Episode 1327 Scott Adams: Paying Artists in SF, Kitler the Cat, Vaccination Passports, and Mostly Fun Tonight
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
A cat named Kitler
Vaccination passport resistance
Finding people who can't get an ID
The "Dilbert Test", a Turing test upgrade
Understanding the High Ground Maneuver
Self-Identifying as Black
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Hey, everybody. I hope you're as prepared as I am for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best part of the day, every single time.
And sometimes, not every time, but sometimes it's even better than that.
This might be one of those days.
Man, you'll be sorry if you miss it.
Oh, wow, will you be?
Well, happy Palm Sunday.
It doesn't mean what you think it means, so slow your roll there.
If you'd like to enjoy Palm Sunday to its ultimate potential, well, with your other hand, what you want to do is grab a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jig or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
You know it does.
Come on, you know it does.
And it happens right now. It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
Join me now.
Go! Yeah, that's good.
So I'd like to give you a little flash from the past.
You ready for it? I was looking in my closet the other day, upstairs, I was just looking for something, and I found this.
This gigantic emergency rice.
And I want to take you back to where your heads were one year ago, roughly one year ago, when the lockdowns were just beginning.
And everybody was buying their secret stores.
Not only did I buy secret stores of foodstuffs, and by the way, why do they call it foodstuffs?
How about just food?
But I actually hid it.
So that when the roving band of armed...
I'm sorry.
So when the roving band of bandits came to rob my house and kill me and steal my food, they wouldn't be able to find it.
Now, do you remember how scared you were a year ago?
When all the toilet paper was gone, it looked like maybe the entire economy of the world would plunge into darkness.
Do you remember just how scary that was?
Just think about it.
Because, you know, we're all bitching about our vaccinations, right?
Oh, my arm's going to hurt, and maybe it's not good for me.
But compared to what it was a year ago, oh, my God.
I'm going to tell you a story that would be better if I could tell you the person, but just for privacy, I won't.
So when the pandemic began...
And I was telling people, you know, don't worry too much.
It won't be that bad.
I got a call at home one day from somebody who is really, really good at understanding the world and predicting what's going to happen next.
And I've never been so frightened in my life.
Now, when I say I've never been so frightened in my life, I mean that literally.
Last year, at a time when I was telling all of you, it'll be fine, just prepare, do everything you can, but don't worry yourself to death.
We'll work through it, etc.
And by the way, I was right, wouldn't you say?
Wouldn't you largely say, That my characterization that we would get through it, we wouldn't run out of food, we wouldn't die.
It would just be really, really inconvenient and bad economically for a lot of people, but we would get through it.
But I'll tell you, at the same time I was hearing that, I was hearing from somebody whose opinion I really respect that we were doomed.
That we were in big trouble.
And I was trying not to tell you that.
Because I didn't buy it, right?
So first of all, my optimism was legitimate.
I thought we would be fine.
Fine in the sense that we would come out of it about the way we are, right?
That's not fine if half a million people are dead.
But I thought we would come out of it about the way we did.
I heard a story that was so scary that...
I've just never been that scared in my life.
It was just the most frightening thing I've ever heard.
And I was not going to tell you.
I'll tell you, you are not going to hear that story.
Anyway, I'm glad it didn't go to the worst case scenario.
So, you know, as we're watching this story about the Suez Canal and how that little Choke point in our economy will affect us all.
I was starting to see a pattern here.
Here's an interesting pattern.
If you look at the Suez Canal thing, the story is that it's going to affect the world economy, right?
We're all affected by it.
At the same time, we're in the middle of the pandemic, which is sort of a unique problem in the sense that it's worldwide.
We're also talking about climate change, which is worldwide.
And we're talking about the rise of China and what that means to the world, which is, again, a global problem.
Have we ever had this many global problems?
It's kind of new, isn't it?
I mean, we've had world wars, but they seem like special cases.
But now it seems that we're such a connected world that That you can't do anything without affecting everybody else.
So I feel as if it's like the simulation or God, if you prefer.
I feel like there's a message being sent to us and we're not getting it.
Do you feel that way?
It feels like...
Let's take the assumption that there's a God.
