Episode 1247 Scott Adams: You Might Have Heard Trump is Banned From Twitter. What Now?
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Content:
Banned for subjective opinions
Who was most responsible for capitol violence?
Whiteboard: Blame Chain
Social media and teachers unions under Biden
Subjective power to target people for destruction...
...Government, banks, social media, fake news
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Come on in. You may have heard that there is some news.
Thank goodness we've gotten past the holiday season and the news is plentiful and interesting and we can be entertained once again.
I don't know how long I will be still platformed coming to you at the moment on both the Periscope and YouTube platforms simultaneously.
But how long will I still have the ability But let's see if we can get through today.
And in order to enjoy this to its maximum potential, all you need is a cup or mug or glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask or vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Oh, it seems that there's some complaints from YouTube.
Let's see what we can do about that.
YouTube, are you happy?
That should make it better.
All right. You know, I own some Twitter stock, full disclosure.
But I don't know if it's going to go down that much on Monday.
I hear a lot of people saying that.
But what exactly is the other Twitter service you're going to use?
Parler and Gab are probably going to be taken down by Apple and the Apple Store and Google Pay.
I think Gab's already taken down.
So let's try this again with sound, okay?
All you need is a cup of mug, a glass, a canteen jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Simultaneous sip, go.
All right, well, the good news is I've ordered an adapter, so this problem where I can't be charging my iPad at the same time the microphone is plugged in should be solved by this afternoon.
Yeah, it was the best sip ever.
You're right. It was the best sip ever.
Let's talk about the news, not coffee.
Well, you all know that Twitter has banned Trump for eternity from Twitter.
Now, it's hard to imagine what that meeting was like.
I don't know if it was a physical meeting or a Zoom meeting, but don't you think Twitter had some kind of a management meeting to decide whether...
Trump should be banned forever.
Now, I think that the justification is that he might have been, in their opinion, fomenting some kind of, you know, trouble.
But how did they do the calculation of Because leaving Trump on there to say things, you could assess that with some risk.
You could say, okay, the things he says might cause more things like the attack on the Capitol.
So you don't want to have that risk.
So you can reduce it by taking him off the platform.
But isn't there an offsetting risk?
I mean, isn't there a risk of actual civil war?
How do you weigh those?
So let's say that taking Trump off the platform, if you were just going to go through the math of it, let's say that you believed it would be a 50% likelihood to reduce 20 deaths because there might be more unrest.
Let's say 20 people might be killed by the time all the unrest is done if Trump were allowed to stay on the platform and said things that got people fired up.
Maybe a 50% chance of 10 people dying.
Now, the way you would calculate that is you'd say a 50% chance of 10 people dying, just for analysis purposes, you'd treat it as 10 people.
So a 50% chance of 20 people dying, you'll weigh that as the value of 10 people.
It's not really 10 people.
This is just how you do the analysis.
And then you say, okay, but what about the other way?
Where you take him down...
And you anger 71 million people who feel that they've lost everything that makes the country the country.
Freedom of speech, freedom, basically the freedom to have an opinion and not be punished for it.
What is the risk of that?
Well, I would say the risk of that is full civil war, wouldn't you?
Like actual civil war.
Not the kind where some people are protesting and saying things and things like that.
But if you shut down the ability to communicate, or it even feels like you did, because Trump's such a big part of that communication, what would be the expected risk?
Now, I think the risk of an actual physical civil war is low.
But what is low?
5%? Let's put a number on it.
Let's say 5%. Is that fair?
Do you think that shutting down Trump from Twitter gives you a 5% chance of civil war that didn't exist before?
Is that too much?
So let's say 5% of civil war, what would be the expected risk or number of people who might die in an actual civil war?
Let's say a million.
You'd be guessing, right?
Let's say a million people could die in the Civil War.
So you would take 5% of a million, and you would compare it to 50% of 20, and you'd say, which is bigger?
5% of a million, it's a lot bigger.
So, if I were in that meeting, and somebody said, we're trying to reduce the risk to the country, and let's say it was entirely...
Non-political, and it just had to do with safety.
Or safety plus the future of Twitter, which would be similar.
If they don't protect safety, they're going to have to pay for that too.
So, if I were in the meeting, I would say it looks like you're taking a 50% chance of 20 people dying, 10 people, comparing it to, what, 50,000 people dying the other way?
So you've saved 10 at the cost of 50,000.
Now remember, we're only talking statistics, so that 50,000 is very unlikely.
Because it's unlikely there would be a civil war.
But what if it's a 5%?
That's how you do the analysis.
If it's a 5% chance more of civil war, you don't do that if you know how to make decisions.
So I asked on Twitter, ironically, whether this would be viewed as one of the biggest mistakes in American history.
And it could. You know, it's in that 5% range, but it could be one of the biggest mistakes in American history, actually.
Now, we don't know where it's heading yet, but in terms of its potential, it's potentially one of the biggest mistakes in all of human, well, American history, not human history.
So, one wonders, were there other considerations?
In other words, if it were just a business decision...
