Episode 1296 Scott Adams: Democrats Fall for Massive Disinformation Campaign From Their Own Side, and What's Up With Sweden?
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
AOC crying meme, is that bad for her?
Dilbert NFT (Digital collectables)
The Abraham Accords and Khashoggi report
GOP vs DEM top concerns survey
Dems don't want Biden to have nuclear launch?
Allegations against Governor Cuomo
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Just look outside. Everything's still where it should be.
Yes, it might be that somebody snuck into your house last night, took all of your furniture, replaced it with identical furniture.
Okay, that's a Stephen Wright joke, but it's pretty funny.
Well, it's funny when he does it.
Obviously not when I do it, but trust me, it's funny when he does it.
Now, what would make this day better?
It's hard to think of anything, because it's going to be a good day.
But, just in case, let's make sure we've got a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen drink or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better except media disinformation campaigns.
Go. Ah, yeah.
Yeah, that's good.
That's good. Well, it seems that the recall effort for...
Governor Newsom here in California looks like it's either going to be successful or it's very close.
They have more than enough signatures, but some of them will be challenged.
So we don't know if it's quite enough.
But it's looking like there's going to be another governor.
Howard Kurtz made an interesting observation yesterday, I think.
He says it's no accident that now that Trump is off the stage...
We don't have much to talk about in terms of federal leadership.
Right? Because Biden is sort of hiding.
Kamala Harris doesn't say much.
So we need to talk about politics, and we need to make enemies and villains out of people.
Otherwise, why bother talking about it?
And so, by default, the state governors are coming under fire in a way that we've never seen before.
We've never seen so much pressure on three different governors, right?
Well, if you count Texas.
So California, Texas, and New York are getting a lot of national attention.
And I think Howard Kurtz is on to something here.
It's just there was a void, and it got filled.
It got filled with whatever was the next thing to talk about.
So it was the states. The important part here is to understand that the things in the news are not the things that are important.
They're the things that fill up the time.
They're the things that fill voids.
When you're watching the news, you're not watching some kind of top priorities or anything like that.
Often they are, but that's not the purpose of the news, to show you the top priorities.
Here's a question for you.
It's a persuasion quiz.
I'm going to ask you who wins in this setup.
You've all seen the memes of AOC crying at what I think was the fence to some illegal immigrant holding pen.
So the original photo, it seemed that she was crying over having empathy for the people who were imprisoned, essentially.
Not essentially, the people who were imprisoned.
And so now you've got AOC. So she's doing her political thing and showing empathy.
But it got turned into a meme.
And now just the little picture of her doing the crying...
Is being pasted in all kinds of humorous situations to make her look silly.
So who won? Did the Republicans win by taking her meme and showing how silly she is and putting it in lots of humorous context?
Did they win the persuasion battle?
I don't think so.
I think they lost hard.
Here's why. What is the most important thing In terms of persuasion.
Well, if fear is not part of it, and in terms of this particular topic, there's not a lot of immediate fear.
It's just something that needs to be addressed.
So fear isn't there.
What's the next most persuasive thing?
Visual. Visual is persuasive.
What do you think of every time you see the meme of AOC showing empathy?
You know where it came from.
Everybody who sees the meme knows it came originally from that context.
All you're doing by sending that meme around is reinforcing the fact that AOC cares about people more than you do.
It's a visual and it shows empathy.
It also shows power.
Because we're talking about her, right?
If you're a politician and everybody's talking about you, that's power.
What is the definition of charisma?
It's the best definition I've ever heard.
I didn't make this up myself, but it's a good definition.
Charisma is power plus empathy.
That's right. Every time that meme is shared, AOC gets more charisma.
Because you're reinforcing the fact that she has empathy.
Oh, you think it's funny and maybe she's faking or is misapplied or something.
But the visual is her showing empathy.
And that is way more important than your concept.
Compare these two things.
A picture of a leader showing empathy versus...
The other side says, wait, I've got a concept to sell you.
The concept is that although she's pretending to show her empathy, she's not really showing it.
Those two things are not equal.
One is a picture.
A picture is really strong.
That gets in your head, it lives there forever.
A concept just sort of washes over you, in terms of persuasion.
So, AOC wins every time that meme goes around by repetition, empathy, visual persuasion against a concept.
And the concept doesn't really carry very far, even when it's true.
I've been asked often recently if there will be a Dilbert NFT. The answer is yes.
How many of you don't know what that means?
Probably most. If you're not aware, there are things called NFTs, which are essentially digital collectibles.
Now you should say to yourself, oh, how does that make any sense?
Anything digital can be just reproduced.
You just take a screenshot, capture your screen.
There's nothing digital that can't be reproduced.
So how in the world could there be a collectible?
And the answer is blockchain.
Blockchain technology allows you to know for sure who was the first owner, legal owner, of a digital image.
It could be a video, it could be a still image, anything.
And because there is certainty about who owned it, You can sell it.
So you can buy a collectible, just like you could buy, let's say, a baseball card.
It could be an image of William Shatner.
I think he's got some NFTs.