We'll just take that model of life for a moment.
It feels like God just keeps tapping us on the shoulder and saying, hey, hey, you can't really just take care of yourself anymore because we're all connected.
Do you get it? I'll send you a pandemic, see if you get it.
Wait, wait, you're not getting it yet, right?
All right, let's try again. I'm going to move this tanker sideways and watch what happens.
Entire world will be affected.
Tap, tap, tap. You get it now, right?
Do you see that? You don't get it yet?
Well, watch this.
And it feels like one thing after another is just trying to tell us the same message.
You know you're all on the same team.
You know that, right?
Team human being, same side.
But we're not getting it yet.
Here's my favorite story in the news.
It's about a cat named Kittler.
Now, poor little Kittler...
It has some markings that look like a Hitler mustache, and so the owners quite humorously named their Hitler-looking cat, Kittler.
Now, that was fine.
Everything was fine with that, because everybody knew that it was just a joke.
But there was a local Fox News weather person who made the terrible, terrible mistake...
of running a cute picture of Kittler on her show where I guess she was showing some cute animal stuff and she got a lot of pushback.
Turns out that a lot of people were offended by Kittler and so she apologized.
Now I want to play her apology because remember I told you that the apologies for all the the wokeness mistakes the apologies are becoming hilarious because The distinction between parody and the real world has just disappeared.
You can't tell the difference between a joke and somebody literally trying to be sincere.
You can't tell the difference.
Let's see if you can tell the difference.
Is she really apologizing, or is this a joke?
I did make a mistake during our Caturday segment.
I used a submitted photo of a cat with an inappropriate name.
I don't want to use the name here, but I never intended to hurt or offend anyone by using that picture that was actually just given to me.
I understand my mistake and I am deeply sorry.
And in the future, I will absolutely be more diligent with this content to ensure it never happens again.
All right, so the punchline The punchline is, I'll be more diligent with this type of material to make sure it never happens again.
Because you know the big risk here?
Oh, we can accept that it happened once.
But man, you don't want this to happen again, do you?
Because how can we go on?
So I would like to join in in solidarity.
With this weather person who has now apologized.
And I would like to say, too, that I'm going to learn from this.
I'm going to learn from this.
Some of you'd never learn, but I learned from this.
And my plans of showing a picture of a cat that looks like Hitler, I've changed them.
I was going to show a picture of a cat that looked like Hitler, but now I know that would be insensitive.
So I'm not going to do it.
I learn. Maybe you don't.
Well, in New York, and I guess in other places, they're going to have a vaccination passport, it looks like.
So there'll be some kind of an app that you can show if you're going to certain kinds of events that says, I've been vaccinated.
What do you think of that?
I don't really understand the resistance to this.
Now, I understand there is a lot of resistance, and people really, really care about it, and it looks like, I don't know, it looks like we're all going to be branded and tattooed and sent to the concentration camps or something.
Somebody's saying, is it a HIPAA violation?
Well, not if you do it voluntarily.
Or maybe you mean some other point, I'm not sure.
But all of you who said, you know, I knew it was coming, are you really worried about this?
Of all the things that you have to worry about, this might be the smallest problem in the world.
Well, no. The smallest problem in the world is Kittler.
Kittler is the smallest problem in the world.
This might be the second smallest.
Do you really think this is going to go wrong?
In what way?
What exactly is the argument that this is going to go wrong?
Somebody says it's a freedom violation.
Is it? And I'm seeing people are just going nuts in the comments.
Over on YouTube, they're swearing I'd be with the F word.
Even for just bringing up the topic.
My freedom! My freedom!
You know, literally everything you do for your health affects your freedom.
Almost every law we make affects your freedom.
Everything you do to be polite affects your freedom.
We don't do anything that doesn't affect your freedom.
All of our choices are trade-offs of, well, I'll give up a little freedom to get a little bit more of this.
Let me ask you this.
If you had two choices, there are no mass events, or if you would like to attend, optionally, Nobody's forcing you to do it.
You don't have to go to the event.
But if you want to attend, you'll show a little thing that says you're safe.
Is that a big problem?
I mean, seriously.