And if we're just based on saving the most people, is that the way you'd go?
Because it looks like exactly the opposite of what you would do if you wanted to save lives, or at least reduce risk.
Now, it could be that if 10 people died tomorrow because of something Trump did, that would look like Twitter is directly responsible.
Why didn't you do it sooner? So 10 people dying that can be blamed on you specifically...
You might take that more seriously than 50,000 people dying that maybe doesn't get blamed on you specifically.
You know what I mean? So it could be that it has to do with how blame would be attributed, and we'll talk about that a little bit more.
So I asked on Twitter, everything's sort of meta today, But I did a Twitter poll, which of course are highly unscientific.
They're just sort of interesting.
And I asked people, who do they think is most responsible for the Capitol protests?
Now, when I said that, I think most people understood that to mean, you know, with the violence, not just the peaceful part.
But who is most responsible for the protests which led to violence?
And the responders, I gave them four choices.
You could argue that there should be more choices.
But I said, would it be Trump, the fake news, social media, or Congress?
Now, of course, my Twitter followers lean pro-Trump.
But here's what they said.
They said 13% said Trump is most responsible for the capital problems.
46% said the fake news.
13% said social media, about the same as Trump.
And Congress got 29%.
So by far the two entities which are blamed the most for the capital of protest are the fake news and social media.
And social media, of course, is a booster of fake news and a creator of fake news.
So here's how I see the world.
Yeah, there's a whiteboard. Yeah, didn't see this coming, did you?
Bam! Whiteboard time.
Coming right at you.
Alright, here's how I see the world.
There is a blame chain, which is to say, it's not that one person had to do what they did in order to get the result we got.
It had to be way more than one person.
You had to have everything that was part of the causal chain had to be just the way it was.
To get just the result you got.
If you change any of those elements, you get a different outcome.
But, let's say you tried to apply that thinking to a murder.
And you say, wait, wait, it's not the murderer's fault.
Because all of the other things had to be placed before that murder could happen.
The victim had to be there.
Well, that's not the murderer's fault, right?
So it doesn't make any sense for a criminal situation.
Because when it comes to crime, you need a specific criminal to punish so that society can see people getting punished, and so there's a reason not to do the crime.
But in the criminal situation, you're really just looking at stopping crime.
You're not philosophically asking, well, who is really responsible?
Could it be the parents of the criminal?
Could it be society or the way they learn things?
Could it be that they were bullied in school?
Those could all be 100% true, and they could be 100% the cause.
But in the legal world, you just say, it's just got to be the person who pulled the trigger.
So let's agree that an analysis about the legal system and who's to blame would be unique and you would ignore a lot of reality because you have to for the legal system.
But let's say you're just saying, in general, whose fault is it?
I'm not putting anybody in jail.
It's not the court.
It's just we're talking.
And we're going to say, who actually should take the blame?
And here's how I see it.
You've got a fake news business which gave us the fine people hoax, the drinking bleak chokes, and non-stop bias.
You could say that it was on both sides.
You could say that Wright was biased and fake news, but it's just different fake news, and I won't argue with you on that.
My only point is, what would things look like if we had a reliable and credible free press?
Well, when the election happened, the free press would have done two things, if they were like a real free press.
They would have dug into each of the allegations, they would have created a master list and said, here are the allegations, here are the people debunking it, and here are the ones that were judged in court one way or the other.
And every citizen would be able to look at that and say, oh, okay, I was quite concerned about the integrity of the election, but now I see that the free press has done the work for me, They've investigated, they got other experts, they've debunked, and maybe they debunked them all.
What would be the outcome if a credible press, both the left and the right, looked into it, compiled a complete list, considered every claim, and debunked it all?
With experts, not themselves.
What would have been the outcome?
Well, not a riot.
Right? Why would you riot if you knew that your side lost fair and square?
You wouldn't. You'd say, damn it, got to try harder next time.
We lost fair and square. So I would say that the fake news is 100% responsible for the outcome.
They created this situation in which they took themselves out of the equation as a credible player.
And probably only made things worse.
I mean, you could point to elements of the press that promoted ridiculous conspiracy theories.
On the right, primarily.
So, how does the press not get blamed for this outcome?
Well, the reason is that the press's influence is harder to trace down to any individual person.
What about social media?
Social media is kind of a booster of the fake news that's full of hoaxes and conspiracies theories.
The algorithms divide us so that there's natural division that's worse than it would be normally without it.
So it's divided the country.
Now once you've divided the country and people are just going to take sides, because that's what social media did to us, what happens when there's any disagreement?
Does the disagreement get resolved in a reasonable way where people go, ah, I don't love it, but I'll compromise for the good of the system and stuff like that?
No. No, you can't get that.
You can't get a negotiated agreement where everybody goes away and goes, ah, it wasn't perfect, but we can live with it.
You can't get that if the social media is dividing the country.
People just go to camps and they think that's where they need to be.
So they've been brainwashed into this division through the algorithms and also the social media allows protests to organize.
So if you didn't have social media, I doubt you could have been as organized as they were to get people there, so that's part of it.
