therapeutic mental health environments NXIVM's Keith Raniere case questions ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Time Text
Hey everybody, come on in.
It's time. Time for Scott Adams and coffee.
Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm not going to call you George.
That doesn't make sense to any of you who don't follow the news.
But trust me, today is going to be a good one.
Oh yeah, you're going to learn something today.
I'm going to give you a little persuasion lesson, tell you what the president is doing right, and boy, is he doing a lot right this week.
He's killing it.
Good timing for it.
But to enjoy this to its complete and utter total capacity, all you need is a cup or mug or glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind, and 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.
The unparalleled pleasure.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Go. Ah.
Well, here's the good news.
Apparently there's a...
Some kind of a meteor kind of a deal called Psyche, P-S-Y-C-H-E. And NASA is planning to visit it.
Is it an asteroid or a meteor?
It's an asteroid, I guess.
And NASA is going to visit it in 2026, right around the corner.
But here's the fun part about it.
Here's the value of the asteroid.
Now, given that it's made of metal, and it looks like nickel and something else, and it's valuable metal, just to give you a preview of what it's worth to mine these asteroids, the entire global economy, the GDP of the entire Earth, just to give you some comparison, is $142 trillion.
That's the whole Earth.
This one asteroid is worth an estimated 10,000 quadrillion dollars.
Quadrillion? What the hell is a quadrillion?
Is it four times a trillion?
That doesn't sound right.
But when you're talking 10,000 quadrillion, that's some serious money.
And it means that if Elon Musk Starts mining one of these asteroids first.
Elon Musk could be not just the first trillionaire.
He could become the first quadrillionaire.
Somebody says it's a thousand trillion is a quadrillion, which makes sense.
Makes a lot more sense than four trillion.
All right, so that's how much money is up there in space.
So if you think Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are crazy to want to start up some space operations, that's why somebody is going to be a quadrillionaire.
Do you know how much you can buy with a quadrillion dollars?
Nobody does. But the whole planet, I guess.
So, do you think the Democrats are starting to get worried this week?
Because they had a good run.
You know, the polls were overwhelmingly Biden-favorable for months and months.
But that seems to be tightening.
And here's the thing that I think Democrats are starting to notice.
Number one...
The Supreme Court is pretty packed, wouldn't you say?
Now that there's a three-person majority of conservatives on the court, because if you didn't hear, Amy Coney Barrett got sworn in yesterday.
So she's the new member of the Supreme Court.
And if you are a Democrat, doesn't that take away your momentum for voting?
A little bit. Because it feels like it's already too late.
And the only thing you could do now is pack the court.
And sure, there will be some Democrats who say, yeah, pack the court.
But I think at least half of Democrats will say to themselves, uh, won't that destroy the country?
Because it would. It would.
So, a lot of Democrats are going to say, I hate this Supreme Court makeup.
But I don't want to ruin the republic.
AOC recently tweeted that it's expand the court.
She doesn't want to call it pack the court.
Expand the court.
And I tweeted back that if you expand the court, how do you do that without shrinking the republic?
Because the republic would no longer be What it was designed to be, which is, you know, a division of power, separation of powers, you would get rid of that.
The moment you packed the court, the most important concept behind the entire country and the Constitution would evaporate.
Because whoever became, you know, president and also had the Senate would just pack the court again.
So you would have packing and packing until you had hundreds of people on the court, because why wouldn't you, really?
Why wouldn't you? If all it is is a power grab, you should expect that people would grab the power.
But it's possible that the court would never change again if Democrats got in power and packed the court.
Maybe they just keep it that way.
All right. So first of all, Democrats, at least half of them, probably have lost a little incentive to vote because it's already too late for this nomination.
And they might not want to pack the court because that would destroy everything.
But I also think it trains the Democrats to accept defeat, meaning that this is a loss for them, that there's another Supreme Court judge who's conservative.
And losing is something you can get used to, meaning that you start to expect it.
So now you have, this is the pattern that's starting to form.
You know Democrats are worried about 2016 happening again.
And it feels exactly like it is, and I'll talk about that in a minute.
But they've got that pattern in their mind.
Okay, 2016, oh my God, it's looking like that again.
We lost before, we might lose again, and we just lost on the Supreme Court.
So, you can train people to lose.
When I used to play tennis, there was a phenomenon which I think we all noticed if you played a lot of tennis, that you could play somebody who seemed relatively close to your level of skill, but sometimes one would just always win.