I get the point that maybe something could get out of control or whatever.
But if you were going to rank this on your top 100 problems, is this in the top 100?
Because I can't even generate a little bit of caring about it.
Like, I'm not even close to being mad at it.
I can't even care about it.
It doesn't even seem like an issue.
Am I missing this completely?
Nobody's going to lose their freedom.
You're gaining freedom.
Because if you don't have this thing, you'll never be able to have the event.
The event won't happen.
So doesn't that give you more freedom because now you can go to a thing that you couldn't go to before?
Okay, now maybe you would say, but how about we just have the big events and everybody can go?
We'll get there. Do you think this is permanent?
I don't think it's permanent.
I don't worry about anything that's temporary.
Let me give you a philosophy that might help you a little bit.
Don't worry about anything that's temporary.
That's it. That's some of the best advice you'll ever hear in your life.
Don't worry about anything that's temporary.
Worry about the big stuff.
Now, I hear it's slippery slope, and they're boiling a frog, and they're getting us used to all this control and all that.
But do you think they don't already know where you are on your phone?
I mean, they're already tracking you on your phone.
They can listen to you if they want.
Your privacy is largely gone.
And I'm not...
So he says it's segregation.
Here's the thing. All of your complaints about this are just sort of like weird conceptual complaints.
I just don't think any of it's real.
I think this is your smallest problem.
But should I be wrong about that, I know you'll let me know in the future.
So Saturday Night Live is starting to, let's say, gently mock the Biden administration.
Michael Che had a really good one.
He did the weekend update, and as he was reading the fake news, he said Biden was asked if he plans to run for re-election in 2024, which is probably the nicest way to ask if he plans to be alive in three years.
Now, what's great about this joke is that's exactly what I was thinking when I heard the question.
I thought, are you really asking if you think you're going to be alive in three years?
And of course, Biden had to say his presumption was that he would run for re-election, but there's no way he thinks that.
There isn't the slightest chance that Biden thinks he's running for re-election.
Do you think that? There's no chance of that.
Here's a story that made me laugh.
And let's see if you laugh for the same reason.
So journalist Cheryl Atkinson, you probably are all familiar with her, she tweeted that she's looking for some story assistance.
And she tweets, for a story, I'm looking for a fairly large group of Georgians who want to vote but cannot get an ID. Please DM me if you have any leads.
Now, here's what made me laugh.
We haven't done that yet?
One of the biggest stories in the country is the Georgia election law changes, and the biggest part of that is requiring identification, because if you didn't have it, you wouldn't be able to vote, at least for mail-in stuff.
And... Cheryl Atkinson is the first person to say maybe we could find one of these people.
These alleged people who have no ID but want to vote.
Do they exist?
Here's my prediction.
I'll be surprised if you can find three in the whole state.
I'll be surprised.
Now that doesn't mean there are fewer than three.
I'm saying that there are probably so few that if you could find three, it would be a little bit of a miracle.
Now, there are two problems here.
One is, I don't know that any exists.
If we get one, we'll find out.
But how hard is it to find someone who doesn't have an ID and also has the second criteria that they wanted to vote but they couldn't?
How do you even find people who don't have an ID? Like, are they on Twitter?
If they are, how?
I mean, I guess you could be, somehow.
But, yeah.
And so here's what made me laugh.
Why is Cheryl Atkinson the first person to ask this question?
Hey, can you help me find some of these people?
The entire, the biggest story in the country is based on the assumption that there are lots of them.
And nobody asked to find one?
Until Cheryl Atkinson asked.
Hey, I don't know where they are.
Never seen one.
Never met one.
Does anybody have one?
Can anybody find one?
What's it tell you that only one journalist even asked the question?
What's that tell you?
It tells you there's no interest in knowing if it's even real.
Except for Cheryl Atkinson.
And I, of course, will be very interested in reading what she comes up with on this.
But it just amazes me that nobody did this.
And let me give you another example of this.
Do you remember when, after the Charlottesville fine people hoax thing happened, do you remember all the press who went and talked to the people who attended, To find out, for sure, just by talking to the attendees, whether there were people that could be described as fine people.
