Episode 1346 Scott Adams: Propaganda Spotting (Great Examples Today) and Defending the Hard-to-Defend Until I Get Cancelled
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Content:
Police shootings
Chip Roy: List cartels as foreign terrorist orgs
Half-human, half-monkey embryo created
Twitter bans Project Veritas
Democrats are eliminating free speech
Race issues are a strategy problem
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I see in your comments people asking me to comment about Thomas Sowell.
Did something happen today?
Because I didn't see any stories that involved him.
So, Lance, I can't comment on him.
I don't know what you're talking about.
But I suppose if I find out, I'll do it tomorrow.
Did you see the video of Man vs.
Bobcat? In the real news, it's totally real and it never misleads you.
There's a viral video of a man going out to his car in the driveway.
And before he gets in, his wife comes out.
It looks like she's carrying maybe a cat carrier case with a cat in it or something.
And A bobcat lunges at the wife, who's between two of the cars, like attaches to her back, and the wife starts screaming, I'm being attacked.
Now, here's the good part.
The husband, who's on the other side of the car, No delay, goes right at the bobcat, rips it off his wife, holds it in the air, looks it down, is like staring it down while he's holding it, and then takes it, and he throws it across the lawn, and it gets better.
Then he pulls out his gun, because apparently he was strapped, and he starts chasing the bobcat, who comes back to attack his wife, and like, onto the car, and now he's armed, he's like, I'm going to shoot that thing.
Well, everybody lived.
And that was the story.
Bobcat attacks man.
Man beats bobcat.
Pretty good, right?
Just before I came on, somebody said in the comments, that's not a bobcat.
That's a cat.
And I looked at it again, and the bobcat is basically the same size as my last cat.
Like, really big. You know, like a Maine Coon cat kind of thing, really big.
But not a bobcat.
Now let me tell you what you can do with a cat, sometimes, that you really can't ever do with a bobcat.
And I'll demonstrate.
Imagine that you're holding this cat and or bobcat like this, and you're holding it in front of you for up to five seconds.
You could do that with a regular cat.
And maybe not be killed.
I'm not positive that you can hold up a wild bobcat in your hands and stare it down for five seconds and then reach it back and throw it without losing every part of your face.
I'm not sure this story is what you call real news, but let me give a shout-out to men.
Now, I'm not going to suggest that you'd have to be, you know, The male gender to rip a bobcat or a house cat off of somebody and save another person.
Didn't require that much strength.
But I will simply note that we should appreciate that men run toward danger.
Men run toward danger.
And we would have a pretty bad world if that were not the case.
And watching it happen in real time with no delay.
There was no delay.
It was instant. Boom.
This man went right to the danger and ripped it out by the core and even had a gun to finish it off.
That's a man. That is the purest expression of the male gender.
Now, without getting into the non-binary stuff, which is a separate topic, but somehow that was just, I don't know, I like that story, even if it turned out it was a house cat.
I remind you that the Dilbert NFT is available.
You can see it's pinned to my Twitter, and it's the First and probably only Dilbert comic that will ever have the F-word in it.
So it's one of a kind.
And I think the bidding's up to $7,500 for the naughty one.
And the un-naughty one, the alternative, is up to $350.
And so it seems that the public is voting for profanity.
For profanity.
No surprise. But if you'd like to get in on that, the bidding's going to be open for a few more weeks.
Rasmussen has an interesting poll.
He said there were a number of questions, but one of them was, generally speaking, are most deaths the fault of police or the suspect?
Now we're talking about police encounters in which the suspect ends up dead.
So generally speaking, are most deaths the fault of the police or the suspect?
How do you think this broke down conservative versus liberal?
Conservatives says, two-thirds of the time, it's the suspect.
So conservatives believe, you know, by two to one, it's usually the suspect's fault that they got shot.
Liberals, 22%.
So liberals believe that it's the police fault, whereas conservatives believe it is the, at least in part, or even a large part, the suspect's fault.
Which of those is accurate?
In the comments, which is more accurate?