And I think a lot of it has to do with just expecting.
The one who is used to winning expects to win again.
The one who is used to losing to this very same opponent just sort of gets used to losing.
And you can get into a mode where your brain just causes you to lose because you're sort of thinking that's what's going to happen.
And your brain is guided toward whatever you focus on, good or bad.
If you focus on bad stuff happening, your brain will eventually, in a million small ways, guide you toward that thing you were thinking about.
If you think about positive things, your brain will, in a million ways, guide you subtly and nudge you toward that positive thing.
It's a pretty well understood thing.
So I wonder if the Democrats have a little bit of the weight of losing in their minds.
So that's a thing.
Now imagine this. Imagine you're a Democrat.
You wake up every morning this week and you see that President Trump is barnstorming all of the Most important electoral college locations.
He's got gigantic rallies.
There's flags.
There's motion.
There's energy. He's doing everything right.
He's reproducing his technique from 2016, which we all believe worked against Hillary.
He outworked her.
He's doing it again.
And the champion that you chose to run against this force of nature...
Is decomposing in a darkened basement while you watch Trump do all of this?
How does that make you feel after you watch the Supreme Court go away too?
Not good, right?
But I don't think it fires you up.
I think it just, it's a gut punch.
I think it just takes everything out of you.
If I had to guess...
I'm sure that voting will be gigantic this year for both Democrats and Republicans.
But Republicans don't have that counterweight.
Republicans only have benefit.
It's like, oh, I want more of this.
I'm happy. Let's go get more of this happiness.
I'm celebrating.
Let's celebrate some more.
That's pretty strong motivation.
Whereas the Democrats got a whole lot of weight on them psychologically.
And no joke, this is a pretty serious mental health issue.
Very serious mental health issue.
And if we treat it like a joke, we could really get stung by it.
A lot of people are going to get hurt.
It's a real thing that people are in psychic emergency, really.
I mean, it's hard to...
It's hard to overstate how bad this is going to be for a lot of people's psychological well-being.
It will be funny because, let's be honest, a lot of you found a lot of entertainment from 2016 and people screaming at the sky.
And I'm going to be honest, I wouldn't mind seeing it again.
I can't be proud of it, but I wouldn't mind it.
All right. Correct me if I'm wrong, and I might be wrong about this because I don't think I've considered everything, but it feels to me that 100% of the signals are pointing toward Trump except the polls we all believe are fraudulent.
Is that true? I'll go through the list and see if I left anything out.
Number one, enthusiasm.
All Trump, right?
So if you're looking at all the intangibles that are not part of the polling, enthusiasm, Trump.
Signage, Trump.
There's some kind of statistic that says that if you win the primaries as a sitting president and you get over 75% of the votes in the primaries as a sitting president, you win re-election almost every time.
So Trump, of course, crushed that...
That measure, he got way more than 75%, so that signals a victory.
Trump is in roughly the same place in the polls as he was against Clinton.
Actually, maybe a little better.
That signals victory.
You see Trump surging at the right time and doing his heavy work thing at the end of the cycle.
That strongly suggests good things for Trump.
New voter registration, I understand, is heavily Republican.
That signals Trump.
Ground game looks better because the Biden people stayed home, the Trump people knocked on doors.
That signals Trump.
Biden isn't even going to the right states.
I guess he's going to Georgia.
He's not even trying.
So you've got Trump going to all the right places.
You've got Biden going to a place that sort of doesn't even make sense, and he's not even going to many places.
You've seen the level of black support for Trump, which by itself, if there were no other things you were looking at, and you just saw the level of black support for Trump is going through the roof, that alone would tell you he's going to get re-elected.
Now, I know that he may have lost suburban women, etc., but I'll tell you, this Amy Coney Barrett thing has a lot of levels to it.
Sure, the Democrats don't like it because she's conservative, but if you're a suburban woman and you're watching Amy Coney Barrett, aren't you impressed?
Even if you hate her politics, aren't you just impressed as hell?
Just about her as a human being, as a mother, as now a servant to the public.
Impressive as hell.
And who nominated her to the Supreme Court?
A woman who looks like the model of suburban women?
Trump. I feel as though Trump is going to get some suburban mother...
appreciation for this pick, even though it was political and even though she's conservative, there's something about it that just feels like it's violating whatever they thought about him, sexism or whatever.
So it counters that a little bit.
So he's got that going for him.
He's got the incumbent advantage in general.