Wouldn't you want to know that?
Don't you think that the news organizations should have done exactly what Cheryl Atkinson did, and say, hey, does anybody know anybody who meets that description?
Because the entire story is about whether they exist or not, and nobody checked to see if they exist.
Just think about that. Just hold that thought for a moment.
It was a gigantic story, and still is.
And the entire thing boiled down to, were there people there who a reasonable person would say, no, you're not a racist.
You had other reasons to be there.
As far as I know, only one person in the world did that.
Me. I did that.
I tweeted, hey, was anybody there who would describe themselves as a fine person?
Or something like that. And people contacted me.
And I interviewed them.
And found out that indeed, people who, in my opinion, did a good job of explaining that they don't have racial biases in this particular way.
And didn't like the racists who were there.
Did not agree with them at all.
Disavowed them completely.
I'm the only one who checked.
I'm the only one who checked.
I'm the biggest story in the year.
I'm not making that up.
I'm the only one who checked.
Right? And now Cheryl Atkinson is literally the only person in the world asking the biggest question about the biggest story.
Are there any?
Have you ever met one?
Alright, so it made me laugh.
Speaking of laughs, so San Francisco has decided to start paying $1,000 a month, guaranteed income, to artists in San Francisco.
And especially whose artistic practice is rooted in a historically marginalized community.
So if you're not white, it looks like they really want to give you some money.
And this works out for me.
A lot of you are offended by that, but since I started identifying as black, I like this idea now.
Because I'm an artist, kind of.
I'm sort of an artist. And also, now that I've identified with, I've self-identified as a member of a historically marginalized community...
I think my people need this money.
So, yes, I think San Francisco should start giving money to my people, the artists from the historically marginalized communities.
And doesn't it make you wonder if they're still trying?
Are they still trying, the government of San Francisco?
Or is it now just sort of like performance art?
They're trying to figure out what's the most ridiculous thing you'll go along with.
Watch this. Watch this.
We're going to tell people that our artists are essential and see if we can just give them money.
And somebody would say, they're not going to buy that.
Nobody's going to think artists are essential in a pandemic and that you should give them money because they're essential.
Nobody's going to believe that.
Watch this. Watch this.
I'm going to sell this.
The difference between a government doing what a government should do and a practical joke has completely evaporated.
The actual government decisions you can't tell anymore if they're practical jokes.
Now there should be some version of let's say the Turing test For government.
Now, if you're familiar with the Turing test, T-U-R-I-N-G, named after Turing, and it was the test to see if your artificial intelligence could fool somebody to make them think that they're a real human being.
And the test, at least conceptually, is that behind a curtain, There's somebody talking.
You don't know if it's a computer or a person, or they're typing, either way.
And you ask them questions, you have a conversation, and if you can't tell, yeah, it's Alan Turing, thank you for the first name.
If you can't tell that it's a computer on the other side, you think it might be human, then you've passed the Turing test.
But if you can tell, oh, that's obviously a computer, then you failed.
But I feel like there's some kind of Turing test going on with our government right now.
Where you hear a new policy out of San Francisco and you say to yourself, I'm not so sure.
Was that a real one?
Or was that a prank?
I can't tell.
And if you fool me, you've passed the equivalent of the Turing test.
I'm going to call it the Adams test.
Or should I call it the Dilbert test?
I think Dilbert is more famous.
So let's do the Dilbert test.
So the Dilbert test is an updated version of the Turing test.
And the Dilbert test, I guess you could apply this to a company as well as a government.
Yeah, actually, let's do that.
Since it's a Dilbert test, let's apply it to corporations or organizations of any kind, government or not.
If you can't tell...
If it's a joke or real, you've passed the Dilbert test.
All right. Next week, I'm going in to re-record my audio book of How to Failed Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
If you don't know the backstory of that, back in 2006, I believe, I lost my ability to speak.
So I couldn't talk.
My vocal cords would clench when I tried to make certain sounds.
So I could make noise, but it would sound like...
Basically, people couldn't understand sentences.
And I had just finished my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Went Big.
And although it was years after that...
After surgery and years of recovery from my voice.
But I hired a voice artist to do that book for me.