So I'd say social media, probably, if you removed social media, would the riots have happened?
I feel you could make a strong case, really strong, That without social media doing what it does, intentionally and unintentionally, you wouldn't have the riots.
So are they responsible?
If they didn't do what they were doing, it wouldn't have happened.
So are they to blame?
Well, the answer is they have 100% responsibility, at the same time that the fake news has 100%.
Because if they didn't do what they were doing, probably we wouldn't have had this outcome.
Now let's take Congress and state governments.
They gave us a non-transparent election with lots of last-minute changes, and they resisted audits.
Does this situation pretty much guarantee that sooner or later you're going to have an election-related riot?
It does. It guarantees it.
Now, it wouldn't necessarily guarantee it if you didn't also have social media dividing the country and the fake news doing the same, really.
So is Congress and the state governments collectively, are they responsible for the riots?
Yes. What percentage of responsibility would I give them?
100%. Because if they'd done their job and given us transparent elections, or let us audit them, or not made last-minute changes which destroyed the credibility of the system, if they had not done these things, we wouldn't have had protests.
So 100% blame.
Social media, 100% blame.
Fake news, 100% blame.
Any one of them could have done a good job, or a different job, and gotten a different outcome.
But they didn't.
They didn't. So what about Trump's calls to protest, the language he used?
Was it responsible for the bloodshed?
Yes. Yes, it was.
Because Trump easily could have done something else.
He could have said, look, absolutely no violence.
I don't want to see anything like that.
If you come to D.C., make sure you're in the safe zones.
Don't bring any lead pipes.
He could have said that.
But he didn't.
And so I backed his removal from office.
Because that was a pretty big mistake.
But I do not back Trump's removal from office without an equal amount of punishment for the other entities which have equal responsibility.
Now again, the way our legal system is organized and the way we're all trained is that the last person who does something is the guilty one.
And if it were a legal case or a lawsuit, yeah, that's the way we treat it.
You have to, because there's no practical way to treat it any other way.
You wouldn't really know what to do with these other entities.
It's too hard to trace the influence, but you know it's there.
So here's my take.
Should Trump be removed from office for this specific infraction, which probably did lead to some deaths?
I'd say yes. And I think it's an easy call because he only has a few days left in office, and what was he going to do anyway, right?
And if you're going to send a message to say presidents should not act this way, you know, to drum up any kind of attack on the Capitol, you could argue that his exact words never said anything like that, and you'd be right.
There was nothing in his exact words that told anybody to do anything violent.
But you know he could have played it differently, right?
It's not what he said that was a problem.
In my opinion, he didn't say anything that was a problem.
It's what he didn't say.
It's what he could have said, easily knew that he could have said.
So I think that accepting responsibility for that is fair.
If you will also let him accept credit for things he did in his presidency, which I think were unparalleled and incredible.
But can't you hold both thoughts?
Can't you say he was really good at this?
This part, not so good?
That's fair, right? Is there anybody who can't hold those two thoughts?
You probably shouldn't follow me if you can't.
Alright, so here's my take.
The scariest part about this system I just described is that social media and the fake news, more of the fake news working through the social media, they're the ones who can assign blame.
So we have a system that if you had designed the system from scratch, people would laugh at you.
They would laugh at you. All right, let me describe the system as if I were designing it from scratch.
All right, I'm going to build a system.
So we'll have something called the free press, and we'll have this thing called the government, and there'll be a public, and this is how they'll all work together.
Now, there's one bug in the system, I gotta admit, and it is that one of the entities can cause the problems in society, and they're the only ones who can distribute the blame.
And I'd say, hold on, I probably heard that wrong.
Are you saying you're intentionally designing a system where the people who are the main cause of all of our problems are also the only ones who can assign the blame?
And the person would say, yeah, yeah, that's what we're doing.
I go, well, hold on, wait a minute.
Do you not see a problem here?
You just said that the ones who caused the problems, let's say the fake news, you're saying they also get to blame other people for the problems that they caused right in front of you?
Yeah, that's the system.
What would you do if somebody presented you with that system?
You'd laugh. You would literally laugh.
You'd say, well, that's not going to work. Because obviously the people causing the problems are going to blame other people, like Trump.
Now Trump made it easy.
He made it easy to blame because he didn't play it right.
So that's the problem with being a politician.
If you make it easy, they're going to come for you.
So this is a completely unworkable system for the long run.
I don't know exactly...
I don't know exactly what we're going to do to fix this, but I do expect there will be enough ingenuity, enough A-B testing, enough free market stuff, and enough energy to probably find some alternatives.
It's just not obvious what they're going to be.
Now, the public is quite good at solving things eventually.
We're pretty good problem solvers.
But I've got to say, it's not obvious to me what you do about any of this.
Because right now you see Trump losing his, effectively, his freedom of speech by being deplatformed from Twitter.
But these other entities, I don't think they're going to lose their freedom of speech, are they?
Because they've got to blame other people.
So as long as the fake news can just make stuff up, what are you going to do?
Let me suggest a possibility.