Incumbents normally get elected no matter what.
And like I said, the motivation of packing the Supreme Court is I think it's sort of split on the Democratic side, whereas the enthusiasm for Trump among Republicans, it's sky high.
It's sky high.
I just don't know the Democrats have that.
And of course, Biden is decomposing and everybody can see that.
I think it was Joe Rogan who said this on the Kanye interview, maybe.
He had this great physical analogy.
He said that voting for Biden was like going for a hike in the woods at night and you brought a flashlight with a dying battery.
And it probably won't work out well for you.
The imagery of a flashlight with a dying battery as you go into the woods at night is one of the all-time best descriptions of that.
All right. Let's talk about Trump's persuasion strategy.
I'm going to try to do this without my camera falling over.
Let's do this. And bear with me for a moment as I'm going to talk to my Amazon digital device.
You might want to cover your device's ears for a moment.
And it goes like this.
Alexa, turn off studio.
Just fixing the lighting so you can see me worse, but my whiteboard's a little bit better.
So Trump is doing his same 2016 technique of going to lots of rallies and getting a lot of energy.
And here are all the things he's doing right.
So these are all persuasion techniques that are baked into what he's doing.
And it's really good.
It's like really, really, really good.
It's like A double plus good.
Let me run through it.
So first of all, he's setting up just a deadly contrast because Biden's problem is he's looking sort of low energy and he's hiding and he's in his basement.
He's not doing much. So contrast is one of the most important concepts in persuasion.
The bigger the contrast, the better.
And Trump has made the biggest contrast you could ever achieve with the The least visible candidate of all time, no doubt about it, with the most visible candidate of all time.
Highest energy versus lowest energy.
Bravest versus least brave.
Amazing contrast, right?
Now there's always contrast, but because he's making us focus on it with these rallies, it just takes that contrast into a whole new level.
There's a recency bias.
Meaning that whatever is happening at the moment is more important to us than anything that happened last year.
And because time has become distorted under the Trump era, the recency bias is way more important.
Meaning that we don't remember what happened two weeks ago.
You know, and if you're going to ask me what happened in February, I think there was some kind of impeachment thing?
I don't know. I don't remember.
That was a long time ago. But I certainly remember what's happening today.
I know what's happening this week.
So by Trump sucking up all of the news cycles with these rallies, which are nothing but positive, it's just one positive, funny celebration after another.
It's got flags and motion and energy and all this stuff.
That's what he's putting in your head, and that's what will be there recently.
So the recency bias is all Trump right now.
He's doing nothing but positivity.
And he's not only leaving it all on the field, a phrase he actually used, by the way.
He's a happy warrior.
And the happy warrior thing is a perfect finisher.
It makes sense to complain and be negative and scare people You know, during the build-up to the election.
But you need a finisher.
You need a frosting on that cake that leaves people with a good feeling toward the end.
And man, is he killing that.
He's just killing it.
He just, you know, from the From the point of the last debate, where Trump decided to go, let's say, presidential, I hate to use that phrase because it's somewhat subjective, but he decided to become more of a presidential-looking, tone-it-down kind of candidate, and then he brought positivity into the rallies, and it's just nothing but good news.
And his recents was great.
He's taking all the attention, of course, because he's getting tons of coverage, especially when Biden is hiding.
He's got a social proof like crazy going on.
Social proof is that we're all influenced by people around us, especially people who are like us.
So if you see, if you turn on the rally and you see all these people for Trump, How different is that from what you thought for the last four years?
Yes, he's always done rallies, but couldn't you kind of write them off as, okay, he just went to a place that there were a lot of supporters?
But what does it do to your impression of how...
Acceptable it is to support Trump when you see these rallies, and many of them are spontaneous.
A lot of the rallies, if you can call it that, don't even have Trump.
The boat rally, there's no Trump there.
They just organized in rallies.
The truck rallies, no Trump.
They just organized their own rally.
And when you see these spontaneous, gigantic Expressions of pro-Trump and they're happening all over the country in different places at the same time.
Suddenly your thought that you can't support Trump because he's sort of a monster and everybody's saying bad stuff about him is really affected by seeing all these people who are okay with vocally and publicly supporting Trump.
It makes it easier for you.
It gives you a fake because.
In other words, you can say to yourself, Well, it can't be that bad if all these people are willing to do all this publicly.
So the social proof is gigantic.
You've got a lot of flags involved with Trump rallies.