It could be any kind of collectible, or a Dilbert image, for example.
There'll be a number of them. We're under development.
But because the The blockchain knows for sure who owns something.
You can sell it. And part of the benefit is that the original creator always gets a share of every future sale.
Pretty good design, right?
So that incents or incentivizes the creators to make stuff because they'll always share in it after it's gone.
And people can collect them.
Now, people used to collect my physical signature back in the peak of Dilbert mania, especially in the 90s.
People would actually buy my autograph at autograph swap meets and stuff.
And sometimes they would check with me.
They'd send me an image and say, just want to make sure I bought your autograph.
Or sometimes I would draw a little Dogburg comic.
They'd say, I just want to make sure this was really you.
And I would look at it and I'd say, sorry.
Sorry. Definitely not me.
You bought a fake autograph.
And of course, there are statistics that physical autographs are very often fake.
Really, really often fake.
As in, so often you wouldn't want to know.
So that's in development.
I won't tell you the angle we're going to take on the NFTs, but you'll like it.
Elon Musk continues to be interesting, and he tweeted today, or yesterday, I admit to judging books by their cover.
Is that a great tweet?
I admit to.
And then later he clarified that he meant that literally books.
He wasn't making a metaphor about life.
He would say, no, literally books.
I judge them by their cover.
Now, the funniest thing about this is that someone else, after I tweeted that everyone does that, because everyone judges a book by its cover.
We all do, right?
And it's a pretty good method.
It's a pretty good method.
Because among other things, the cover is going to have, you know, is this a New York Times bestselling author?
That's on the cover. What's the name of the author?
Is it somebody I should listen to?
It's right there on the cover.
And then beyond that, I would say that if you can't come up with a good cover, maybe your book's not so good either, right?
Maybe your publisher doesn't have their stuff together, so maybe they don't even pick good authors.
So yeah, you can judge a lot.
In the same way that you can judge people by their clothing, adjusted by income, of course, But you can judge people by their clothing.
You can judge books by their cover.
You're just not right every time.
It doesn't mean you're right, but it's a pretty good clue.
Somebody responded to my statement that everyone judges books by their covers by saying, I don't.
So there was somebody who said he doesn't judge books by their cover.
That's sort of a lower level of awareness, if I can say it that way.
You don't have a choice.
There's no decision-making involved.
You can't opt out of judging things by their visual appearance.
That's not even a thing.
You could want to not judge a book by its cover, but you can't.
You can't. It's not an option.
So just the fact that Elon Musk tweets this, it just opens up everything from the conversation of free will to how do you make decisions without science backing everything you do, because of course science couldn't do it.
It's too busy. All right.
So that was fun. Elon's always fun.
Apparently the Biden administration is going to put out a report Saying that the Khashoggi murder is being blamed on MBS. So Saudi Arabia's leader, MBS. Now, somebody tweeted, Olga Lautmann tweeted, I'm relieved Khashoggi Intel report officially blamed MBS of assassinating Khashoggi is coming out.
But where is the investigation and information into what role Trump, Kushner, Pompeo, etc.
played? Because, you know, you can't just have stories.
You've got to blame people.
Somebody's got to go to jail for just everything.
In today's world, if you get a job in politics, all the questions will be about when you're going to jail.
And here's how I answered.
Those people ignoring or playing the MBS thing the way they did, the outcome of that was the Abraham Accords.
The outcome, the predictable outcome, and I say it's predictable because I literally predicted it in public a whole bunch of times.
So when the Khashoggi thing first came out, and it was obvious that Trump was sort of underplaying it, I said, that's probably the smartest thing he's ever done.
Because that gives the United States tremendous leverage over Saudi Arabia.
Because we would have a secret...
Not really a secret, but we would have a club, if you will, at least in public opinion.
Trump decided to not use that club.
What did he get in return?
You don't know, do you?
I don't know. Do you think that Trump, just think of his personality, think of his deal making, and think of the fact that he would have been completely aware, completely aware that he had now Leverage over Saudi Arabia.
You think he didn't know that?
I said it every day on livestream while it was happening.
Yeah, of course he knew it.
Of course he knew that gave him leverage.
Do you think that behind the curtain, or at least maybe he doesn't even have to say it, right?
Maybe you don't have to say it to Saudi Arabia because they kind of know it.
Do you think he got something in return?
Well, we don't know.
But we do know that the peace deals between Israel and a number of countries started coming together, and that never happened before.
What would it take for those other countries to feel safe in joining with Israel on some kind of a peace deal?
Well, probably they needed to know that Saudi Arabia wasn't going to be a problem.
And they weren't.
So, I would say that what we're seeing here is that Trump played it so well that two members of his administration were nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
I think, at least we could speculate, we can't know this for sure, that the way he handled the Khashoggi thing probably mattered.
It probably mattered to the point of two Nobel Peace Prize nominations totally deserved.
Avi Berkowitz and Jared Kushner for their good work in the Middle East there.
So, next topic, I guess Joe Biden's presidential approval is up.
You know, the weekly variations probably are not terribly telling, but it's up.
