Episode 1282 Scott Adams: Let's Talk About Well-Dressed People Misinterpreting Each Other, Also Known as Politics
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Was President Trump close to needing ventilator?
Jamie Raskin used "Fine People" HOAX
"Tapestry Approach" to impeachment guilt
Claims of documented evidence...without a source?
Governor Cuomo top adviser says they hid info?
Fenix Ammunition won't sell to Biden voters?
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It's always true. It's going to be one of the best coffees with Scott Adams all day long.
Yeah. And I can almost guarantee that by not doing another one.
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Go. Oh, I was wrong.
It's making impeachment better, too.
Yeah, didn't see that coming.
Sneaks up on you.
That's how they get you.
Savor it. Savor it.
Okay, now we can go on.
Dr. Funk Juice.
Good to see you. I'm in a good mood today.
For no particular reason.
Do you ever have that happen? I think it's just a good night's sleep.
You get a good night's sleep and suddenly the world is a wonderful place even when it isn't.
Let's talk about all the news.
Such that it is.
Elon Musk tweeted today that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely.
The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.
Now I wasn't sure if he was pairing that tweet To an earlier tweet of his own in which he said that he'd invited Kanye to talk within the Clubhouse app.
It's an app where you can have audio conversations.
And so he may have been referring to that specifically, but somebody noted the similarity in our thinking.
Now, is the similarity in our thinking, because one of us influenced the other, Or is it because we are both, let's say, interested in, I won't say believers, but interested in the simulation theory?
Because if we are a software simulation, there might actually be a reason the most entertaining outcome is the one that happens.
Because, in other words, we might be some, you know, multiplayer game in which...
Interesting elements are introduced intentionally, either by an AI or by a game designer, I guess.
So, there's an interesting question.
Somebody says, is Elon Musk a hypnotist?
Well, let me point out the following.
Elon Musk was originally part of the PayPal founders that included Reid Hoffman and...
Why am I forgetting there for a second?
The other Trump-supporting billionaire whose name I'm just forgetting for a moment.
But you notice that there was a surprising number...
Yeah, Peter Thiel, sorry.
Peter Thiel. There were a few others, but those are three famous ones who went on from there to larger fortunes.
Let me tell you.
Those three people have very deep talent stacks.
And I can say from personal contact, at least in two cases, that they just understand more topics than other people.
And part of what some of them understand, I would think all three of them, is the topic of persuasion.
And they do all seem to understand it.
I think Reid Hoffman was maybe the person who came up with the scheme for suggesting friends on social networks.
You know, if you have some friends, it'll suggest other friends, and there's some other techniques like that.
So if you look at the success of a lot of their products, the psychology is built in.
When Elon Musk...
Builds into his cars the ability to have, what is it, like a poison gas protection mode or something.
He's replacing the need for advertisement by simply being interesting.
Now, how many people are smart enough to do that?
Consistently. To just get rid of advertisement, but to consistently just be interesting so people can't stop talking about you.
You don't need advertising then.
Well, he does that, right?
And you see him doing it across his whole line.
So when you see the various things that at least three of the founders of the PayPal situation, you see what they can do, and you see that they bring the skill set to different areas, and they just keep succeeding over and over again.
It's not an accident.
It's not an accident.
It's partly because their skill stack is so deep.
It includes understanding the psychology of situations.
So I would not say that he was a hypnotist per se, but his skill set definitely overlaps with psychology.
And if you've got somebody who has an engineering brain, think about this.
If you have an engineering brain, which Musk presumably was just born with and developed over time, and then you add to that...
The understanding of psychology and what motivates people?
You can be a billionaire, too.
Do you know the reason I'm not a billionaire?
Because I'm not an engineer.
If I were also an engineer, instead of just somebody who talks about them, I feel like I'd probably be a billionaire.
Because if you combine...
You know, high-level engineering, the kind of creative, entrepreneurial type that a Musk or a Thiel or a Reid Hoffman have, if you take that skill set, you combine it with understanding people, you're done.
You're done. That pretty much covered the whole frickin' world.
So it's not an accident that somebody like Musk succeeds.
You just look at his talent stack and say, well, yeah, how are you going to hold that back?
So I would say that it is likely that people who believe in the simulation, and when I say believe, I just mean the statistical understanding that it's a trillion to one likely that we're a simulation, But you can't know for sure.
At least we can't know yet for sure.
I think we will. I do believe that there will come a time when we can develop a test or a scientific way to look into it and we'll actually know if we're a simulation.
I think that's ahead of us.
Like literally we will know because we'll figure out a clever way to test it.
So, that's that.