The book Pre-Suasion by Cialdini talks about how some researchers did some tests where they would show images of the American flag To people before they voted.
And they found that if they show you the flag before you vote, you're far more Republican biased in minutes.
We're talking about a change that happens almost right away.
So the American flag makes you feel more Republican.
Now, I don't know why.
It could be just the Republicans favor the flag more than other people.
But... You see that many flags in all these rallies, and of course the news is covering it all.
That persuades you.
It gets you in the mood for Republican voting.
And it is a measurable effect.
And it's not me just talking crazy talk.
It's been studied. Specifically the flag, and specifically voting for Republicans.
That exact thing has been studied.
And he's killing it on that.
Reciprocity, one of the most important concepts in persuasion.
That's why a salesperson will do you a favor, might be a small one, buy you some tickets to the show or something, because once somebody does you a favor, you are automatically wired to return the favor.
When you see Trump working this hard to do something which clearly is entertainment, He entertains at the rallies.
That's why he does it.
There's not like a lot of information being transmitted.
It's entertainment. And when you see how hard he's working for the base, what does that do to the base?
When somebody works hard for you, you say, I gotta do something in return.
And all he's asking me is to vote?
That's it? That's not even hard.
So the reciprocity thing is gigantic.
It's really powerful.
We owe him a favor because he did so much to entertain us, to show up, to get our energy up, to get the policies that you wanted, etc.
You owe him. And he's working hard, and you appreciate that, and you respect it.
Everybody responds to hard work.
It's universal.
You will like anybody who works hard.
In fact, you've seen me model this, actually.
When I've said good things about AOC, when I've said good things about...
Who is the actress who is very pro-Biden?
Alyssa Milano. I say good things about both of them, although I disagree with their opinions on just about everything, but they work hard.
They put in the time.
They do the effort.
AOC with her wearing out her Her athletic footwear.
And with other people, you just see them putting in the hours, and that means something to me.
That gives me some respect.
Energy, of course, is always persuasive.
People are drawn to energy.
Trump is showing the energy like crazy, and you are just naturally drawn to it, especially if somebody is trying to be a leader.
Pattern spotting, very important.
If you think there's a pattern and it influences you, you will subconsciously start working toward that thing.
So, if you think that this year is going to look like 2016, you don't know it will, but you suspect it.
You worry about it.
You fret about it. You think about it.
It's the thinking about it that matters.
And you're thinking about this 2016 pattern where Trump comes from behind, in the polls anyway, And wins at the last moment.
What does that do to you?
Well, if you're talking about what it does to any one person, probably nothing.
They're just going to vote whoever they're going to vote for.
But remember, we're talking about large groups of people and you only have to move a little sliver of them to make a difference in this election.
And I believe that that pattern, which is in all of our heads, Democrats and Republicans, will make Republicans show up To satisfy the pattern.
And we'll make Democrats, who might have been on the fence about whether it's worth voting or not worth voting, maybe just find something else to do that day.
Now, if you ask them later, hey, did you change your behavior because of the 2016 pattern that's in your head?
Everybody would say no.
They'd say no. What's that got to do with anything?
This is this year. I simply made a decision that That I wouldn't vote because I had this important other thing I had to do.
So that's the way it would play out in people's heads.
But the effect would be you'd see, you know, 1%, some small percent, maybe 1% of the people would just act a little differently because that pattern is rolling around in their head.
I talked about the fake because.
Watching Trump work so hard, as contrast to Biden, is just one more fake reason you can give yourself to do the thing you wanted to do anyway.
And sometimes you need that, to just give you that little extra nudge to get you off the fence.
People who wanted to vote for Trump, but maybe they were concerned about this or that, something that he did or might do.
But then you see how hard he's working.
Compared to Biden, and that gives you another fake reason.
It's like, ah, I've got to have the guy who works hard.
I mean, I'm hiring somebody.
You're literally hiring, for all practical purposes, an employee.
Are you going to hire the employee who stays in his basement?
It's like just a perfect reason if people need a simple one.
It's like, well, I don't understand all these policies, and I wouldn't know a good trade deal from a bad one, but I can tell a hard worker from a not-hard worker.
That's pretty easy to tell.
I mean, I can see that.
So that'll be my reason.
The Trump rallies are insanely visual.
And of course, the visual element is the most persuasive of your senses.
It's more persuasive than a concept.
It's more persuasive than hearing it.
And man, are they visual.