I'm just going to brainstorm right now.
We watched Trump get kicked off not just for inciting violence, but I think they would have kicked him off anyway for making election claims that social media says are not true.
But you know what? Social media also needs to do a little bit better job on the fake news because, for example, these hoaxes, the fine people hoax, the drinking bleach hoax, those were allowed to spread.
What do you think did more damage to the country?
The fine people hoax or Trump telling people to protest in D.C., which led to the violence?
Which do you think hurt the country more?
I don't think it's close.
I think the fine people hoax is one of the most damaging things that's ever happened.
Not even close.
It's maybe 1,000 to 1.
I wouldn't compare them.
As horrible and tragic as it is for five people to die and all those people being injured, completely unacceptable on every level.
But to find people hoax is worse by maybe a thousand times worse.
It's not even close to what it did to this country.
But social media allows that to stand.
Now, that's an obvious lie.
You just look at the transcript.
Oh, obvious lie.
Why is that allowed to stay?
Could it be that the real way to solve this is to put pressure on social media to wait for it, wait for it, use their own standards?
Because that's a pretty strong argument, isn't it?
Hey, social media, we'd like you to use your own rules.
Just use them consistently.
And I think we would need to pick a few items, let's say we being anybody who's concerned about the issue, pick a few items and just die on that hill.
Just say, look, as long as you're allowing people to say that the fine people hoax is a real thing, and that you can just say that on social media with no repercussions, just pick one thing and say...
You need to be regulated or shut down if you can't treat these the same.
Right? Now, wouldn't you think, there's a question, would it be possible to do a lawsuit in which you just pointed out this difference and said that it's two classes of people being treated differently by the same company?
Is that legal?
One class of people being Republicans, let's say, the other part being non-Republicans, could a social media company treat them completely differently?
When their policy says, their own policy says, they don't.
Their policy doesn't say anything about Republicans and Democrats.
It just says, you know, information that's terribly wrong and might be dangerous to the country, they're going to ban.
What if I agree with that?
What if conservatives said, hey, I like this?
What if conservatives embraced it?
And said, absolutely, here's our list of other things you should ban on your platform.
And let's just go for it.
Let's do it consistently.
Let's do it once.
Let's do it right.
Let's get rid of the following lies.
Now, probably it would be good to have a list of maybe five good lies.
Like the five top lies that social media allows.
And you pick the ones that are the most damaging.
The ones that literally you can say, okay, that probably killed somebody.
For example, when the fake media said that President Trump was suggesting drinking bleach, which never happened, or anything like it, nothing similar, nothing like it.
And if you still think that happened, you need to read up on it.
But what happens when the fake media says your president is so unscientific and dumb that he said drink bleach, which never happened?
What does that do to people's compliance when the president says maybe you should wear masks?
He was a little reluctant, but, you know, well, he got there.
Do people say, yeah, I'm going to listen to the guy who said drink bleach?
No. No.
They discredited Trump, so anything useful he might have said, and he did eventually say wear masks, didn't have any effect, because he's the drink-bleaching guy, according to the media.
So you could easily, I think, find strong arguments that say that the two sides are being treated unequally, and maybe the Supreme Court would hear that.
Now, I'm not a lawyer. Is that a case?
Can somebody who actually knows anything about the law, which would not be me, tell me, could you bring a case about unequal treatment when it's so obvious?
This is the most obvious case you could ever see.
There's no jury in the world who would disagree that they're making up They're making up stuff and publishing it like it's true.
All right. So maybe that's the way to go.
As we're learning more about the protests themselves, and I have to admit I was taking a little bit of a humorous approach to it because there was a guy in a Viking helmet and blah, blah, blah.
But when you hear the details, there were apparently members of that group With lead pipes, and it was probably the lead pipes on the head that injured the cops, and at least one died.
And let me say this as clearly as possible.
Anybody who had a lead pipe and used it, in this situation, should be the death penalty.
You know, normally maybe not, if it was like a fight or something, but if you're trying to overthrow the government, If you attack the government with lead pipes, the government in this case including the security force, I don't even know if that's jail.
That should be execution, shouldn't it?
If you get all the way into the Capitol building and start killing people with a deadly weapon, That should be a death sentence.
I'd be okay with that.
As opposed to all the peaceful protesters, of course not.
There's some fake news going around on a video.
I've told you that video is the biggest liar.
We used to think if you saw it on video, you saw it with your own eyes, and therefore it's true.
It's right there on video. But of course, the last couple of years we've learned that video is the biggest liar.
It's the easiest way to lie, is a misleading edit.
And there's a video on the internet that people are saying in the comments that what they're seeing in the video is that the law enforcement opened up a door and let the protesters into the Capitol.
So that's what the comment on the video says.
You can see it with your own eyes.
There are police officers opening the door to let people in.
And then you watch the video, and nothing like that's on the video.
You see a door open, but there's no suggestion that the police did it.
There was somebody on the inside, but probably a protester who got in there and opened the door.
The ability of people to be fooled has gone to a whole new level, it seems like.