You know, I said on Twitter today that most of what passes as politics these days is little more than well-dressed people misinterpreting what the other side said.
And a lot of people came in and said, willfully.
The other side is intentionally, willfully misinterpreting what the other side said.
And I'm here to tell you that that's an illusion.
I used to believe it myself.
I used to see one political side saying something that was obviously a lie, and I'd say to myself, well, they know they're lying.
They're doing it for effect, but they know they're lying.
I don't think so anymore.
Clearly, in some cases, they are lying.
But the more I spend time with people who are genuinely arguing their case...
The more it's obvious to me that the difference in news coverage, you know, who sees what news, completely determines your opinion.
So the people who only watch CNN, they do believe CNN when it says that the fine people hoax was real.
Why wouldn't they? If the only news you had seen said that the fine people hoax was real and you saw all these credible looking people saying it and saying it every day for two years, And it's all you saw.
Would you be lying when you repeated it?
You wouldn't be.
You wouldn't be lying at all.
You would actually frickin' believe it happened.
All the people who believe the drinking bleach hoax or the injecting disinfectants hoax, all the people who believe that really happened believe it because their entire news universe covered it like it happened.
They treated it like it was a real thing that happened.
Why wouldn't they believe it?
So this is a big deal in terms of your understanding of the world you live in.
Those people that you think are willfully lying to you and intentionally telling you an untruth, they're not.
Some are. There's no absolute here, right?
Some are. But not 90%.
I'll bet you a solid at least 90% literally believe the things they're saying.
Literally. And in fact, you could put a gun to their head and say, look, I've got a magic gun that will go off if you're lying.
They would stick with it.
At the risk of their own life, I do believe that they believe the things they're saying.
Most. Some not, but most.
All right. And by the way, if you were not a trained hypnotist, it would be hard for you to get to that place.
You would still think, well, it's still obvious.
It's a lie. Isn't it obvious?
You don't even need another news source to know that the president did not call neo-Nazis fine people.
You don't need a news source to tell you that didn't happen.
Common sense would tell you that didn't happen.
But it's so easy for people to buy into their team's narrative that I do believe they believe it, mostly.
Here's just a throwaway thought that I like to inject into the universe every now and then.
There are a number of things that we argue over politically that we don't need to.
And I would argue that immigration is one of those weird issues where the way we're approaching it is super...
It's disruptive, and it makes us fight with each other about where immigration should be, and what's right, and who's really the Nazi, and all the crazy stuff.
But what if, what if, let's say I'm president.
The day I become president, and people say, what is your immigration policy?
I say, I'll figure that out.
Here, we're going to use a system.
And the system is going to be this.
I'm going to get the smartest people, bipartisan economists, and I want them to tell us what measures we should look at in the economy or crime, or maybe drugs, etc.
Which measures should we look at to decide how much immigration to let in in any given year, and from what countries?
Why don't we just have a set of rules?
This is as if the GDP is over 4%, which would be really good, then you let in a little bit more workers because you're going to need workers.
If the GDP falls or unemployment reaches a certain rate, you cut it back because you don't want to be competing with your internal workers.
If I'm president and I present you with that proposition and say, look, Let's take you and I out of this.
Why am I arguing with you when neither of us really know the right answer?
Do you know the right number of people to let in to make the economy better versus too many?
Do you know that?
How would you know that?
How would you possibly know what is the right number of immigrants to let in?
You don't know that. I don't know that.
So pretending that we know the right number It's just like a stupid argument.
It's just two stupid people who don't know anything arguing with each other with their stupidity.
Nobody knows the right number.
But if we got this bipartisan group together and they said, look, under these conditions you let in more, under these conditions you let in fewer, under these conditions you let in, let's say, more people with technical degrees from India and other countries, under these conditions you let in more workers, It should be fairly objective.
Now, the people who come up with these standards could easily be wrong.
That's how economic things are, right?
They're not usually that good.
Economic projections and any kinds of triggers and stuff like that.
They're always going to be really gross.
But at least it would keep us from fighting with each other.
Wouldn't it be better if we were all just fighting with the algorithm and saying, hey, I don't think you should be 4%.
Maybe you should take that down to three and a half.
That would be a far more unifying argument to have.
So why am I arguing with another citizen when we should be on the same side?
Right? We should be on the same side.
We should be arguing about the process.
We shouldn't be arguing about the people.
As soon as you're arguing about me, you're on the wrong topic.
Let's figure out a process, a system that works perfectly.
At least as rational, even if it's not perfect.
If I ran for president, I would do it without telling you what my policies are.
And I would win.
Here's how I'd do it.
I would tell you what system I would use to arrive at my decisions.
And that's all I would tell you.