They're super visual. Lots of red.
You know, that's a good visual color.
Just everything is visual about it.
And of course, Trump Transitioning into happy warrior mode just feels good.
When somebody is bringing you optimism, it makes you feel optimistic, gives you a little energy, maybe enough energy to show up and vote.
So look at all the stuff that Trump is getting right with all this stuff, and look at the timing of it, perfectly timed to peak at the right time.
It's really good.
It's really good. Alexa?
Turn on studio. Alright.
That's enough of that.
Let's talk about some more stuff.
You saw the video where Joe Biden appeared to think that the president's first name was George.
Did you see that? And then there was some follow-up clarification that Biden was actually in an interview with George Lopez.
So George Lopez was a name that he was probably kicking around in his mind.
So when it looked like Biden couldn't remember the name of the president, it was still a mental hiccup, so it wasn't nothing.
But it was less than you thought it was, maybe.
It was a little less than you thought it was.
Because it's not that unusual to confuse the name of the person you're talking to with the person you're thinking of.
It's a little more ordinary.
So I will accept that clarification that it really wasn't about George Bush and he wasn't having some senior moment about George Bush, but it was still sort of a senior moment, right?
It's not nothing.
It's just a little bit less than what your first impression was.
Philadelphia is on fire, at least some of it is.
There's protests, not protests, there are riots.
Black Lives Matter is rioting there because a police shot a man with a knife who was attacking them.
Now, he was an armed person who got shot in the act of violence.
And so there's a riot and looting.
What does that do for the campaign?
Well, as Matt Walsh tweeted, he said, Black Lives Matter is rioting in Philly because police shot a guy who was charging at them with a knife.
These buffoons didn't get the memo that they're supposed to stop burning and destroying stuff until the election.
Now they may have just handed Pennsylvania and the election to Trump.
I endorse every part of that tweet.
I think that's what happened.
Because if you're the suburban family looking at this, it just scares you again.
And it's all Democrat-related.
So the Democrats' idea of squashing that violence just before the election didn't work out.
Apparently, Trump, back in 2018, I saw a Jack Posobiec tweet on this, he was advocating for more mental health institutions, so that that would be one small way to deal with gun violence or other violence, because crazy people can get violent.
Now, it's not the full answer to gun violence, of course, but it's starting to look better and better, isn't it?
A lot of homeless people...
They don't really have a homeless problem so much as a mental health problem.
And I think we just have to get to the place where there are some citizens who just can't live among the rest of them.
Would you agree with that?
I think we've reached a problem.
Let me give you a reframing of what you see in society right now and see if this works for you.
We have a bunch of problems like homeless and People with mental health and we've got lots of income disparity and unemployment and lots of problems, right?
And you've got lots of people who've gone through the prison system and they can't get jobs.
There's a whole swath of civilization that can't live with the rest of civilization.
But if you could find a place where they could have their own life away from the other people who just need to get away from them, Maybe that's the solution.
The problem seems to be when you integrate everybody in the same place.
Because an insane person could live happily in some environment.
A person who has committed crimes before could probably live happily in some environment.
But if you force them to live where they can't afford the rent, What are they going to do?
Maybe steal some stuff.
So I've got a feeling that a lot of our problems in society are this assumption that everybody should live near everybody else or wherever they want.
And what we need, and this is one of Kanye's innovations, I think, because he's working on building low-cost, more livable shelters, etc.
Kanye talks about how space can rewire your brain.
And I think he's on to something way bigger than people quite understand.
I would like to see some kind of a trial, because you should test it small, where you try to see what you can do for mental health by building a physical environment where the physical environment is part of the cure.
Not cure, let's say treatment.
Because imagine somebody's got a mental health problem.
And it's pretty bad. And so you grab them and say, you no longer can live by yourself.
I'm going to put you in a mental health institution.
Is there anything that would be worse for your mental health than being in a mental health institution, which is basically a bunch of square box containers with white walls?
I feel like that would make you worse.
Whereas, just take this as a suppose.
Suppose you took that same person and you put them in more of a nature-surrounded living environment where they're outdoors as much as they're indoors, but they can't hurt themselves.
There's no traffic.
There's enough professionals watching everything.
I feel like you could heal people to some extent, or at least make it easier to treat them, if you put them in An environment that didn't suck.
That feels like it's a much, much bigger thing than we're giving it credit for.
Because when somebody has mental health or other problems, they go to jail, whatever, you want to spend the least amount.