Now, I think that Biden has learned that just staying out of the news himself just really works for him.
So maybe just staying out of the news will just keep working.
We'll see. Now, Rasmus also did a poll and found out that most voters now believe China is an enemy.
And they say that President Biden's policy toward China is worse than Trump's.
So Biden actually is not getting as high marks as Trump did on dealing with China.
Arguably the biggest issue in the world.
Arguably. So here's the actual numbers from Rasmussen.
So 50% said Biden policy was worse than Trump on China.
50% say China's an enemy.
8% say they're an ally.
37% say somewhere in between, so not quite an ally, not quite an enemy, but somewhere in between.
And 5% said not sure.
So when you add up the ones that are not the ones saying that they're an enemy, some of them are unsure or in between.
So there's a real dominant opinion that China is an enemy.
Now let me ask you this.
For those of you who have been watching me the longest, When was the last time that I was persuading hard about something and you didn't see it go that way?
Now that doesn't mean that I made a difference.
But I'm just asking you to make this observation.
That when I have taken a strong stand on persuasion, on whatever it is, it always goes my way.
Have you noticed that?
Now, some of it might be I'm picking the right side.
I might just be good at picking the winning side, right?
It could be just that.
But it is also true that I am a trained persuader with a very large platform that is watched, or at least it was, watched by the White House and other people.
I don't know if anybody in the Biden administration is tuning in.
I haven't heard that, so I don't know that they are.
But I'll just put it out there.
I'm not going to take any credit for anything, but I don't know there are too many people who pushed harder to make China look like what they really are, an enemy to the United States.
So I will take some credit for having been on the right side, and I will take some credit for having done my best to move the needle, and the needle moved.
But that doesn't mean I can take credit for it, obviously.
A lot of people Gordon Chang, you can name lots of other names who have been pushing against China.
So it was a group effort.
This is a perfect example, I would say, of this interplay between government and people.
Somebody in the comments says, you moved me.
So there was somebody who was persuaded there.
So we don't know how many, but somebody was.
So, let's see.
That's enough about China.
So there was a survey about what was of most concern to the GOP versus what is most concern to the Democrats.
I'll just read you the top things on the list.
So the GOP was most concerned about illegal immigration, police support, higher taxes, and liberal media bias.
So those were top concerns.
Weirdly, the coronavirus doesn't seem to be on either team's top concerns.
Jack Posobiec pointed that out.
How could neither the Democrats nor the Republicans put coronavirus in their top four?
I guess everybody thinks it's kind of solved.
We just have to wait it out.
And that would be fair.
I'm not sure I want to put coronavirus at the top.
Because I also think it's solved.
I just think it's a waiting game now.
We don't have to wonder if we'll beat it.
We're going to beat it.
So it's a given now.
But here's what the Democrats had as their top concerns.
Now, I'm going to remind you again the GOP. Illegal immigration, police support, high taxes, and media bias.
Hold those in your head, and now see if you can find a pattern.
What the Democrats are most concerned about are Trump supporters, white nationalism, systemic racism, and gun violence.
What do all those things have in common that the GOP does not have in common?
Their issues are different.
That's interesting. Somebody says the GOP is more about freedom?
No, I don't see that.
I don't see that.
Yeah, the biggest difference is that the Democrat major concerns are based on media brainwashing and not based on reality.
Just not based on reality.
Now, are Trump supporters really like the big problem in this country?
I don't feel it.
It feels like that's just a fake news sort of narrative that just got out of control.
Same thing with white nationalism, which is really just another way of saying Trump supporters if you're a Democrat.
And again, systemic racism, gun violence, each of these are the biggest issues.
Not because they're not real.
Systemic racism is real.
And if you're black, it's a pretty damn big problem.
And if you're white and you like, or anything else, and you like fairness, It's a really big problem.
So I'm not going to say systemic racism is small, but the way they talk about it is not about the teachers' unions, which is the cause of systemic racism, or the biggest perpetuator of it, because it doesn't give a poor kid of any type a good chance of coming out of it.
If you don't fix that, you're not going to fix systemic racism.
You're not even going to get close.
Education gap has to be closed, or forget it.
Everything else you do is a waste of time.
You've got to close the education gap, and for that you need school choice.
So the Democrat, and even gun violence, I would argue, as big a problem as that is, is limited to certain places, right?
In your town, is gun violence the big problem?
I mean, Chicago, definitely.
Yeah, Chicago is definitely a problem.
But how about your town?
Where would you list gun violence on your top priorities?
I can't think of any in my town.
I can't think of any gun violence in my town the whole time I've lived here.
And I would think that a lot of you...
I mean, most of you know somebody who got killed by a gun.
I do know people who have been killed by guns.
But not lately.
So I wouldn't have put it in my top four.
But again, I think that depends where you live.
So it's kind of really amazing that the Democrats are actually hallucinating about what's important.
They're actually hallucinating.
We told you yesterday that something like 44% of Democrats believe that over 1,000 unarmed black people are killed by police every year.
The real number is 30.