Is it usually, and again, we're not talking about specific cases, but just sort of in general, is it usually the suspect brings it on themselves, or the police are just not doing their job the way we want them to?
What do you think? Well, this is again...
A critical difference, and I'll be talking about this a little bit later today, meaning on this live stream, of a worldview.
And I would like to make this distinction, which will be one of the most important things you could ever understand.
There is a difference between what is true and what is useful.
And if you're locked into the belief that the only things are useful are also true, you have handicapped your ability to succeed.
Because there are lots of useful things that may not be so true.
And what I mean is, if your worldview is obsessed with what's true, you're not going to succeed.
If your worldview is that I'd like to know what's true for sure, but I'm not going to be limited by it, I'm going to do what's effective, then you have more tools.
You can follow what's true, if that's your best path, or you could follow a philosophy that's not based on truth.
Let me give you an example of a philosophy that's not based on truth.
You can control your life.
That's not true. It's not true.
Because there are all these other forces that are banging on you all the time, right?
So is it true that you can control your life?
Absolutely not. Just tons of stuff outside of your control.
But if you decide that that's your worldview, which is not true, but you act like it's true, and you build a philosophy and systems around it being true, what happens?
You succeed. Pretty much every time.
It's almost a guarantee.
You know, there are no guarantees in this life, but it's as close as you could get to a system that's going to work every time.
That you just pretend, and a lot of it is pretend, that you have control over everything.
Right down to a police stop.
Is it true that That the suspect can always control the police action by how they act.
Nope. That's not true.
Definitely not true.
But it's kind of true.
Right? It's not technically true.
Because the police can just be mistaken.
They could be jerks.
They could be racists. They could be poorly trained.
All kinds of things you can't control directly.
But it's still true you have a lot of control.
All right? So you see the difference?
If you're stuck in the what's true world, you don't have as many options.
If you say, I love what's true, if it's useful, but I'm going to use what works, if there's a difference, then you say, I control myself, and I can control you by what I do.
Not totally true, but if you act like it's true, you're going to do well.
Let me give you another one. There's lots of evidence, scientific and anecdotal, that people who are confident can perform better.
Right? So if you were a reality-based person and you were obsessed with what's true, you'd say, there's no evidence that I could be good at this thing, whatever the thing is.
No evidence. Every time I've tried it, I've got this result.
Why should I assume without any evidence that I would be able to be better at this?
The facts are limiting me.
So don't use them.
The facts are the wrong tool in this case.
Instead, say that you're great, and you can perform well, and you can improve.
Is it true?
It might be true by accident.
But if you don't assume it, you're not going to perform at your best.
So having a false impression of reality Which is that maybe you're a little better than any facts suggest, improves your performance.
So every time you're stuck in what are the facts, you've limited your toolbox.
Facts are great. We prefer them.
But they're very limiting if your worldview depends on them.
I'm going to talk about that with some more examples in a bit.
But let's do some other things.
First of all, some compliments.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Also, the Rasmussen poll, I think there's just some other poll, said that liberals believe that over 1,000 black men are killed by police per year.
Do you know what the real number is?
So liberals, I think this was not Rasmussen, liberals believe that over 1,000 black citizens are killed by police, presumably without a good reason.
What's the real number?
About 27. Now, what do you think about 27 black people being killed by the police each year?
If you're a human, and you have any empathy or caring about the country you live in, you say to yourself, 27 people got killed by the police?
That's way too many!
That's like a gigantic number of people killed by the police who didn't need to be killed by the police.
27's a lot! If you're talking about the government killing people, if you're talking about a disease killing only 27 people per year, you wouldn't even care.
I mean, you'd care if it was your family, but you wouldn't see it as a national problem.
But if the government, the police, are killing 27 people a year that didn't need to be killed, if that were true, you know, that's a separate question.
But if it's true, This is a big problem, and I would acknowledge that Black Lives Matter has a good argument about why the hell?
What the hell is going on?
But believing that it's 1,000 completely changes your scale of it, right?
27 is way too much.