Because it's like, oh, we don't want to raise our taxes.
Let's make it the cheapest thing.
It's like cubicles.
If you take an employee, And put them in a little box, a cubicle, they don't perform the same as if they're in a nice environment, because your environment programs you.
That's just a fact.
Anyway, I think Trump's on the right path, which is we need more facilities, but I would object to building those facilities the way we have in the past.
I think you need more of a Kanye-level design thinking about how to approach this.
Let's see. Let's talk about NXIVM. I hope some of you saw my interview I did, it's on YouTube, with Nikki Klein, who was involved with NXIVM and involved with DOS, a separate but Venn diagram crossover.
With NXIVM. So it's the same people from NXIVM. Some of them formed this smaller group.
And their leader, Keith Ranieri, is being sentenced today.
Now what's interesting, and I said this before, is that he didn't put up a defense.
But apparently Keith Ranieri will get to speak to the court today, and I don't think the court has heard from him because he didn't put on a defense.
Now this is really interesting.
Because he's not like regular people, meaning that he has some persuasion skills, which is what got him into this trouble in the first place, that is not normal.
And I'm really curious if we'll ever know what he says in court and whether it will make a difference.
Because typically it's just a right, or I don't know if it's a right, but The fact that somebody says something in open court doesn't really change anything, does it?
Has it ever changed anything?
Maybe change a little bit the sentencing, but probably not.
But that's normal people.
If you let me talk to the court, a trained persuader, there's a little higher chance that something would come out of that.
A little bit, even if it went through the press before it changed something.
So he might actually move the needle.
And I tell you, I would buy a ticket to watch what he said to the court, especially given that the claim is that the trial process was rigged or had some irregularities in it that should raise one of your eyebrows through the roof.
And there are definitely some irregularities.
Let me talk about some of them.
So I guess I would separate all of the charges against Ranieri, which add up to possibly a life sentence.
So this is how bad all of the charges are.
A life sentence is possible today.
But there are three categories.
One has to do with an underaged girl, a 15-year-old girl.
We'll talk about that. One has to do with a bunch of business-related financial improprieties and something with immigration, etc.
And then another has to do with some kind of sex trafficking coercion.
So three separate categories.
Now, the ones with the financial irregularities, here is the context which you need to know.
Pretty much any small business that was making a lot of money And it was a private company, not a public corporation, but a private company making a lot of money.
If the government decided to rip it apart and look at everything, look at every transaction, every bank account, check the immigration status of all the employees, look at all your paperwork, how many crimes would you find in the average law-abiding, you think, American small business?
If you don't know this, this might come as a surprise to you.
Pretty much all small businesses in America are criminal organizations.
Now, part of that is because they don't know how to satisfy all the laws.
I used to own a couple of small restaurants.
I was in court twice, or I went into a court process, let's say, twice, for violating laws that I didn't know existed.
Right? That's how hard it is to obey the law if you're a small business.
If you're a small business, you will violate laws you didn't even know were laws.
Now, I can't tell you what the two cases were because I had to sign something that says I won't ever talk about them.
Part of the reason the court, I think, doesn't want you ever talk about them is because it's embarrassing, because they shouldn't be laws in the first place.
But two laws, if I describe to you what the law was and then what we did as a small business, you would say to yourself, are you effing kidding me?
That was a law?
How could you possibly have known you had even violated that law?
And by the way, no victims.
No victims. In both cases, people were given what they wanted.
And it broke the law.
No victims. Everybody got what they wanted.
There was no fraud.
Nobody was fooled.
Nobody was lied to.
There was nothing sketchy whatsoever.
And it violated two laws, and I had to settle in both cases because the violation of the law was perfectly clear.
I just didn't know it existed, nor did anybody else associated with the business.
So the category of those things suggests that maybe there was, let's say, a prejudice against the organization that That caused them to dig deeper into unrelated things, because I don't think they were originally accused of all the crimes that they were convicted of.
I think that these were things that they discovered in the process of looking at other stuff.
I might be wrong about that, but I think that they just uncovered a bunch of stuff.
Now, the stuff that they uncovered didn't seem to be related to one big scheme.
It was a bunch of individual things that individual people We're involved with.
It didn't even look like it came from the top.
So in other words, there's no suggestion that Keith Ranieri specifically was ordering people to violate the law.
There may have been some of that.
I don't know. But it was just individual instances.