So, I mean, that's just a brainwashing problem, right?
You don't go from 30 to 1,000 unless somebody's brainwashed you, because they felt pretty confident about their estimate.
Somebody says 27, not 30.
But it's in that range.
So, Luke Stark on Twitter says, you can say the same about Republicans, meaning that the Republicans are brainwashed to think that their issues are big.
Is that true? Is illegal immigration...
An imaginary problem.
Well, if you said, how big of a problem is it at the moment, you can make an argument that it's under control.
Just today, like literally Wednesday.
You could say, well, today, you know, there's a problem, but it doesn't seem to be ruining the country in some direct way.
But the problem with illegal immigration is that it can go from whatever you think is manageable to something that isn't manageable in just a week.
And then, of course, how do you ignore the fact, as the comments are saying, that we have 11 million or however million, 25 million, you know, people who are undocumented in this country?
That's a big thing.
Now, whether you call that a problem or not, I think, does depend on what media you're looking at.
But in terms of illegal immigration, even if you thought it wasn't a problem so far, it's obviously something that would become a big problem if you handle it wrong, obviously.
Police support, as my critic pointed out, it's not as if the police have gone away.
You know, the Republicans might be a little bit too concerned about police support relative to the actual news, but both illegal immigration and police support are about what might happen, right?
If you open the borders, it would be a disaster.
If you did defund police, which there's a lot of chatter about, it would be a disaster.
So these belong at the top of people's worry list, even if you think it hasn't become a problem yet.
You don't deal with the problem after it's a problem, if you can get it early.
I'm seeing reports, Hannity reported it, etc., that three dozen House Democrats Signed a letter to see if they can change the situation where the president has the sole power of the nuclear launch.
And they don't want Biden to have the power to launch a nuclear attack by himself.
In other words, be the only decision maker.
Now, what do you make of that?
Is that Democrats who are saying, my God, even we don't trust Biden's mental capacity to launch a nuclear strike?
That's one way to look at it.
That's the way Republicans are looking at it.
Here's another way to look at it.
And by the way, they did not ask for this when Trump was president.
So just think about this.
Is the problem more of a problem than it was last year?
It's not more of a problem than it was last year, having one person making the decision.
Now, the way they're presenting it is that the problem is having one person do it.
They're not saying Biden is a problem.
They're saying the problem is one person.
But that was the problem last year too, right?
Wasn't that the problem last year?
That it was one person?
So you could certainly infer that maybe they're worried about their own president, the Democrats are.
They don't say that, and I think that that would be unfair to assume that's the only reason.
And as somebody in the comments pointed out, the reason that one person gets to make the decision is because time matters.
You might have 15 minutes to make a decision.
You can't find your vice president and find your three other people or whatever to decide.
But here's what I would like to toss into the mix.
The military would not launch a nuclear attack, even if the president ordered it, if it didn't make sense.
Does anybody disagree with that statement?
Because it's not like Biden is talking to the person who pushes the button.
Biden's going to talk to the top generals, or top general, and he's going to say, I've decided this, go make it happen.
He's not talking to the operator.
Now you can say to yourself, but the military general has to comply with an order from the commander-in-chief, so therefore it really is just Biden making the decision and other people just implementing it.
Not in the real world.
In the real world, that general gets to decide.
Period. Does anybody disagree with that?
The general gets to decide, even though the Constitution doesn't say it's his job.
He does get to decide.
Now, somebody's saying they'll only obey a lawful order.
But let's say it's lawful.
Let's say the president saw some attack or saw something, so it's lawful.
It just isn't a good idea.
And you can tell that the president isn't thinking clearly.
Is the general going to launch?
No. No.
No, the general is not going to take that order and make it happen.
Because the general is going to be in the room and say, you know, might need a second opinion on this one.
So I'm not terribly worried about this single decision thing with the president, because it's not really.
It's the single plus the military and the military.
What are the odds that both of them are crazy at the same time, right?
Pretty low. Somebody says it doesn't work that way.
Well, I'm certainly sure that I do not know the details of how it works.
So that part I'm sure of.
But... I will not take any disagreement with the fact that the military would have to agree to launch.
I'm not going to take any criticism on that.
That's just obviously true.
Yeah, and the nuclear football is not like there's a button in it.
It just begins a process, right?
Alright, Governor Cuomo is getting the Rose McGowan treatment, so he's been accused of sexual harassment-like things by at least one person in the office.
There's some talk that everybody knew he was like this, but somebody named Boylan has made the following claims.
And I think the claims, you have to look at the details, because if you're only hearing that there are allegations, It sounds different than when you look at the specific claims.
So one claim is that on a flight together, now I don't know who else was on the flight, but obviously at least the pilots and the flight attendants, but He suggested to this subordinate of his that they play strip poker.
So that's the first example.
Which would be pretty creepy, right?
I don't want to minimize that if you're just trying to do your job and your boss is saying stuff like that.
Pretty creepy, right?
She also wrote that she complained to friends that the governor would go out of his way to touch her on her lower back, Arms and legs.