I wouldn't tell you what the decision will be.
I might predict what I think it will be.
But I won't tell you what it will be.
I'll tell you that the way I'll deal with it is I'll bring in the people on both sides.
I will publicize it.
I will actually broadcast my conversation with both sides.
We'll have some iteration where I've got some questions and they have to come back to me with some answers.
And when it's all done, I will present both arguments.
As president, I will present the argument that I disagree with as well as I can.
First. First.
So I would present first the argument I disagree with, and I would do the best job I could of genuinely selling it.
And then I would say, we understand why people think of this, because it's a pretty strong argument.
Then I would say, the full argument for the other side, let's say the side I've agreed to back, and I would say, This is a good argument, too.
And when I compare these two good arguments, I feel that this one has a little more value.
Here's why. We can't know which is better, because it's a complicated world and predicting things is crazy, but we can know this one has some qualities that we're looking for as a country, perhaps, or maybe some risk management qualities that we would all appreciate.
I'm pretty sure I could get elected president without telling you what any of the decisions would be.
Because the moment I tell you what the decision will be, you should stop trusting me immediately.
Because between the time that I say this is what I would do and the time that I could get elected and do anything about it, there could be a lot new information.
I might find out things that I didn't know.
I might become president and get the secret information and You know, the homeland security information I didn't know before and changed my mind.
So I'd rather tell you, here's my process.
I'm going to try to follow the Constitution.
Got some basic rules of, you know, what is fair and right for the world, but basically I'm going to let people argue it out in public, and I'm going to give full attention to the minority argument or the argument that's not going to win.
Full attention. You have to give them complete attention.
Otherwise you're not credible.
That's what most of our politicians are doing wrong today.
The best political way to sell something is to sell the other side's argument first.
That makes you look credible.
If you can explain the other side's argument as well as they explain it, and even better, it would be better, right?
If you can explain the other side's argument as well as they can explain it, and then you tell why your argument might be a little bit better than that, well, at least you're credible.
At least, right?
You're not trying to just be a manipulative, you know, dick, which is pretty much every politician at this point.
All right, so that's all fantasy, because I know that's going to happen.
We're learning now that President Trump was way sicker with the coronavirus than we thought.
They were actually thinking about putting him on a ventilator, which, as you know, is usually the end of the road, meaning that once you're on the ventilator, you don't come back.
And he was close to that, they say.
What do you make of the fact that we didn't know that?
What do you make of the fact that the White House apparently was lying to us about the severity of our leader's condition?
What do you make about that? Somebody says, is it true?
Yeah, that's the first question.
The first question is, is it true?
Can you believe it?
You know, it's the right question, but there are some specifics to it that make it sound real.
I'm completely on board with all of you who say you can't trust this automatically.
So don't trust it automatically.
It could be fake news.
But my bullshit detector tells me it's not.
And my bullshit detector is telling me that the details are a little too detailed.
And it's a medical thing.
It just doesn't feel like the kind of thing that they would lie about.
And if they did, you probably would have already heard the other side saying, no, that's not true.
It was never that bad.
So there seems to be a lack of any pushback, although the president's not in office, so he doesn't have an official pushback machine.
But it looks true enough to me.
If I had to bet on it, I'd bet it's true.
Now, if it is true, is that an impeachable offense?
Because I don't recall that Pence was ever put in charge, and how coherent was President Trump when he had 80% or his oxygen was in the 80s, near death, or near high risk of death.
I feel as if almost everything that they're going after Trump for to impeach him is not nearly as bad as things we know he did.
Or if this is true, we know he did it.
I feel like the public needed to know this.
And I feel like this is really bad.
If it's true. Again, can't assume it's true.
But if it's true, it's really bad.
The other part of this story that makes me interested is that they tried hard to get the Regeneron drug, and it looks like maybe it worked in his case.
Trump thought it worked.
But where are we on Regeneron?
Do we know that works now?
Is that randomized, controlled trials have proven it works, and are we making enough of it?
And who makes it? I have lots of questions about Regeneron because does it work?
Do we know that? Why aren't we making more of it if it works so well?
So your news is failing you on a pretty big point there.
Here's something that is bugging the fuck out of me today.
There's something that's just bugging me a lot today.
Just a lot. And I can't say it's necessarily important.
I mean, it might be. It might be important.
And it's this. Jamie Raskin, Senator Raskin, Brought up the fine people hoax and sold it as if it really happened.
You know, the idea that Trump had actually said that the neo-Nazis and racists were fine people.
Now, if you watch any of my content or you're associated with any content on the right, you know that that's debunked.
You know that the hoax is caused by cutting off the part where he clarifies he's not talking about them.