Because I couldn't get through a whole book.
My voice wouldn't have lasted.
But, if there's one thing you know about me by now, is that I am one stubborn motherfucker.
And I fucking hate to lose.
And I don't know, I will wait forever to get revenge.
I will wait forever to fix something that wasn't right.
Like, I will chew through a fucking concrete wall to get something done that just needed to get done.
If you don't know anything else about me, you should know that.
And I have never been more bugged by the fact that I couldn't read my own book.
But, as you've noticed, I have now spent at least one hour a day every day for several years now talking in public until I can do this.
Finally. I can finally do this.
It took me years.
But I don't like to give up.
And so tomorrow I'm going in the studio and I will re-record and then we'll re-release the book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
Because if you write a book called How to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big and you give up before you record it properly, well, you have not lived up to your own book.
So I'm going to get this done.
It's not going to be easy, because the recording is always unpleasant.
It takes days. But I have rebuilt my voice to the point where not only can I record this book, but I think I'll be happy with how it will come out.
So that's just a little personal update for you.
Clarification. I thought that Vice President Kamala Harris would be assigned to the Border control situation, but apparently she's being assigned just to the international affairs part where she'll deal with the Central American countries to see if we can make them more attractive for staying there.
And that tells us a little bit more about the future.
If they had put Kamala Harris in charge of border security, do you remember what I said about that?
It's like, uh, are they trying to get rid of her?
Because that's like a suicide mission.
Nobody's ever going to succeed about the actual border itself.
You can't succeed.
Half the country is just going to hate your guts no matter what.
Maybe three quarters. But you probably could succeed doing something that would maybe help the Central American countries do a little better job of being an attractive place to stay.
And that's more of a presidential kind of a job, isn't it?
So instead of giving her this suicide mission, she's really going to have a very high-level job.
And if she were to succeed in that at all, it would put her in good position for running for president.
So I would say at this point, that is helping her future.
So Christina and I went out to eat last night in my San Francisco East Bay neighborhood.
And there was the most fun thing.
You know, we're all looking for these little signs of life, you know, that the world is getting back to normal and the economy is going back to where it was.
And let me tell you what I saw when we went out to dinner.
I've never seen so many senior citizens out to dinner.
Right? I'm not counting myself necessarily in this group.
I'm on the bubble, but I'm talking about 70 and older.
The restaurants are crushed with vaccinated seniors.
The restaurants are crushed.
They're crushed.
Couldn't get in. I mean, we did get in, but finally, you know, we found a place.
But you go there, and it's over 70, over 70, over 70, and oh, my God, it's just great to see.
It is great to see.
I have to admit it.
It affected me. And we ate indoors for the first time.
Well, the first time in a while.
We ate indoors. But the funny thing is it's like the night of the living vaccinated.
Because, you know, obviously you go out to dinner.
There'll always be a good dose of senior citizens anywhere you go out to dinner.
But not like this.
You go out to dinner and...
As soon as you get into the restaurant areas, it's like night of the living vaccinated.
You know, I got my second shot.
Give me restaurant food.
Let me in.
I got two shots.
So I think I'm eligible.
I believe my eligibility kicks in this week.
So sometime this week I might get a first shot if I can find access to it somewhere.
Dr. Birx is saying that because we handle things wrong in this country, and if we had handled it more like, let's say, Germany, that all the deaths over the first 100,000 might have been mitigated or reduced.
To which a doctor, I don't know his name, but said something, was on TV, said, yeah, that's great, Dr.
Birx. It was your job to make sure that didn't happen.
Is that fair? So Birx is saying, we handled it wrong and all these people died.
And then somebody else is saying, that's on you.
That's on you. If you didn't talk the government into doing what you knew was right, why are you complaining?
Because your job is not just to tell them what to do.
Your job is to talk them into it.
It's not just your job to know what they should have done.
Your job was to make them do it.
And let me be as clear as possible.
If you couldn't make them do it, your job was to fucking quit.
Really publicly.
Right? Let's just be as clear about this as we can.
Her job was to make this happen, since she knows this is what we should have done.
Her job was to make it happen, or fucking quit.
Right in front of us.