Now, I think in 2021 especially, we're all pretty sensitive about touching people.
Now, what do you make of this, that he touches people on their lower back, arms and legs?
Hold that thought. We'll get back to it.
And he reportedly encouraged Boylan To look up photos of his rumored former girlfriend because he said they looked alike and could be sisters.
And then in another incident, Cuomo allegedly kissed Boylan on the lips in an unwanted, apparently, kiss.
So here are the allegations.
He once said we should play strip poker.
He touches her on her lower back, arms and legs...
And once said, you know, you look like my old girlfriend, and once kissed her on the lips.
So these are the things for which people want to fire him.
Here's the context I would like to add.
Now, I want to be careful.
I'm not defending him.
Hear that as clearly as you can.
I'm not defending him.
I'm just talking about it, okay?
So that's not a defense.
How do you draw the line between something that is clearly just illegal, inappropriate, firing the fence, and what is sort of normal mating behavior?
Who makes that decision?
Because there's no doubt that this woman is a victim.
Would anybody disagree with that?
A victim in the sense that there were these unwanted things that intruded on her career should not have happened.
Nothing should intrude on her career, especially of this nature.
But how do you make men not men anymore?
Because you sort of would have to reprogram us.
Do you think that when Cuomo was doing any of these things...
That he thought she was a victim?
Probably not, right?
He thought, I'm just guessing, because we can't read any minds, right?
We're not mind readers, but put yourself in this situation.
Do you think that he thought he was sexually harassing her?
I'll bet not. I'll bet not.
Which again, just to be perfectly clear, whether he was aware of how bad his behavior was or not, is not relevant.
That's not relevant.
Because he did the things.
That's relevant. It's not relevant what he was thinking.
So, here's the problem.
Without defending anything that Cuomo did...
Oh, somebody says she was married.
Okay, that's a whole other level.
Um... What is described here is men responding the way they respond in lots of different contexts, but of course this is the worst possible way to do it because he had power and she was just trying to do her job, so that's pretty bad.
But I only put this out there that Let me just work through this, a few of the examples.
Do you think that when Cuomo suggested strip poker that he was in any way serious about that on an airplane where other people obviously were, at least the pilots?
Do you think that was serious?
No. Of course not.
It was creepy.
And it's also something that men often say without thinking.
How many times have you been...
How many women have heard some guy suggest playing strip poker?
All right. Men do it sort of as a throwaway line, maybe testing to see how she react, but it wasn't serious.
There was no serious thing, I would imagine.
Couldn't have possibly been serious.
Secondly, when he touches her on her lower back, arms, and legs.
That's, you know, illegitimate in our modern times.
But how much does he touch the men in his office?
Wouldn't you like to know?
Does he touch the men?
Because some people are just touchy.
Now, touching people on their lower back often is in the context of holding a door.
Fairly common. Have you ever held a door for a woman, and then just to make sure that you're making sure she goes first, you sort of just put your hand behind, like just a light touch on the lower back, just at a moment, just to clarify that you're asking them to go first.
I think most men have done that, right?
Most men have done that at some point in their life.
But usually it was somebody they'd know better and not necessarily in a work situation, which makes it creepy.
So was he thinking at the time that he was being creepy, or was he doing what he always does when he holds the door?
Don't know. Somebody says he never touches the men, idiot, in all capital.
Do you think that's true?
Because there are people who do touch men and women.
Now, somebody's saying it in all capitals and shouting it at me, but is that true?
Because I can tell you that back before it was illegal to touch everybody, it wasn't unusual that I would touch a man on the arm in a work situation, even if I were a boss.
Just sort of get attention.
Even in schools, you see it.
Like if there's a kid misbehaving, one of the best things that Teachers learn to keep a kid from misbehaving is you just walk up to them and you put your hand on their shoulder.
That's it. You just put your hand on their shoulder and the kid will settle down.
Now, again, I'm not defending him.
I'm just saying that it's a naughty question whether you want to stop this kind of behavior in all of its forms or Again, agreeing that it's bad behavior, inappropriate in the workplace.
No argument on that, right?
But how do you deal with it?
Let me ask you a question for the comments, okay?
In the comments, tell me how many of you personally, and this has to be personal, how many of you personally have had a sexual encounter with a boss or a subordinate?
It doesn't have to be a direct subordinate.
It could be just somebody lower level in the company.
In the comments, how many of you, yes or no, have ever had a sexual contact with a workplace subordinate or superior?
Let's see in the comments.
I have, yes.
No. Student, yes.
Yes. Fist pump.
Okay, you're funny. Somebody says, you're working this too hard.
I'm almost done.
The married part, you can all put your own judgment on, right?
I'm not defending any of it, so you don't have to argue with me about it.
It's interesting how many people are not answering the question.
That's pretty interesting.
Look at all the yeses. Now you're seeing, let's see, more no's than yes's, but there are a lot of yes's, right?
I'm seeing it both on YouTube and Periscope.
Look at all the yes's. So everybody here who is jumping on Cuomo, just consider the context.
Just consider the context.
So I'm not defending him.