Now, I think that if you do enough individual instances of something that the law doesn't like, they can call you racketeering.
In other words, they can say it's not one person doing a bad thing.
It's a group. So maybe it's some kind of a group problem, and that's bigger.
Now you're racketeering, and maybe you've got some RICO problems and everything else.
So you can sum these things up to a bigger thing.
All right, then the other category is, let's talk about the underaged girl.
It's really hard to read any press that gets into the details, but there are some things about this that don't make any sense at all.
So one of the major claims is that this 15-year-old girl and two siblings came to live with the NXIVM folks, and it's because their father was a big fan of the program.
He went through it and had a great result, so he wanted his children to benefit too.
And so the parents said, yeah, go there.
Now, two of them were underage, two of the females, I guess.
So here are the things that kind of don't make sense in the story.
You ready? One of them is that the 15-year-old was imprisoned in one room with the windows covered and a mattress and a piece of paper that she could only write letters to Keith Ranieri saying she was sorry or something, I don't know, and that she stayed there for a year.
Now, when you first hear that, you say, okay, he needs to go to jail.
He needs to go to jail for a long time.
Because if you put a 15-year-old in a room and imprison her or him for a year, you need to go to jail.
But then you read another detail about it.
Here's the other detail.
It wasn't the cult that imprisoned her.
It was her family in the house that the family lived in.
So her family made her stay in that room.
Is that the cult?
I don't know. I mean, you could maybe say, well, the cult forced the family to do it.
But this gets me to the next question.
I'll talk about this in a moment.
So that sort of doesn't make sense, because it feels like if the family's doing it, It's still bad, but wasn't that more the family?
Next, there's a story that the older sister, the one who was older than 15, was getting a little flirty, I guess when she was 17, with Keith, the leader, and that when it started to look like it was going to get physical, Keith, the leader, said that she was under 18 and she was too young.
And so they waited until after she was 18.
This was the sister of the 15-year-old who will come into the story again.
But the story goes that he did sleep, or did have some kind of sex, with the 15-year-old.
Now does that story completely attract you?
That he would be telling one of the sisters, you have to wait until you're 18, And obviously he was interested in her, because as soon as she was 18, they got busy.
So does the person who is so concerned about somebody not being a minor suddenly not care about the other one?
And then I guess the story given was that he said that some people are more mature than other people.
But I believe that the evidence that he had sexual relationship with the younger one was hearsay.
Meaning that I don't believe that it came from anybody except another witness.
Meaning I think the sister is the one who said that the 15-year-old told her, and the sister is the one who said that Keith said it.
But I don't know if they have any direct evidence.
Meaning I don't know if Keith said it, you know, legally if he said it, and I don't know if the 15-year-old, who is now much older, she's in her late 20s, I guess, I don't know if she ever said it.
So these are just sort of questions I have.
It's like, do you actually have evidence of this?
Because we've got two pieces of evidence that don't disprove it.
They certainly don't disprove it, but they certainly raise some questions, and the press doesn't fill in those blanks.
So I've got questions. Now, let me say as clearly as possible, if anything happened with the underage girl, the legal system needs to be involved in whatever it comes up with.
Probably makes sense.
But there does seem to be a strong indication that there's maybe some kind of vendetta going on here, and that there might be some prejudice in the whole process.
But let me get to the most interesting part of this, because it gets into free will.
So the largest part of the accusations Or that he sort of brainwashed people into becoming sex slaves.
And I feel as though there's a blind spot here in how the normal public looks at this situation.
Because let me give you this example.
Let's say somebody came to you and said, I've got this proposition for you.
I would like you to be my slave.
And as part of that proposition, That situation, I would like you to give me personal, private information that will guarantee the privacy of this situation.
Blackmail, if you will.
Now, it's only blackmail, I suppose, if somebody used it, and there's no evidence that in this NXIVM, or in this DOS situation, I should say, there's no evidence that anybody ever used any of that blackmail.
And indeed, People left the organization.
So there were people who left the organization.
There's no penalty.
So we know that happened.
Now here's the question. If I say to you, here's the deal, you have to give me this information, and then you would be treated as my slave.
And let's say you agree to that.
You agree to be a slave, for whatever reason, and you agree to give that private information.
And then later you decide...
That you have to do what you're told because you have agreed to this situation.
Where's the crime, exactly?
Where's the crime?
Because it'd be one thing if somebody stole black male information and then used it against you, but there's no indication that happened.
It was all voluntary. So where does free will come into this?