Without any prompting, Trump clarifies, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis.
And the other races.
So they just cut that part out, and then it makes it look like the opposite, like he was talking about them.
So Raskin brings that up.
And I say to myself, if the Trump legal team doesn't start by debunking that, simply by showing the part that they left out, if they don't start by debunking that, they're worthless.
And they shouldn't be paid.
Honestly. If Trump hired lawyers who don't go after this, the single biggest hoax used as a foundational point in the entire defense, if they just gloss over that, if they just act like, oh, well, that's what you say, now here's what we say about something else, if they let that stand, they should not be paid.
Seriously, they should not be paid.
You know, Trump always gets a lot of heat for not paying subcontractors, and some of his lawyers thought they wouldn't get paid.
But I don't hate the fact that there's somebody out there who doesn't pay for bad work.
I don't hate that. Have you ever had any work done on your house?
Was it all great?
Was it all terrific?
All the subcontractors, your plumbers, your electricians, they all did great work, right?
But they probably got paid, no matter how good their work was.
If Trump, being a builder who needs to make a profit, if it was his habit not to pay people who did bad work, I just like that some people exist who do that, because I can't personally do it.
I'm still going to pay for the bad work, right?
Because I just don't need the trouble.
But I don't hate it if that's his habit.
Now, of course, you don't know if that's why he's not paying.
You know, you wonder if he's just being selfish or he's just getting away with it because he can.
Who knows? So I don't have any details on this, but I do think that people who don't do the job should not be paid.
And if they let this go, I would say, number one, that Trump deserves to be impeached.
Not in a legal sense, But if he leaves Trump supporters exposed on this hoax, if he lets the world who now has to pay attention because it's an impeachment trial, they can't just skip it.
CNN can't turn it off.
You get how good this is?
CNN can't really change the channel now.
If Trump's lawyers say, we're going to make you watch the entire find people hoax video for the first time, they can't cut the commercial.
Because that would make it a bigger story.
And if they sit there and let you watch it, the entire country is going to find out that one of the most basic things they believed about Trump never happened.
Now, if Trump allows his lawyers to skip this, then fuck Trump, right?
He's leaving us exposed, us being anybody who ever said anything good about him for four years.
So let me say this again as clearly as I can.
Trump owes his base, doesn't he?
And nobody would argue with that, right?
Trump's base supported him, even when things were tough.
Trump owes his base a similar consideration.
And his base is very exposed right now.
Because that fine people hoax hangs out there like this cloud over all of our heads.
As if we somehow supported a president who had supported neo-Nazis.
That didn't happen.
We didn't support a president who supported neo-Nazis.
We supported a president who condemned them in clear voice without any prompting.
That's what we supported.
If he tells his lawyers, look, I don't care if I win or lose this thing, but you're gonna fix that fucking thing.
That's all I'm gonna ask of you.
I don't care if I get impeached and removed, probably not gonna run for office anyway, but you've gotta fix that fucking thing.
That's all I'm gonna ask of you.
Because you gotta do it for him, you have to do it for Trump, but you have to do it for us.
Alright? It's not just about Trump.
The rest of us are on trial.
Us being, again, anybody who ever said anything good about Trump.
We're all on trial.
And if these fucking lawyers let this opportunity go by, and they don't debunk this thing in front of a captured audience of the public, they are fucking worthless.
And should not be paid.
Should not be paid.
If they let that go.
Now, I tweeted just before I got on that if I were defending the president even not as a lawyer, just me, I could win his case from the starting position that his lawyers have today.
In fact, it would be hard to lose.
Because all I would do is say, all right, let me tell you for the first time you've ever heard this, How the left has manipulated information and created hoaxes.
And one by one, I would debunk each of the popular hoaxes about this president.
But here's how I would start.
The first hoax I debunked would be a Biden hoax.
Why? Well, I told you earlier in this live stream.
If you can't describe the other side's argument...
Then you're not credible.
You have to be able to describe the other side.
And Biden was the subject of a hoax, perpetrated mostly by the news on the right, that he had once recently said that signing EOs is what a dictator does.
And then he signed a bunch of EOs.
He never said that. He said that a certain type of thing you couldn't do with an EO, and that you would be a dictator if you tried, but that there were other things that, of course, you could do EOs about, and he did.
So that's an example of complete fake news about Biden.
And I would start with that.
I would literally defend Biden against one of his more aggressive claims against him.
And then I would say, look how the right believed that.
Because their news source told them it was true.
And they did believe it.
Right? And then I would say, this same technique has been used against President Trump for four years.
Let's run through some examples.
I would show the fine people hoax.