Just saying it's a pretty widespread thing.
All right, we now know that another racism hoax has emerged, I guess a few years ago in 2018, an elite Massachusetts liberal arts college.
There was a woman who complained about racism, and now we know none of it was true.
It was all made up. And it ruined several people's lives.
So there were people who...
I'm still looking at all the yeses.
Somebody says yes and married him.
A lot of people got married to people that were different levels in their own company.
Somebody says...
Let's see.
Who is this? Mr. Brockie says in all capital letters, Scott, defending, molesting a married lady.
Am I doing that?
Did you see me do that? Did you see me defending, even though I stopped every 10 seconds to say I'm not defending, I'm not apologizing for it, it's all bad behavior?
Did anybody see that?
Well, you're too dumb to be on this, so you are blocked forever.
Smart people only.
Alright, moving on.
Is there a name for the psychological disorder where you see white supremacists everywhere?
Because, you know, we had...
What am I hearing?
There's something bad happening around my house somewhere.
Okay. So, we had Trump derangement syndrome to describe people who were temporarily crazy about Trump, but now we're seeing, like, legitimate people who think they see white supremacy everywhere.
And I asked, is there a name for that medical condition?
And there is. Apophenia.
So, A-P-O-P-H-E-N-I-A is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between seemingly unrelated things.
Now, it's not specific to seeing white supremacy everywhere, but the examples you see are when people are putting together unrelated things.
So they'll say, yeah, yeah, if you look at any one thing, Not a lot of white supremacists.
In fact, when the KKK had their big gathering, they got, what, a dozen people?
So if you look at any one example, it seems trivial.
So you have to look at the whole tapestry.
It's the connected largeness of it.
It's not just the one example here or there.
And that actually has a name, Apophenia.
So, for example...
Just, I guess it was yesterday, was it, who was it, Sheila Jackson?
Who was just corrected on the fine people hoax by Representative Biggs.
So, Joel Pollack reported on this, and I probably have that in my notes somewhere, but forgot.
Yeah. So, oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah, so it was Representative Jackson Lee of Texas.
And what's her real name?
Jackson Lee is her Twitter handle.
Anyway, she tried to use the Charlottesville fine people hoax at a House Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday.
Imagine bringing up the fine people hoax after it had been completely debunked at the Trump impeachment trial.
But Representative Andy Biggs responded to it by playing the entire video to show that the whole thing was a hoax.
So yeah, Representative Jackson Lee, getting the name correct finally, was completely just faced.
Somebody says it's Sheila.
Oh, it's Sheila Jackson Lee.
That's the full name.
Thank you. All right, fact check.
It's Sheila Jackson Lee.
Anyway, she got fact checked hard, and good for Representative Biggs.
So this should happen every time this hoax plays.
Every single time somebody should just say stop and just play the hoax.
Now, the fine people hoax is one of the biggest parts of the The tapestry that says the world is full of white supremacists of the United States.
So apophenia is what it's called.
My new first choice for leadership as we're looking for new leaders to emerge is Representative Elise Stefanik from upstate New York, where I was, where I came from.
Went to Harvard, pretty smart.
Youngest woman to be elected in Congress, I think.
And she's got some legislation she's promoting here that it would limit Chinese government involvement in American universities.
Good idea.
And added her name to another bill, They would impose sanctions on any company affiliated with or operated by the Chinese military.
So Representative Stefanik has correctly identified the biggest problem in the world, which is China, and is promoting legislation which is directly useful.
And that's a leader.
That's a leader. So we're all kind of just sort of scanning the environment to see if anybody emerges.
To be a national leader.
I've said, much to your dismay, that we only have one at the moment.
If you don't count Trump, who's sort of a special case, after Trump, there's only one.
And it's AOC. Now again, I'm not talking about managing.
We've got lots of managers who are just sort of doing whatever the polls say or whatever their team says.
They're just sort of managing the government.
But there's only one who's going to make noise, everybody knows their name, is willing to attack their own side if needed, as she just did twice in the last couple weeks.
That's a leader. You can hate her, you can hate her, you can hate her.
I don't care. But that's what leadership looks like.
There's only one, and we're waiting for more, right?
Because you don't want to have one choice.
Maybe Elise Stefanik is a possibility.
Alright, let's talk about the mystery of coronavirus with India and Sweden.
Why do India and Sweden both have mysteriously good outcomes?
Sweden is mysterious because they didn't do the harsh lockdowns, although they are considering it at the moment.
And India is a mystery because their problem seems to have decreased just like everyone else's, but there's no reason for it.
They don't have enough vaccinations.
The season didn't change.
They just don't have a reason for it.
So here's some of the speculation.
For India, the speculation is that at least, I guess, in Mumbai, the Mumbai slums, about half of the population has been infected, so they may have antibodies.
And then also in...
There's at least one other city, Delhi, that has been 50% infected.
So in the big population centers, they may have so much infection that the virus isn't spreading as well.
But they also have younger people, and I know somebody here is going to say they give hydroxychloroquine.
I rule that out as an explanation.