So that we know who the problem is.
If the problem is you couldn't talk some idiot into doing what you want, let us know.
That's your fucking job.
Your job is not to complain about it after you're out.
That was not your job.
You did not do your job, lady.
Do it right or quit so that we know what the problem was.
Who the problem was.
Alright. Um...
So I issued a challenge on Twitter to see if somebody could win Sidney Powell's case, the lawsuit in which Dominion is suing Sidney Powell for libel, I guess.
Defamation or libel or whatever the proper legal word is.
And I said, try to win her case in one sentence.
You know, just the first sentence.
Try to win the whole case.
And I gave you my take on this.
So here's a sentence that I believe Sidney Powell's...
Lawyer could say one thing and then just sit down and just be done.
And we'll see if you agree that this is one thing that would win the case.
And it goes like this.
So imagine the Sidney Powell defense attorney looking at the jury, I guess it's a jury, and saying, quote, or potential quote, I'm a lawyer advocating for my client, Ms.
Powell, and I'm wondering...
How many of you think everything I say about dominion today should be assumed to be a fact?
And then you just sit down and say, the defense rests.
There's nothing else you'd have to say.
Now, of course they would.
But think about this point.
Do you think that anybody in the jury would look at the defense attorney and say, oh yeah, it is my plan.
I plan to believe everything you tell me.
Nobody. Nobody would say that.
Because everybody in the jury understands, because they're adults and they were at least capable enough to be chosen for jury duty, so you have to show a little bit of human capability or you're not on the jury.
Right? Every person on the jury would listen to that and say, well, no, I'm not going to believe it just because you say it.
You're a lawyer. You're advocating for a client.
In this context, we only believe evidence.
If you show me evidence, I may or may not believe the evidence, but I'm sure as hell not going to believe it because it came out of your stupid mouth, your job is to persuade me.
Your job is not to be true.
Your job is not to tell me the truth if you're a defense attorney.
Your job is to do the best you can to get your client free.
That's it. Now, let me tell you, how many adults don't understand that?
None. Every single adult understands that an attorney advocating for a client is going to say things that you need to check.
Right? Everybody knows that If you can't check it, you shouldn't think it's necessarily true.
So the weird part is that the defense attorney would be in exactly the same position as Powell herself was, because she was a defense attorney, or maybe more of an offense in this case, but the analogy is perfect.
It's not even an analogy.
It's basically the same thing.
And This is an example, if you're following my persuasion lessons, of what I call the high ground maneuver.
Do you know how often the high ground maneuver, which is a persuasion trick I'll explain a little bit more in a moment, do you know how often the high ground maneuver works?
Every time. It's probably the only persuasion method that works every time.
Because there's a reason for this.
People don't care about facts.
You understand that, right?
So if I'm trying to persuade you with my better reasons and my facts, we observe that people just harden their opposition.
The facts don't persuade anybody.
But everybody wants to avoid looking foolish.
It's universal. So if you're in a meeting or in your business situation, and there's something that would make you look foolish, you're going to change your mind immediately.
Because you don't want to look foolish.
So regardless of what you think about the truth of the world, you're going to protect yourself first.
So the high ground maneuver creates a situation where the person you're trying to persuade has to protect themselves.
This is the key.
They're protecting themselves as opposed to protecting their argument.
If you give somebody a choice of, I'm going to let you protect your argument, Or I'm going to let you protect yourself.
They'll choose themself every time.
That's why it works every time.
Now you don't always have the opportunity to use it, right?
So not every situation will lend itself to a high ground technique.
It has to be there.
And you have to recognize it.
So it has to naturally sort of be in the situation.
And the high ground in this case...
Is that you adults in the jury are certainly smarter than the public in general, right?
You're not so gullible that you would believe that somebody whose job is to persuade you is also always telling you the truth.
You're well above that, are you not?
Because the person sitting next to you is above it, and the person behind you, they're above that.
They know how lawyers work.
They know the difference between an honest person and an advocate.
But you don't?
Because all the other people seem to understand this.
Right? So as soon as you create the situation where if you stay with your opinion, you will look like the only person who doesn't understand something that everyone understands.