I would show the drinking bleach hoax.
I would show the overfeeding the goldfish hoax.
I would show the Covington kids hoax.
And I would show the brand new Swalwell hoax.
Swalwell showed a tweet as part of his argument against the president.
Yesterday he showed a tweet from a woman who said that if...
I believe she said if Trump wanted, they would, quote, bring the cavalry.
Swalwell presented that as cavalry, meaning military, meaning violence.
It turns out that cavalry is a prayer group.
That's right. The woman whose tweet was mentioned said, we're a prayer group.
We were saying that we'll bring our prayer.
So I would show the world that Swalwell had just made this up and showed it in a context and that that's how all of the hoaxes are created.
They're all created by removing context.
And likewise, the impeachment of the president...
is made by removing context, specifically the context of do it peacefully.
And then they're doing another trick that I don't know...
I guess I don't know enough of the history of this trick to know whether legally this makes sense as a legal strategy.
But they're doing what I call the tapestry approach to blaming the president for inciting violence.
And the tapestry approach says this.
There was no one thing he did It's really a whole bunch of things he did that you would maybe think are unrelated, but once you've looked at them together as a presentation, they form a tapestry of incitement to violence which guaranteed the capital assault was going to happen.
So that's the case that they're making.
To which I say, is that a thing?
Is the tapestry approach to inciting violence, when did that become a credible, legitimate argument?
Because I don't think it is.
Is it? I mean, in what world is it the accumulation of unrelated events which caused a specific incitement at this point, and we ignore all other variables?
Like, all the other variables that caused The Capitol assault to happen?
Just ignore all of them?
It's just Trump? Here's what I say.
Ask yourself this.
Number one. Would there have been an assault on the Capitol if we had a credible news industry?
Well, here's what would have happened.
If we had a credible news industry, they would have reported...
Hey, it looks like this election was fair enough and that we've done audits where we can and there's no specific claims that we can trace down that look like there's real.
So we, the respected and credible news organizations, think that it's time to move on and just have a Biden administration.
Suppose the news had been not fake news and aggressively fake news for the last four years.
Would the people who assaulted the Capitol have believed the election was fixed, which is what they believed, or would they have said, oh man, everybody in the news is telling me it was fair enough?
I guess maybe it was.
Do you think that this could have happened In a world in which the news was trying to be fair.
Because I don't think CNN was trying to be fair.
I mean, really? They weren't trying.
MSNBC, they're not really trying to be unbiased.
So, let me give you a little flashback to years ago.
I took a test called the GMATs.
Now, the GMAT is a test you take to see if you can be qualified to get into a business school to get your MBA. One of the questions that was on the test, or types of questions, that they've now removed, and they've removed it for a good reason, and I'll tell you why.
They would give you a scenario, a little story of a business person who had a problem, and then they would say, what is his biggest problem?
In other words, what does he need to solve to make whatever he wants to work, work?
And there would be several things in the list.
And I would look at the list and I'd pick one, and then I'd look at the answer guide because I was practicing, and I'd get it wrong.
And I'd think, hmm, I think the answer guide is wrong.
Because it's my opinion against theirs.
Just my opinion.
My opinion is that this was the most important thing.
The answer guide said it was something else.
With no explanation. Now, here was my argument.
If, in order to solve the problem, you needed both things to be solved, it wasn't one big problem.
If you solved it, then everything else would take care of itself.
It wasn't like that. There were multiple things that every one of them had to be solved for the solution.
Now, if you need all of them to be solved, or you don't have anything...
Which one's the important one?
Right? None of them.
None of them is the important one.
They're all equally important because they all have to be solved 100% or you can't do anything.
So that kind of question got thrown out on the GMATs because they were just subjective.
It was obvious after a point that you could just argue about what was the important one and nobody would know the difference.
And then I was going to tie that back to an earlier point which I don't remember at all.
So in your minds, if you can remember what I was talking about just before I started talking about the GMATs, figure out a way that that made sense with whatever the hell I was talking about, and now imagine that I was coherent because I'm not right now.
Okay. Thank you for the help.
Oh, the tapestry. Yes.
Okay. So the tapestry prosecution imagines that each of these things happening is somehow the important one, and that you can somehow suss out of all of the things happening, that the fake news is priming us one way, the Democrats themselves are priming the public another way, Trump is priming people a certain way, and then how about this?
Why are we arguing that Trump incited the public?
Did you see that happen?
It looks like it, right?
It looks like Trump said stuff about the election and that incited the public.
Let me blow your mind now.
That didn't happen.
You thought you saw it, right?
You thought you watched Trump saying stuff about the election, and you thought you watched people getting worked up about it, and you thought you saw them attack the Capitol over it.