At this point, hydroxychloroquine I don't think even makes sense as an explanation.
I see it in the comments, but I don't think it makes sense because it would just be too obvious if it were.
Nobody would be talking about India being a mystery.
If that was the answer to the mystery, it would just be really obvious if it was just hydroxychloroquine.
So I think you could completely rule that out as being a big factor.
I think you could still allow that it might be a small factor.
I don't think that's been eliminated from the possibilities, but it's definitely not a big factor.
We would know that by now.
Absolutely. Same with ivermectin.
Whatever ivermectin does or doesn't do, we would know by now if it's changing the result in some countries and not others.
And I'm sure we would know that by now.
And then Sweden, the other mystery, is that why did they do so well without the lockdowns?
Now, of course, that's being presented on the internet as proof that lockdowns are not effective.
But As others have pointed out, and I didn't really look into this until today, do you know the percentage of people in Sweden who live alone?
One person in the household.
Take a guess in the comments.
Let's see your guesses. Percentage of households in Sweden that have one member.
So this would include largely the seniors and young people.
Somebody said 100%.
Don't be crazy.
Alright, look at your comments coming in and see how they're all over the place.
40, 66, 45, 25, 33, etc.
The answer is about 50%.
Let's make sure I'm looking at the right numbers here.
Yeah. And it was uncommon in Sweden in 2019...
The most recent information.
For children under 25 to be with their parents.
So because of the social safety net in Sweden, when a kid turns 18, they pretty much leave the house because they can afford to do it.
In the United States, you can't afford to leave the house necessarily just because you finished college or just because you're 18.
Yeah, it's 50%.
Now, what is the primary place that anybody gets an infection?
In their house.
That's the primary place.
I think it's over 50% they've narrowed it down to.
And all of the other causes put together don't equal all the infections that happen in a house.
Now, what is a percent for the United States?
If 50% of the people in Sweden are living individually, How does that compare to the United States?
Let's look at some specific states.
California, it's 25%.
Half.
So Sweden has 100...
Well, let's not do dumb math.
We'll just compare. Sweden has 50% of their people with one person in their household.
California only has 25%.
Now, for the whole country, yeah, I think it's higher.
It's 30-some percent in the United States.
Closer to 37 percent.
But look at two places that got hit hard.
New York State is 30 percent.
30.5. California is 25.
That's gigantic.
Gigantic difference.
Yeah. This guy is hopeless.
So, David, you won't have to worry about me anymore.
Your comment, this guy is hopeless, has banned you forever.
Alright. So, do you think that it's possible that the entire Sweden situation can be described just by having way more people living alone?
Why wouldn't that be the whole explanation?
Because they did a lot of social distancing, and they did wear masks in places that made sense, etc.
And how did they count the homeless?
That's a good question. Somebody says they think Germany found that sharing the house did not increase it.
You can do a fact check on...
Do a fact check on there, but I'm pretty sure I saw statistics that over 50% came from household stuff.
People ask me, you don't know this, but all day long people peck on me why I'm not saying there are two genders and trans people are bad.
I'm not going to say that.
You can work on me forever.
That's not going to change.
Because it's a bad frame.
It doesn't matter how true it is.
It doesn't matter if it's scientifically based or anything like that, which is not true.
But even if it did, it wouldn't matter.
Here's what matters. We live in a world where kids, every day, make decisions that affect the rest of their life and a lot of them are permanent.
They do drugs, those effects can be permanent.
They may not pay attention in school, those effects are permanent.
They might break the law.
Those effects can be permanent.
So we live in a world in which people are making choices that could permanently ruin their whole life, just all the time.
But we also live in a world where people make the right choices for themselves.
And unfortunately, people will make right choices and wrong choices on every topic.
So the frame that there are only two genders It's so unproductive.
I don't want to say it's true or false, because that doesn't matter.
What matters is something helpful.
Is it helpful? Is it useful?
Is anybody better off for this argument?
No! Not at all.
Somebody says, don't do communism, kids.
So here's what is useful.
If you want a society in which you have fairness and compassion and empathy and all that, the easiest way to think of life is everybody is infinitely different.
I'm not like other white people.
Sorry. Sorry.
Sorry, I know you would like me to be like the white guy with all the white things, but I'm not like anybody I've ever met.
Whether they're white or not.
I'm as different from every black citizen in this country as I am from every white citizen in this country.
Now, not in terms of how society treats me.
That's a separate question. But in terms of who I am, I am infinitely different than everybody.
And so are you. It's not because I'm so special.
We're all unique.
That's a useful frame.
That's useful. Now you might argue, oh, but you're not that unique, and there are groups that have things in common, and that's important.
Okay. Okay.
It's just not useful to talk like that.
Because, I mean, the science is still going to do what science does.
But when we imagine that people are on a team, you just get in trouble.
And similarly with the transgender stuff, people are trying to convince me, Scott, don't you understand?
The kids will make the wrong decision and regret it for the rest of their life.
Yes, I understand that.
Who doesn't understand that?
Who doesn't feel empathy for that?