Because everyone understands lawyers or advocates, not a source of truth.
Everyone understands that.
The moment you've painted that picture, everybody goes to the high ground with you because they can't stay here.
They look like idiots.
So you're not making them defend their argument.
You're making them defend themselves.
Do you want to see here being the only idiot who doesn't understand that lawyers are not supposed to tell the truth?
Well, I'll say that wrong.
They're supposed to tell the truth.
But nobody expects it.
No reasonable person expects it.
That's it. That's the end of the trial.
All right. I'm oversimplifying, of course.
Trials are more complicated than that.
But if you wanted to understand the high ground maneuver, this is just the best example.
You couldn't get a better example than this.
Twitter user John Katz, K-A-T-Z, I believe he has a podcast, so he's somebody in the public.
He had a tweet that I just love.
This is just the greatest tweet.
And when I read this to you, you're going to say, why did it take somebody so long to say this?
All right, here's his tweet.
Quote, You think your AR-15 will work against a government with tanks?
So he's mocking the people on the left who have two opinions that don't seem to fit together.
So here are their two opinions.
That they think an AR-15 will work...
I'm sorry.
Let me stop screwing this up.
He's mocking the people who are saying that having AR-15s will be no use against a government with tanks.
So one of the arguments for owning guns is that it protects you in case your government turns against you.
And the Democrats say, you fool.
You fool. Are you telling me that you think that a bunch of hillbillies with their AR-15s are going to protect against the government with tanks?
Seriously? You think that?
Now, the same people who are asking you that, as John Katz points out, are also telling you that these same hillbillies...
I'm just using hillbillies to be provocative...
Almost took over the government with bear spray.
Both of those messages are out there at the same time.
Don't be ridiculous.
You're not going to be able to defend the public with just your little rifles against tanks and nukes.
At the same time, you know, if you've got some bear spray, you could pretty much take out the government.
And it was this close.
The bear spray people...
Almost got it done.
Almost got it done.
And both of those messages are out there completely.
Seriously. Like nobody's even embarrassed by that.
Nobody's embarrassed that they hold both of those positions.
And a lot of people do.
Now usually, I saw this comment on Twitter as well, that something like 90% of Twitter arguments is somebody imagining somebody who doesn't exist and being mad at them.
You know, the person who holds this opinion, but also hypocritically holds this other opinion.
And usually that person doesn't exist.
It'd be hard to find somebody who actually held those literally two opposing opinions.
But this is one where this is real.
I'm pretty sure that this describes almost the entire Democratic Party.
I believe that most of Democrats would agree with both of these sentences...
That conflict.
And I don't think that they have any problem with it.
There's no interior conflict with thinking that both of these could be true.
And of course, Trump caused trouble by referring to the Capitol riots as having basically zero danger.
What he meant, of course, was as an overthrow to the government.
Or at least I hope.
I hope he meant there was zero danger in terms of an overthrow of the government.
Obviously there was physical danger and plenty of it.
All right. 90% of baseball is half mental.
Is that Yogi?
Yogi Berra? Yeah, mind reading.
I don't want to mind read, so I'll back up on that point.
You know, the mind reading flaw...
It's just the stickiest thing, isn't it?
And once you start seeing it in other people, you can recognize that they're involved in mind reading.
But it doesn't help you not do it yourself.
It's really, really hard to not fall into the mind reading trap where you confidently imagine you know what other people are thinking.
Because you never do. You're terrible at that.
Your accuracy is just terrible at that.
He said they were kissing the Capitol Police.
Maybe some of them were.
There's another carjacking.
Let me ask you this.
Our entire media is now obsessed lately with the violence against Asian Americans.
Let me start by saying we don't want any violence against Asian Americans.
So I think we're all on the same side that violence against anybody's bad.
Violence against an ethnic group in particular takes something that's already really, really bad and adds that extra badness.
We're all on the same side.
Nobody likes violence. But let me ask you this.
Do you believe that the mainstream media would be reporting about all this anti-Asian bias if China were not making it happen?
Yeah, think about it.
Is it a coincidence that That China has advanced AI to the point where they can influence the conversation and the argument in the United States.