You can actually look at the video that doesn't show that thing, and then tweet it with a statement that says, look at that thing on this video, and it's just not there.
This is not there.
What the hell?
All right. Apparently, according to Rasmussen, Trump's approval is up since the protests.
What do you think Trump's approval is going to be after he gets kicked off of Twitter?
He has been. I feel like it might go up.
What happens to Trump's approval the less you can hear about him tweeting?
It goes up.
But here's the interesting thing to me.
So the things that Trump got banned for, ultimately, were nothing you should get banned for in any of our opinions.
I mean, it's obviously subjective.
But I don't think anybody thought there was any content that was bannable.
Even the ACLU, no friend of the president, even they're saying it went too far.
But apparently one of the tweets just before he got banned was he was talking about starting a competing platform to Twitter.
Now is it a coincidence, is it a coincidence that as soon as Trump said something that was vital to the bottom line of Twitter, that he was going to start a competing platform, that that's when he got kicked off the platform for something that didn't look like a big deal?
Is that a total coincidence that That he was using Twitter to take down Twitter, and they banned him?
I don't think so.
I mean, I don't know if anybody was at the meeting and said it out loud.
Hey, Trump's talking about a competition.
Let's use an excuse to kick him off.
I doubted anybody said that out loud.
But if you own Twitter stock, and you see Trump talking about making your stock worth less...
Which way are you going to decide?
If you own Twitter stock, would you let Trump stay on there talking about stuff that would make your stock price go down?
I think you'd find a reason to get him off, and it might not be the strongest reason, if you know what I mean.
If you catch my meaning.
So I would say that everything about the way Twitter has treated that raises questions.
So Dominion Voting System...
Is suing Sidney Powell for $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit?
And I think she's got trouble.
She's got trouble.
Because the claims that she made were really specific and really, really debunked.
So she might have a problem there.
And when I saw the number, suing for $1.3 billion, I thought, well, that's like a crazy number, right?
You can't sue for...
There's somebody yelling at me in all caps.
Scott spelled wrong with one T in all caps.
This isn't about stocks, Boomer.
Did I say this was about stocks?
It's one variable.
It's one variable. All caps, guy.
Relax. Relax.
I have some advice for you, all caps, guy.
You'll probably see a lot of people making comments in a public way.
You know, they'll write their comment and then it'll show up on the screen and then sometimes thousands or tens of thousands of people will read those comments.
That's not for you.
That's not for you. You maybe should whisper to people that you know really well.
Tweeting in public?
Not your strong suit.
Just rethink it. That's all I'm saying.
Maybe put your energy somewhere where you're not embarrassed.
Anyway, when I thought this $1.3 billion defamation suit against Sidney Powell, that's probably not too far off from what this is going to cost them.
I wouldn't be surprised if Dominion lost over a billion dollars.
I mean, that certainly seems possible.
Because if people believe these allegations...
Now, I, of course, have said that any digital system can be compromised.
So if you believe that their digital systems are the ones that have not been compromised, it's probably because you did a deep audit of it yourself, right?
Because nobody else did.
Nobody audited that stuff.
So I would say that I have no specific reason to think there's anything wrong with this system or any other, except that 100% of the times that you have this set up, somebody's going to hack it every time.
You don't know if it was this year.
You don't know if it's happened in the past.
You don't know if it'll happen in the future or when.
But it happens every time.
It's not like this will be the one situation.
There won't be a hacker.
That's not a thing. Here's some more stuff that got removed.
I guess Steve Bannon's The War Room got removed from YouTube.
Google Play is getting rid of Parler, and Apple might as well.
Gab is already banned on Google Play and Apple Store.
So if you don't think this is serious, it's pretty serious.
I thought I went down 40,000 followers on Twitter in the last few days.
And is it a coincidence that the purge began...
Right on January 6th when Biden was sworn in.
It feels as if that date was picked because that would be the safest day to do it.
So I don't know how many of the removed users are because of bots being removed.
I think that's the biggest reason.
I think the main reason was Getting rid of bots.
But I think the...
Yeah.
But you also wonder how many people just left the platform.
So a lot of people left and have gone to the Locals platform.
I will tell you that if I get banned here, you could find me on a subscription platform called Locals.
And the URL would be Scott Adams, all one word.
So I'll be there if anything happens to this.
Lindsey Graham, he tweeted, he says, I'm more determined than never to strip Section 230 protections from big tech.
Now keep in mind, Lindsey Graham, if you strip those protections from big tech, you're also stripping it from Parler and Gab.
And Parler and Gab would go on a business pretty much the same day because they allow more free speech, which allows more bad voices to be part of the system.
And so if they had to start moderating all of their voices, if Parler and Gab did, then they would just become Twitterers.
So the only choice they would have is to become Twitter, at which point there's no point in having them.
Or they'd just give Sudan a business for having Nazis on their website.
So, Lindsey Graham...
You're a little bit too late.
I don't see any way that a Section 230 thing could work in the coming administration.
Do you? I don't believe that the opportunity to regulate the social media companies exists anymore.