It didn't happen.
Here's what happened.
Trump's base got Trump incited.
Trump was just one of the people incited.
His base was who was incited.
Do you know why his base was incited and believed it was a fake election?
Is it because Trump said so?
No, you fucking idiots.
Not you. I'm talking about other people.
You're the smart ones. No.
No, Trump believed the election was stolen because his base believed it.
Why did his base believe it?
Because it's believable.
And we live in a world in which it's perfectly believable.
And their expectations were violated because they expected to win and then they didn't get one.
Now, does that mean they're right?
Well, we don't have evidence that they were right or that they were wrong.
We have a non-transparent system which has not been fully audited.
We can say for sure that there is no court-proven evidence of massive fraud.
We all agree with that.
But your illegitimate press and your illegitimate politicians have told you, just by repetition...
That if you can't find evidence in a hidden system, that means there's no problem.
That's stupid. That's just stupid.
If you can't find evidence, it just means you can't find it.
Doesn't mean it's not there.
When I go look for ketchup in my refrigerator and I can't find it, have I proven it's not there?
Well, if I were good at looking at things, it would be close to a proof.
But I'm really bad at looking at things.
If I open my refrigerator, I can't find the ketchup.
It's just a guy thing.
It's just a sea of noise in there.
I can't find the ketchup.
But that doesn't mean it's not in there.
It's in there. I didn't put the ketchup in a drawer, right?
It's in there. I just can't find it.
So I haven't proven it doesn't exist because I can't find it.
And that's what we've been sold, that the ketchup doesn't exist because you can't find it.
Oh, by the way, you also haven't opened up the door to look for it because it's a non-transparent system.
Again, I lost my train of thought.
I'm sure it was really good.
I shouldn't digress so much.
All right. But I could totally win the president's case from this point.
I would just make sure that people understood that the tapestry of causes are not just Trump causes.
There's an entire tapestry of his base believing that the election was fraudulent.
And why did they believe it?
Because they live in a world in which everything that's been presented has been a lie.
The fine people hoax, the drinking bleach hoax, you just go down the line.
So the people who said the election was fair are the same people, roughly speaking, same, not really the same, but feels the same, as the people who have been lying for the last four years.
Why would they believe it?
And what possible reason would anybody have to believe...
That a non-transparent system run by serial liars with gigantic interest in falsifying the result would have been fair and free.
What exactly would be the reasoning for them to accept that uncritically?
Now, it could be true.
I want to say this as clearly as possible.
I personally don't have any proof of widespread election fraud.
Do you? Do you have any?
I'd like to see it if you have it.
I don't have any. I've seen statistical indications, but I don't think that they hold up in court.
Those statistical indications may be enough for you.
I'm not even sure if they're true, much less you should interpret them the way you might be interpreting them.
Let's talk about Mike Lindell in his video in which he says there's 100% proof that we know the election was fraudulent.
There were a number of claims he made.
I recognized a number of them as having been debunked.
But there was one claim that he held out as his strongest claim.
His absolute proof, he called it.
Absolute proof. And I asked on Twitter for people who had any debunking The claim was that there is documented evidence that you can see Chinese intrusions into our voting system,
that there are logs showing the IP addresses, and the IP addresses clearly come from China, and that you can trace what those IP addresses did once inside the system, and what they did was flip votes from Trump to Biden.
Now, that's the claim on the video by Lindell.
So I asked people on Twitter if that's true.
Has anybody dealt with that or tried to debunk it?
And the evidence I got is that the source of the information is not mentioned.
And I said, what?
Are you telling me that the absolute proof, the 100% proof, the log of data that is the 100% proof, there's no indication where that log of data came from?
Apparently there isn't. So, what kind of credibility do you put on...
It's a very detailed thing by somebody who is allegedly an expert in this, but the source of the data is not mentioned.
What kind of credibility would you put on that?
Zero. Zero.
Yeah, the right answer is zero.
Even if it's true.
Even if it's true, the amount of credibility you should put on it is zero.
Because when somebody says, here's my data from a source unknown, that's the end of the conversation.
That is the end of the conversation.
It's not the beginning. It's the end.
Don't tell me about your data that you got from your secret source, Mike Lindell.
I love Mike Lindell, by the way.
A big fan of his Pillow, as well as his company and what he's done.
And he's a great salesperson.
He's clearly making an impact on the election, or at least on the politics of it.
But we need a source, Mike Lindell.
We need a source for that data, or it's not helping.
It's not helping if you don't have a source.
All right. So, let's see if the impeachment trial does what we hope it would do.