You've got to do something about that.
You've got to understand it better, at least.
But you look at what the fake news has done, they have literally, literally, This is not hyperbole.
The fake news has brainwashed.
Again, no hyperbole in use here.
This is actually just straight definition of brainwashing.
A lot of liberals believe that over 1,000 black men were killed.
So obviously they have a completely distorted view of how big it is.
Again, 27 is a terror and can't be tolerated.
Compliments to Representative Chip Roy, Republican, for introducing legislation Thursday that would label the drug cartels as foreign terror organizations under federal law, which I assume gives us tools to directly engage them where they are.
I don't know if that's the case, but I'm pretty sure it gives us some extra aggressive tools.
Do you remember who was the first person you heard say, why are the cartels not designated as terrorists when they obviously are?
Who was the first person you heard, not the first person who said it probably, but who was the first person you heard say that they should be designated as terrorist organizations?
Probably me, for most of you.
I've been saying this for a while.
One of the things that I track is how often I'm persuading on some point in public and then how often things go my way.
Now again, I'm not saying I'm the first person who said it.
I wasn't. I'm sure it was a fairly popular idea somewhere.
But there is a weird coincidence, isn't there?
That whenever I'm behind something specific, you wait a few months and it seems to happen.
Now, I'm not saying I'm causing it, because I think what's happening is I'm just good at front-running stuff, or just guessing what's going to happen anyway.
It feels like that's what's happening.
Certainly, I don't feel like I had any causation in this one, specifically.
But it's weird how often things go my way, isn't it?
Have you noticed it, or is this just something happening in my head?
Has anybody else noticed? How often things go my way?
Am I just crazy?
Or have you noticed it too?
In the comments, let me know.
I'm genuinely curious about this.
If it's an internal phenomenon in which I'm the only one who sees it, or do you see it too?
Again, seeing it as a coincidence, I'm not saying I'm causing this stuff.
Yeah, so...
Alright, I'm looking at your opinions.
In today's bad data analysis segment, I like to look at things where people are just looking at the analysis wrong.
So here I'm not going to make a political point.
And see if you can separate this, right?
I'm only going to be talking about the analysis.
So don't retreat to your opinions.
We're only looking at the analysis, okay?
The topic is masks and mask effectiveness.
Okay, it's too late. You just went to your corners.
Come on back. Come on back.
It's not about whether they work or they don't.
It's only whether this analysis tells us anything or doesn't.
So Kyle Becker, who's a real good follow on Twitter, by the way, so if you want to Google him, Kyle Becker, has a very good Twitter follow.
But he's tweeting some statistics today that I question, and I'm going to ask for your help.
The reason I question them is that with my little bit of You know, data analysis experience, it doesn't look like good data.
It doesn't even look like a good approach.
It doesn't look like anything.
But I will acknowledge that to someone who may not be a data analyst, it looks really compelling.
And here's what the graph tells you.
There's no correlation between mask use and number of people who die per thousand.
Does that show you for sure that masks don't work?
No correlation. Wherever you add masks, you might have a lot of deaths.
Some places you have lots of masks, not a lot of deaths.
So no correlation, right?
No, I don't think so.
I think that these graphs literally tell you nothing about masks.
Actually, literally nothing.
There's no information about masks.
It's a graph only about masks But there's no useful data about masks in the graph.
That's what I see. I don't see anything about effectiveness of masks.
I just see where they're used.
And here's the disconnect, I think.
And this is where I need an assist on this, right?
There are two places I can imagine you would expect to see more masks.
One place would be wherever infections are high.
So if you look at a graph that says wherever infections are high...
There's more masking. That would make sense, right?
That doesn't tell you masks are effective.
It tells you that the experts say to wear them.
So wherever infections are high, follow this part, don't you expect to see lots of masks?
Because infections are high, so A, everybody mask up.
So that part we understand.
Whether or not masks work, are you with me so far?
That would have nothing to do with whether they really work, but we all acknowledge that the experts recommend them whenever the infections are high.