Can a person not agree?
In this country, is it illegal to agree...
To be somebody else's slave and to give them private information that, of course, could be dangerous later.
Why is that illegal?
Now, let's say you did it with one person.
I'll bet that wouldn't be illegal, right?
But suppose one person did it to lots of people.
Let's say there was one person at the top and lots of people got involved.
Well, now it sounds like a bigger problem, right?
But isn't it the same thing that wasn't a problem, just multiplied?
There's more of it?
How many of these people enjoyed the situation from beginning to end, including the part where they voluntarily accepted a brand?
How many people were happy all the way through, from the moment they said yes, through all the process, all the way to the end?
And when it was a problem, how many of them said, Why is this a problem?
I don't even understand.
I voluntarily did this.
I enjoyed every minute of it.
What percentage of them said that?
I don't know. But I feel like probably more of them said they liked it, and probably more of them said, well, this is what I signed up for, than there were who ultimately changed their mind.
So there obviously has to be something more to this from a legal perspective that turned that into something illegal.
But I suspect that sexism is a really big part of this story because imagine, if you will, that you just reversed the genders.
Okay? Suppose there was a woman on top of a slave organization and all the slaves were men.
Would that woman ever go to court?
No. No.
All you'd have to do is reverse the genders And nobody would even see a crime.
Because they would say, well, men can make decisions, and if a man makes a decision to give you private information, and a man makes a decision to act as your slave, where's the bad?
Where's the crime? So here's the part that will make your head explode, I hope.
It made my head explode.
It's only a crime because, wait for it, society doesn't imagine that women can make up their own minds.
That's it. I think this whole thing got hyper-criminalized because society doesn't think women have agency over their own decisions.
And that they can be manipulated by this Svengali, you know, guru.
But if you reverse the genders, nobody would say that about a man.
They would just say, well, you dumbass.
You gotta enjoy your brand, dumbass.
You had it coming. Nobody would give a shit if you reversed the genders.
That's important.
Now, if I were going to argue this case, and I were the defense attorney, I would have gone right for that, and I think that the jury trial would have said, you're right.
If the agendas had been reversed, we wouldn't have had any problem with it at all.
I see in the comments that somebody of you were agreeing to.
So the reason that I talk about this, I see some of you are uncomfortable with the topic and saying, move on, get away from this topic.
The reason that this is relevant to everything else is persuasion and free will.
These are my primary topics.
When I talk about politics, it's generally through that filter.
Somebody says they're uncomfortable with how stupid this is.
Is it? See, here's your blind spot.
The blind spot is this.
You believe that the people who signed up as slaves were coerced.
Right? That's really the nature of the thing.
You believe they were coerced.
Now you're thinking to yourself, well, they were manipulated.
So they feel like they made their own decisions, but did they?
They were manipulated into making those decisions.
But again, you wouldn't have said this if it were men.
All right. Let's keep an eye on this.
There will be more news about this.
Oh, let me give you one update that you'll like.
So I was reading up on this.
CNN had an article. And in CNN, they mentioned Nikki Klein, who I interviewed on YouTube, who was a member.
And they said that they contacted Nikki Klein for a comment, and she declined to comment.
And so I texted Nikki Klein and said, CNN says you declined to comment, which seemed not necessarily true to me because she wants public attention.
Why would you decline to comment if you are actively engaged in trying to get attention for your point of view?
And so I said, did you decline to comment for CNN? What do you think she said?
No. She invited them to join the protest and cover it, which is where she is right now at the courthouse as part of a protest during the hearings.
So CNN, the one thing I could check wasn't true.
So just hold this in mind.
I talk about the Gelman amnesia all the time, where if you know about a story, you can tell all the things that are wrong about it.
But if you don't have any of your own information about a story...
It looks real to you.
I mean, you say, well, it's in the news.
It's probably true. But as soon as you know anything about it, you know it's not true.
What did I know about this story?
Nothing. I took a guess on one fact in a larger body of a story.
I just took a guess and I said, I'll bet this fact isn't true.
Picked up my phone and learned it wasn't true in less than 30 seconds.
Right? I mean, that's the world you live in, right?
So let me say, I don't believe any of the reporting about this NXIVM stuff.
If it turns out the underage girl stuff is true, then Keith deserves some prison time, I'm sure.
But the rest of the stuff?
It's really sketchy.
It's really sketchy.
And I think probably it needs to be addressed in some way.
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