I'll bet it won't. Governor Cuomo is getting a lot of heat.
Today's new report is that his advisor, one of his top advisors, or his top advisors admits that they were hiding the number of deaths in nursing homes in New York because they didn't want to get in trouble.
What? What? Yeah, they're saying it directly.
So the Cuomo administration, at least his aide, and I assume the governor was part of this decision, they admit, at least on a phone call, somebody admitted that they hid the information to keep it out of the press.
Now, the excuse was that Trump was putting legal pressure on them And because they had legal pressure on them, they didn't know what to do and they sort of panicked, basically.
Because they didn't want to go to jail, but they also didn't want to lie.
And if they had a choice of lying or going to jail, it looks like they chose lying.
Because they didn't want to go to jail.
Now, that probably wasn't a wise decision, in retrospect.
But people do make bad decisions under pressure, so...
I don't doubt that that's what was happening.
It sounds reasonable. Don't know.
But it's reasonable. So, should Cuomo be impeached for that?
Well, I don't think I would buy his book about how to handle an epidemic or a pandemic.
I feel like that should hurt his book sales a little bit.
But I'm trying hard to stick to my original philosophy that I had at the beginning of the pandemic, that our leaders would make big mistakes and we should forgive them in advance.
Because there's no way there wouldn't be big mistakes in the fog of war and guessing what works and guessing what doesn't work.
There had to be big mistakes.
But this one doesn't feel like the other mistakes, does it?
It would be one thing if you underplayed or overplayed masks or you thought hydroxychloroquine was a good risk management thing.
But this feels different, doesn't it?
This doesn't feel like a mistake that had anything to do with the, let's say, the fog of war.
It looks like a mistake of somebody just covering their ass because they got caught in a mistake.
So it's the covering your ass part that is really the unforgivable part.
I actually do forgive, still.
I know you don't. But I'm going to stick with my philosophy and not change it.
Which is that our experts really didn't know what to do.
And some of them were going to do the wrong thing.
This nursing home thing was clearly a mistake.
But it was a mistake you kind of expected.
So I don't think I would judge that as harshly as many of you do.
Even though people died, even though it was a mistake, even though you probably should never be re-elected.
That should probably be the end of your political career.
But still, put it in context.
Interesting story. There's an ammunition...
I don't know if they're a wholesaler or a retailer.
They must be a retailer.
But they sell ammunition, and it's Phoenix Ammunition, F-E-N-I-X, and then in parentheses, KULAC. I don't know what the real name of the company is.
But they have a new policy in which they won't sell you ammunition if you check a box that says you voted for Joe Biden.
They won't sell you ammunition.
And I thought to myself, is that legal?
It is, right? That's legal.
Or is it? Can somebody tell me if that's even illegal or legal?
Because Biden voters do not fall into any protected group, right?
They're not necessarily women or minorities or anything else.
And the reasoning is that Joe Biden is trying to destroy their company by making it hard to buy ammunition, and so he doesn't want to support their voters.
I feel like that's fair.
I feel like it's fair.
But I'll tell you what else it is.
It is also Elon Musk brilliant.
This is Elon Musk brilliant.
Because how much advertising does Phoenix Ammunition need to do now?
None. They can just take whatever their advertising budget was and just throw that away because they don't need advertising for a while.
This is brilliant.
This is how to advertise.
Because do you think conservatives are going to love this company for this decision?
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
I don't identify conservative, but even I love this company for doing this.
Because they're completely within their rights, I think.
Right? I mean, I need a fact check on that, but I think they're within their rights.
And if they are, this is a perfectly good statement.
And they say directly, we don't want your money.
If you were a Biden supporter, we'd rather make less money.
Than sell ammunition to people who are trying to put us out of business.
It's not a bad play.
It's pretty clever.
All right, in the category of the left eating their own because they don't have as much Trump fodder to go after, here are the latest ones.
A writer named Nathan Robinson, who used to work for The Guardian, had tweeted that...
The cancel culture is nonsense because everyone who gets, quote, canceled ends up on their feet and they get book deals and they come out fine.
And so his point is that there's not really a cancel culture per se that's sort of overblown.
Well, he was just fired from The Guardian for writing about U.S. military aid to Israel.
A little bit politically incorrect, I guess.
So, he got cancelled.
Joss Whedon, who is no friend to President Trump, but very successful director type, has been blamed by many people for being a horrible person to work with.
And more people who have worked with him are coming out to try to cancel him.
Here's the latest claim.
On one of the movies, I guess Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there was a rule saying that he was not allowed in a room alone with this woman, Michelle, who I think was 14 at the time.
He wasn't allowed to be in the room alone with her.