I think on about January 6th, even the possibility of regulating the social media companies just went away.
So, you know, Lindsey Graham can talk about it, But it's not going to happen because the social media companies just have too much power and they're too connected with the Democrats.
It just can't happen.
There's just no way that can happen.
So there's no point in talking about it, actually.
Weird story that there was a lot of job loss recently in December, but women lost jobs at a rate of 10 to 1 compared to men.
Or 9 to 1 or something.
Something in that range, you know, like 10 to 1.
Now, why would that make sense in a world in which female employment had been zooming to the point where actually for a while it was higher, there were more women working than men?
I mean, that's how good female employment was.
It just dipped below that number.
But why would it be that women would lose jobs 10 to 1 or something in that range?
And the answer that I saw, I don't know if it's true, is the teachers' unions.
Is there anything that the teachers' unions haven't broken?
Because the teachers' unions are keeping the schools closed.
They have the power to influence that.
And because we live in a sexist, gender-sexist country, more women are staying home because the kids have to stay home from school than the men.
Now, Who saw that coming?
So I don't think there's anything that you can't blame on teachers unions at this point.
So teachers unions are, you know, brainwashing people that, you know, gets you this kind of situation.
They're preventing school choice, which is the fundamental cause of structural racism.
Because if you can't get a good education...
You're not going to get ahead.
So as long as the teachers unions are destroying the country from the bottom up by destroying education and the opportunity to have competition and education would make it good, as opposed to what it is now, teachers unions are now invulnerable because of the Biden administration.
So now teachers unions, the most malign influence in the country, are now completely safe.
The second most malign influence, which also has lots of benefits, right?
There aren't anything that's completely bad or completely good, would be social media.
And social media now is completely invulnerable under a Biden administration.
So the two most negative forces in the country just became invulnerable under Biden.
Am I wrong? Is that hyperbole?
The two most destructive forces just became invulnerable.
I think that's true. I don't think that's an exaggeration.
Alright. How long do you think Republicans will be allowed to use banking?
You know, when we had lots of non-digital systems and people could be anonymous and you could use your little bank and it's not connected to anything else, everybody could make mistakes or be unpopular and they could still live a life.
But what happens when you get to the point where you say something in a tweet and all of your banking gets turned off?
You know that's a thing, right?
That's a thing already.
That if you say something in public that is not popular, then you can't bank.
Now, what can you do in this world if you can't bank?
Well, you could try to get by with crypto, but it's not much of a life, right, at the moment.
That'll probably correct itself in a few short years.
But at the moment, you wouldn't be able to start a business, get a loan, anything.
So the ability of the fake news to just cancel you is reaching higher and higher levels to the point where once the government gets this power, and it will, of course, the government will be able to just turn off any critic.
So let's take me, for example.
Have I done anything that would, in your opinion, earn me a ban or get me kicked off of banking?
I think the answer is no.
And I try really, really hard to make sure I know where that line is, and I don't say anything that would cause trouble.
And if there's a story in the news that turns out to be not true, I think I'm pretty consistent in saying, oh, I was wrong, not true, as soon as I know.
I think you would find that I've probably debunked more conspiracy theories than anybody, so I'm not really in the business of promoting them as much as debunking them.
So if you were to look at my body of work, you'd say, no, he's okay.
He'll be okay.
But here's the thing.
There's a lot of subjectivity involved in that, isn't there?
How much subjectivity would it take to To take me from my safe little content to just stretch that over the line a little bit to where I'm bannable, just because of somebody's opinion of what I said, maybe not even because of what I said.
Now, am I vulnerable to being banned because someone else has an incorrect opinion of what I said?
The answer is yes. Our current system allows somebody else to say, you know, in my opinion, Scott, You've crossed the line.
Even if I haven't.
Even if I haven't.
And they can just turn me off.
Now, the banks can do the same thing.
How long do you think it'll take before they figure that out?
So here's the play.
You might see people like me targeted for destruction.
I would expect that.
You're seeing it already, by the way.
If you're following me on social media, you know that they are coming for me.
And there will always be a reason that's not the real reason.
So the reason will be somebody else's opinion turned into fake news of what I did or did not say.
The fake news will become what I have to explain, but I can't.
Do you know why I won't be able to explain it away?
Because it's on social media and fake news.
And they control who sees what.
I don't have a chance.
I mean, I can say what I can say, but they could just suppress it.
So, let's say this scenario.
Let's say there's somebody who's got a strong association with Jack Dorsey.
Or let's just say somebody on Twitter.
Let's take Jack out of it.
It doesn't have to be his personality because that just makes everything confusing.
Let's just say it's Twitter.
And there's some executives there who could push the button and erase me.
And some politician knows this person at Twitter and says, you know, it would really be good for the cause to get rid of a guy who talks about persuasion and is maybe helping the other team.
Wouldn't it be good if there were less of him?
And now the person at Twitter...
Hypothetically, this is just a speculative kind of thing, says to themselves, well, I'll take a look at him.
And if he's done anything to violate our guidelines, then we'd have cause, but I'm not aware of anything.