Who doesn't think you would like to have less of that?
Everybody. Nobody's on any other side.
If anything tragic happens to a child, I think we all wish it didn't happen.
But... We live in a world where you have the freedom to destroy your own life in any way you want.
I mean, there are some laws that might make it harder, but you do have freedom.
Now, in the real world, parents, of course, have a great control over their kids, and if the parents also agree to let a child make a decision which ends up ruining the child's life, At least the right people were involved.
At least it was the people involved made the decisions.
A lot of them are terrible decisions.
A lot of them are awful.
But I don't think you can change that.
That's one of those things you can't change.
Now, you can certainly do everything you can do to make sure people make better decisions.
That would be good. I'd be all for that.
I do think that you should also consider some kind of moratorium when it comes to people under 18.
I think that's worth talking about, right?
Because it is certainly true that if you're under 18, you should not have the same rights as people who have fully developed brains, right?
So I wouldn't mind seeing a law that says you just can't do it until you're a certain age.
It might not be 18. It might be 16.
You know, something that makes sense.
But let's get away from this.
There are two genders, right?
Even if it's true, it's just so harmful.
It just turns it into a fight.
And it doesn't need to be a fight, right?
It just doesn't need to be a fight.
Is there anybody on any political realm who thinks that they would like to see a child make a life-destroying decision at age 8?
No. Nobody wants to see a child destroy their life at age 8.
If you can avoid it, but you also need to give people their freedom.
Alright? So, it's always going to be a balance, but the there's two genders doesn't get you anything.
It buys you nothing.
Only trouble. Alright, so, that's what I say about that.
And have I made everybody angry yet?
Probably. I think I've said enough.
Have I? What made you the most angry about today's livestream?
Of the topics I mentioned, if you were here for the whole thing, which of my topics bothered you the most?
Because I'll probably do more of those.
No, I'm actually interested to see which one bothered you the most.
Somebody says, what about the girls who want to compete in the Olympics?
The Olympics is bullshit.
The Olympics should just go away.
I think the Olympics are some of the worst things that we do to children.
Think about all the children who spent their whole life doing ice skating training and then never even made it to the Olympics.
That was their life goal.
I think the Olympics is child abuse, frankly.
That's just my opinion. So I don't think we need to fix the Olympics.
Just get rid of them.
It's just trouble. It's not fun anyway.
All right. The Cuomo stuff.
Oh, people are saying that the Cuomo stuff bothered them the most.
Now, did it bother you because you thought that I was defending him?
Or did it bother you?
Is that why? So even though I said 12 times I'm not defending him, is the reason that you're bothered is because you say I defended him?
Because I think that's what's happening?
Even though I didn't?
All right. Oh, UFO investigations.
I'll talk about that another day.
Somebody says your obsession with AOC bothers me a lot.
Well, you know you get blocked for that, right?
So I'm going to block you for that.
So everybody who says that I have some kind of obsession with AOC is going to get blocked, because I just don't want people like that in my world.
Did I have an obsession with Trump?
I'm going to talk about the people who know how to do persuasion.
Now, if you don't want me talking about people's persuasion talents, objectively, Then you definitely should not be part of these live streams.
The most useful thing you can get out of this is when I talk about people you don't like using techniques that you could use, right?
So the idea of talking about AOC is so you can learn what she does, understand it, and borrow those techniques and incorporate them.
It's the same reason I talked about Trump that way.
So you could take his techniques, understand him, and incorporate it.
Same thing. But...
You won't have a choice to do that because you got blocked forever.
Alright, that's all for now, and I will talk to you.
I will talk to you later.
Bye for now.
And you YouTubers?
Oh, good.
I'm glad that you like the persuasion conversations.
You know, there's no way to do it well without talking about people you don't like.
Because some of them are really, really good at persuasion.
That's why you've heard of them.
Why did Cuomo's accusers wait so long?
Who was it in the news...
Who made just one of the best comments on that and said, we have to stop asking that question.
And I agree with that.
Her context was, we have to stop asking the question of why the woman put up with it for so long.
Because that's always the first thing you ask.
Why did they put up with it so long?
Sounds sketchy. Why would a woman put up with that?
And I agree with, it wasn't Rose McGowan, but it was somebody in the public eye who was kind of smart, who said, we need to stop asking that question, because we do know why people wait too long.
They've got lots of reasons.
They're afraid they don't want to lose their job, they don't want to cause trouble, they don't want to ruin their own reputation.
Tons of reasons. Tons of reasons.
And, you know, they also give fooled and Stockholm Syndrome and all that.
So we should just stop asking the question, what took so long?
It's just not a fair question.
Although it would be interesting to know, but it shouldn't matter to the situation at all.
Why do the YouTubers get more time?
The reason is because Periscope is going to go away any day now, I think.
March 1st, maybe? It goes away.
So I was favoring YouTube as a gentle way to encourage Periscope people to migrate a little sooner than when Periscope gets turned off.
So it is marketing.
I'm just making it a little bit extra here so people don't get forced to come, but maybe they want to get a little extra.