And there would be no thing that would be better for China than to create as a national story anti-Asian, in this case Asian American mostly, anti-Asian discrimination as the top headline story.
Do you think that this story is originating in America?
It might. It might.
Right? I don't think so.
I'm going to tell you something that might scare the shit out of you.
We no longer live in a world where the default assumption is that this is a natural story.
The default assumption is that it came from China.
And that they're manipulating the United States through a variety of means to make this the main story.
Now, do I know?
Do I know that?
No. No, I don't know it.
I can't give you evidence of it, etc.
Do I think that this would be a good play?
Yes. If China were to do this, and if they pulled it off...
It would be a really good play, because it's exactly the kind of thing that would prevent the United States from going hard at China.
Because somebody's going to say, hey, are you going hard at China because you need to, or is it really sort of a racist thing?
Because I'm sure China noticed that we have trouble dealing with our southern border because...
because... The internal politics are that we're fighting over whether that's really about racism.
That's why we can't deal with our own border.
What would China like to do in terms of how the United States deals with China's aggressive growth?
China would like the United States to be arguing about whether that's a racist policy.
And they succeeded.
In the sense that it's happening.
All we're talking about is Is the country racist against Asians and Asian Americans?
If that's the top thing you're talking about, what's the default assumption in a world of AI and social media and intelligence agencies really behind most of the big stuff?
The default assumption should be that this is coming from China.
That doesn't mean it is.
But the default assumption should be if you don't know, if you can't tell one way or the other, the default assumption is that it's China.
And if you don't get that, you're a few years behind.
Because in 2021, that is the default assumption.
And if you don't know that, you think the news is real.
It might be. I can't rule that out.
I'm just saying that if you don't think China is behind this being the headlines in this country, you are probably naive.
Probably naive.
So, here's something to look for.
See how many times our internal news is focused on a story that coincidentally would have some kind of a benefit to one of our We're good to go.
Or an adversary. Because remember, our intelligence agencies are putting influence on both adversaries and enemies.
So, you know, there's no reason to think that our adversaries are not doing the same thing to us, just in different ways for different interests.
So you can fill in the names of those other countries as easily as I can.
Okay.
All right. As a black American, will you be making any edits to Hedafil and everything?
Well, I don't think that the book needs to be edited for that reason.
Should we suspect foreigners or Democrats?
Well, here's why, if China is behind these headlines, the Democrats would be, let's say, so interested in the same story that they would easily allow it, if not being a participant.
Thank you.
Yes.
Now that I have an interracial marriage, I feel that I understand things a little bit better.
I didn't have one until recently, when I started identifying as black.
And by the way, the great thing about identifying as black is that I get to be on the winning team for a while.
And it's funny because I actually feel that.
The moment I started identifying as black...
I started looking at the news differently.
People are so automatically team-oriented that if you just say you're on a team, suddenly you start rooting for that team.
It's just automatic. You can't turn it off.
And suddenly I'm looking at the news differently, and I swear to God it's true.
I'm looking at the news differently, and I'm thinking, all right.
Looks like my team's doing pretty well today.
They're doing really well today.
Somebody says I'm not black.
I think you're a racist.
So there's some racist on here saying that I'm not black.
Now, I understand that visually it seems like that, but I think we're well past the visual part being your identity, aren't we?
Aren't we all past that?
It doesn't matter what I look like.
That's no longer a criteria and should not be.
I'm fully on board with that no longer being a criteria.
Because you wouldn't want to say, who's the, one of my brothers, the black activist, Sean, what's his name?
Sean, somebody fill in the last name.
But he's a famous black activist that people say is not physically black enough.
And I say that is offensive.
Sean King, thank you.
So I defend Sean King because racist saying that he's not black enough so he can't self-identify as black.
That's purely racist.
And I will defend my brother, Sean King, as much as I would defend myself because we're in the same situation.
Not the same. Nothing's the same, but everybody's different.
But I feel it.
I feel it. All right.
That's all I've got for now, and I will talk to you all tomorrow.
Tomorrow. Yeah.
I'll see you tomorrow. Bye for now.
All right. YouTubers, I got you for another minute here.