So then he starts looking at my Twitter feed.
Do you think somebody who's looking for a problem could find one?
Every time, yeah. There would be no chance that they couldn't find one.
And yet, there's nothing there, as far as I know.
I've never done anything that would be even really close to that line that I know of.
I mean, I'm not aware of anything that's even close to the line.
But so easily it could be interpreted as something that I didn't say, meaning more than it meant.
Wrong contacts, leave out something, etc.
So then what happens if that Twitter executive does a favor for his friend, the Democratic senator?
This is all just made up.
None of this is happening. And they take me off.
What do I do? What's my recourse?
My recourse is nothing.
Nothing. There's no recourse.
Twitter was talking at one point about having some kind of independent mechanism for judging who gets kicked off, but that's not happened.
And I think that enough time has gone by that you should assume it won't.
I don't think there's much chance that's going to happen.
So, if there's no process for getting kicked off, and you can get kicked off because of an opinion, somebody else's opinion, not your own, why wouldn't they come for me?
Really? Right? Why wouldn't they try to get rid of me?
It would be the smart play.
So I think people like me will be targeted for destruction.
And if you said, well, Scott, you can go to one of those other platforms.
No, you can't. No, you can't.
You could try, but not many people would see you there.
And you wouldn't be interacting with the other side, which is a little fun of it anyway.
But what happens if they turn off my banking?
That could happen. How hard would it be for somebody to get to somebody in one of the payment processing companies, Stripe or something like that, and just say, you know, you've got standards, Stripe, and this guy.
And then Stripe would say, well, what did he say?
You know, we need some information.
We can't just ban somebody because you want them.
I go, well, look at the news.
Look what it says on social media that this guy did.
He's already been banned by Twitter.
Already got kicked off of YouTube.
So why are you giving him banking?
See what happens?
You don't need any new rules.
You don't need any new laws.
You don't need anything to change.
And people like me can be kicked off of both social media and banking with no recourse.
No recourse.
And that's our current situation.
That's right now.
Now, you don't think that's dangerous?
The only thing that I would add to that...
I might get kicked off social media right now.
Let's see if I can word this in a way that keeps me here for another day.
All right? Yeah, Stripe did it to Gavin McGinnis, somebody saying in the comments.
So this is real, by the way.
What I'm describing is something that already happens.
I'm not talking about something that might happen.
You get that, right? This is happening now.
I'm just saying that they could just do more of it, and it could pick me up easily.
It would be easy to disappear me if they want to.
But here's the part that...
I've got to say this really carefully.
Let me say it generally...
I'm going to say it in the most general way, and then you can fill in with your own mind what I mean.
It goes like this.
I'm probably the last person you want to fuck with.
I'll just say that.
Probably just about the last person in the world you want to fuck with.
Because I am really, really flexible about most things.
I'm really, really flexible.
If somebody makes a mistake or they criticize me, eh, no big deal.
I mean, I tend to respond to criticisms, but that's just for fun.
But if I got taken out just to take me out, that might put me in a whole different mood.
A whole different mood.
And I'm just saying.
I'm the last person you want to fuck with.
So we'll see what happens there.
The FBI released a poster of 10 of the Capitol rioters who, they have good pictures of their faces, and they're publishing the 10 faces of Because they're looking for the public to help them identify them.
What's wrong with this story?
Before I tell you what's wrong with the story, this is being reported, I think it's a real thing, that the FBI has 10 faces that are asking the public to help them identify.
What's wrong with that story?
See if you know.
And remember, the faces are really clear.
You can see them really well.
What's wrong with the story that they're asking the public to identify them?
Here's what's wrong with the story.
They don't need the public to identify them.
They know who they are. So why are they asking the public?
When I say they know who they are, Have you heard that there is facial identification applications?
You don't think the FBI has facial identification such as, I don't know which one they use, but Clearview AI is the leader in the field.
You think there's nobody in the FBI who has the app that thousands of law enforcement agencies use routinely?
Nobody at the FBI Knows that there's a facial recognition app that they can have in, I don't know, 30 minutes?
It would take them to buy a license for it?
What's wrong with the story?
The FBI publishing these faces?
I don't know what the purpose is, but it's certainly not identification.
Because they know who they are.
You could call somebody today.
I could literally do this.
I could literally, personally, get their identities probably in half an hour if I had access to the app, but you have to be law enforcement to do it.
So you could pretty much find somebody in law enforcement who has the app and without any violation of any licenses or privacy say, hey, do you have the app?
And let's say some police officer somewhere says, yeah, we use this all the time.
And you say, did you see this tweet?
Here's ten faces.
Point your app at the tweet and tell me who they are.
And this is how hard it would be.
Here's the tweet.
And then you take your other phone with the app and you just point it at it.
And you identify them.
Instantly. Now you're telling me the FBI doesn't know that?
What is the FBI doing?
Is it part of demonizing Trump supporters?
Is that what's happening?
Because I can't think of a reason they do it.
Unless it's just some automatic process.
Maybe it's just the process that they always publish them or something.