Okay, that says something. So we don't know which of these allegations against him are real and which are not, but there sure are a lot of them.
Sure are a lot of them.
But he's getting cancelled by the left.
So the left continues to eat their own in an amusing way, which we enjoy.
Somebody says Phoenix.
I guess it's Phoenix.
F-E-N-I-X. Ammo already sold out.
Well, get some more ammo, guys.
We'll send some more business your way.
You know, as I have promised you, I want to be part of the solution to this cancel culture.
Now, just the small part.
I've got, you know, 600,000-whatever followers on Twitter, so it's, you know, medium-small.
But every time somebody gets canceled for something that's just purely bullshit, I'm going to promote them.
I'm going to let you know, so that if you have a choice about where to spend your money, maybe you throw a little at the people who got canceled...
And you support free speech that way.
So if you hear of any other examples of people getting cancelled, let me know.
And I would include in this, just to show how fair I am, I'm going to include in this Nathan Robinson, who got fired from The Guardian, who didn't even believe in cancel culture as real.
But he's obviously a high-end writer, And I think that Nathan Robinson should get a job offer.
And I'd like to see him come out well.
Just like he said other people who got cancelled did.
Just because he might be more...
I don't know if he is, actually. But if you imagine he's more left-leaning...
I'm not sure if that's true, so don't take that as true.
But if he is, that shouldn't make a difference.
He got cancelled. People who got cancelled...
Let's support him. Now, if Joss Whedon gets cancelled, that's because he's doing criminal, horrible things.
I'm not going to support him. But if he just got cancelled for freedom of speech, or supporting the president, or any of that stuff, then I think we should throw you a little money.
Put a little money your way.
All right. Nationalism was over.
Well, I'm not going to read the second part of that.
That's a pretty provocative thing you're saying there.
Alright, let me see this question.
Scott, Scott, Scott. Did you hear MSNBC's Nicole Wallace suggesting drones striking US citizens recently?
Yeah, I think the context was militias, right?
So the context was if there was some militia that was a domestic terror organization I'm not sure I take the drone strike thing too seriously.
Don't make the same mistake that the left always makes, which is to take everything as literal.
I don't believe she means use a drone strike against people who voted for Trump.
I don't believe she means that.
I think she means if we could identify a genuine FBI-certified domestic terror group who might actually go kill people, that why would you treat them differently than any other terrorist group?
So I think it was more of a conceptual point.
It wasn't really about drones striking any Americans.
So I'll use the same standard to defend her, That I do when other people use hyperbole.
It's just hyperbole. In fact, I think there should be a cabinet-level position, and it should just be me in that cabinet, to explain to people how communication works.
Literally. Just to explain how communication works.
Because people think they can read minds based on what you say.
Well, I see what you say, but I'm going to read your mind and then read into what you say a completely different meaning.
There needs to be a cabinet-level position of just to explain to the public that that's not a thing.
They don't have mind-reading ability.
Yeah, my book, Loser Think, that's over my shoulder here, talks about this.
A highly successful book, which you should be reading.
People are loving it. And, yeah, it would be The Ministry of Truth.
No, it wouldn't be The Ministry of Truth.
Because The Ministry of Truth would tell you what's true.
And, of course, that would be a problem because people should decide for themselves what is true.
I would only tell you how communication works.
I would only tell you, no, this person is using hyperbole.
It's a common form of communication.
It doesn't mean she wants an actual physical drone to kill actual people.
When Biden says that some EOs would be dictator-like, he doesn't mean all EOs.
He means the kind that you shouldn't do.
The kind that you need a congressional vote of a certain kind.
So that's what I would do.
I would just explain how talking works.
I would explain that if the context has been removed, that you can't understand it.
You have to get the rest of the context.
Just simple stuff. And just act like the public doesn't understand that because they don't.
They don't understand that video is mostly a lie.
People still think that if they saw it with their own eyes, they've seen truth.
But in the world of 2021 and 2020, if you saw it with your own eyes on video, it's probably fake.
It's probably out of context.
Probably. More often than not.
All right. Department of Speech Precision.
Eh, maybe. Who's my favorite drummer?
You know, I'm developing some favorite drummers, but I don't have one yet.
All right. That's all for now, and I will talk to you later.
All right, YouTubers.
Okay.
There is no evidence that I have a favorite drummer.
That is correct. I don't know if I would be a good press secretary.
Because the problem with being a press secretary is that you have to...
Basically, you have to say what your boss wants you to say.
You don't really get to say whatever you want to say.
So being handicapped by having to say what my boss wants me to say would largely make me ineffective at that job.
Because I'd really need to do it my way, or I wouldn't be that effective.