I don't know. But I got a question, because they certainly don't need to do it.
By the time that was tweeted, they had all those names.
Long before somebody could have done a Photoshop to put the 10 faces onto a page...
The time it would take you to Photoshop the page of the ten faces is way longer than it took to identify them.
Literally, this is them identifying them.
Snap. And there's the name.
That's literally it.
If you haven't seen it done, it's shocking.
It's shocking that it works, and it basically works every time, for all practical purposes.
Have I considered starting my own bank?
Well, I do have a crypto, the WEN. So I have my own currency.
That's a start. Oh yeah, and somebody's saying the FBI thing is training people to snitch.
Maybe. I don't have a better theory.
I don't know that that's true, but...
Why else would you put on a list and ask for help on something you don't need help on?
There's some other reason.
It's definitely not identification.
Why limit it to law enforcement?
Well, you don't want your stalker to have it.
There are reasons that facial recognition probably needs to be limited.
If you were to fast forward 20 years from now, yeah, it'll be ubiquitous.
In 20 years. But at the moment, while we're feeling our way through the market, I think limiting it to law enforcement makes sense.
That's just a good guardrail for now.
But it'll change. Treating them like outlaws?
Well, that's the point, is that they were breaking some laws.
What is the freest place on earth?
I don't know. Good question.
Was there a poster of Antifa and BLM rioters?
Probably. I mean, I wouldn't say there wasn't.
That's why I'm saying the FBI just might have a process where it doesn't even matter if they've already been identified.
There's just somebody's job it is to put things on posters.
So maybe the person whose job it was to put things on a poster just went ahead and did it, even though it didn't have to happen.
Treason needs to be dealt with.
Well, here's the problem with treason.
Treason would be helping China take over the United States.
Unambiguous. And we'd all agree, well, there's some treason right there.
There's a traitor. But what if there's a genuine and legitimate disagreement about who won the election and who is the one doing the coup?
So if you're trying to take over the Capitol because you're trying to stop a coup, is that the same as taking over the Capitol because you are a coup?
Because who was it who got to decide that the protesters were a coup versus people trying to stop a coup?
Who got to decide?
Well, social media, fake news.
They get to decide.
Now, you can say to me, but Scott, Scott, Scott, the protesters were operating under bad information.
Bad information about the election having problems, and since there was no court case or official ruling that there was any problem, that therefore they're the treasonous ones.
No, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense.
If they were just mistaken, it's not treason, they were just mistaken.
If they thought they were doing a counter-coup to a coup that just took over the United States, they are patriots.
They are misguided patriots, and the ones with the pipes broke the law, and they will have to pay for that.
But why were they doing it?
Were they doing it because they thought they were overthrowing a legitimate government, or did they do it because they thought they were stopping a coup, which would have been cheating in the election to get the wrong people elected?
I think the minimum requirement to call somebody treasonous or a traitor We're good to go.
In general, they were working for the benefit of the country to keep the United States strong and to make sure that it had not fallen to a coup.
That is literally the opposite of treason.
That is opposite.
Because the only thing that matters is what they thought when they were doing it, in terms of how you label it.
Now, in terms of what they were thinking when they did it, Doesn't make any difference to the criminality of it.
And unfortunately, we all have to accept that.
Because you can't have a system where somebody with a pipe can get away with it because they had bad information.
If you kill your neighbor with a pipe and then later say, Ah, I had bad information.
I thought my neighbor did something bad.
Turns out he didn't.
But, you know, you can't convict me because in my mind I thought I was actually doing a good thing.
That doesn't work.
You can't use that with the legal system.
You just sort of have to blame the person who had the pipe in their hand or the whole system falls apart.
But treason? Treason's an opinion and it's not based on any observation.
Do you think there was anybody in that crowd who would have said to you, Yeah, we do think Biden won fair and square, but still we don't like it.
So we're going to try to overthrow the government because even though the election was fair, we don't like the outcome.
Do you think you could get even one person to say that?
Literally one. Could you get one person to say that in that crowd?
I'll bet not. I'll bet there wouldn't be one person who in their minds thought they were doing anything remotely like treason.
They thought they were protecting the country.
Now, why is it that somebody could be so uninformed, according to other people?
How could they be so uninformed, according to social media and fake news?
Well, could it be that information comes from the sources that don't give good information?
Fake news and social media.
I would think they would be to blame.
So, that's enough for today.
Nobody knows exactly where all this is going.
But there is a breaking point.
Nobody knows where it is.
But there is a breaking point.
Trump, I think, is a special case in every way.
He's a special case. And he certainly was intentionally pushing Trump You know, pushing the boundary.
He knew he was doing it.
He knew the odds of him being banned were really high.
So I'm not sure we can count him like everything else.
But if you see me disappear, and I think that's at least a 50-50 chance, at least, maybe higher.
If you see me disappear, that's the beginning, not the end.
That's all I'm going to say.
If I disappear, that's the beginning.
And you'll know what to do at the time.
Alright, that's all for now. I'll talk to you tomorrow.