So, so far, without any information about mask effectiveness, just knowing that experts recommend it, we would expect to see exactly what's on the graph.
Oh, infections were high, so there were a lot of mask wearing there, because it was recommended.
Where is a second place Where you would see a lot of masks, wherever it is politically recommended.
In other words, if you don't have a lot of infections, but you're a democratic area, you're still going to wear masks.
So what are the two places you would expect to see masks politically?
You would expect to see them when infections are high, Because the experts say to wear them and there'd be mandates.
And the second place you'd expect to see them is where infections are low, but they're Democrats.
And so they have a preference for masking up.
So if you see a graph that says that they wear masks where infections are high, and they also wear masks where infections are low, what have you learned about mask effectiveness?
Nothing. Nothing.
There's no data there. Literally nothing about mask effectiveness.
The only thing you learned is where they wear them.
That's it. Does anybody get that?
Now, if there's a correlation, or a lack of correlation is the argument, there's no correlation, and if masks worked, you would see it clearly.
Not these graphs.
No, you would not see that.
I don't think. So here's...
So let me... Let me put a little more humility on my opinion than maybe came across.
One of the things I'm often criticized for, rightly, is acting more confident than my argument should suggest.
I'm about 75% confident that I'm right about this, that these graphs mean literally nothing.
But they look like they mean everything.
So I'll ask the skeptics to dig into that.
All right, so I don't know if you're following the Law of Self-Defense blog, which talks about the Chauvin case, and I've recommended it, but it turned on me today.
So the Law of Self-Defense blog tweeted, there was a reference to China and genocide, and they decided to put me into the story.
And so the Law of Self-Defense blog, or Law of Self-Defense Twitter, I remember Scott Adams saying, referring to this process, meaning the genocide against the Uyghurs, as if China were dealing with an infectious disease.
That's all it says.
Why am I in this story?
What is the implication here?
Is the implication that I'm in favor of China dealing with the Uyghurs like an infectious disease?
It feels like that's the implication, doesn't it?
And if not, why am I in the story at all?
What would be the point of putting my name in a story about genocide?
Now, I don't think I have to tell you I'm opposed to genocide.
Do I? And it is true that I made this analogy that China is looking at it like it's just a disease that they're eradicating.
Does that say anything about my opinion?
Other than my opinion about China.
It's not really my opinion.
I'm describing China's opinion.
So why am I in this tweet?
What's up with that? And if you read this without knowing the context, would you not think that I was a horrible person who believed that the Uyghurs should be treated like a disease?
Kind of... Kind of suggests, I think, that, doesn't it?
Doesn't say it, but kind of suggests it.
Interesting. Well, in the most important news of the day, for the first time, scientists have created embryos that are part human and part monkey.
An embryo that's part human, part monkey, and finally.
I know you were waiting for flying cars.
You'll have to wait a little bit longer for that.
But it looks like the day of monkey people is here.
I would like to tell you the funniest comment I saw on this story from user D. Hello, D. I know you're watching this.
And after I tweeted about the first time we were creating half humans, half monkeys, Dee tweets, "There goes the price of bananas." Congratulations, Dee.
That was the funniest thing I saw on Twitter today.
Well, there goes the price of bananas.
And what's funny about it is that there are so many deep ethical questions and everything about the nature of reality is in the story.
What is ethical and what is not?
And D says, there goes the price of bananas.
I ate a banana this morning because I got extra hungry for bananas.
Well, apparently the reason for this is they're trying to grow these monkey people for transplants.
So basically create a monkey person And then rip out their organs and put it in a fully human person.
To which I say, yeah, I think we got an ethical problem here.
Because number one, what exactly, what exactly makes me love humans more than monkey people?
Because I think there's a gross assumption in this that if a monkey person were created, That I would somehow have less affection for the part monkey, part human person than I would for the fully human person.
And I don't think that's demonstrated.
I know I like my dog more than a lot of humans.
I don't know that I wouldn't like a monkey person better than a regular person.
Because a monkey person would have a lot of advantages.
Like, suppose you're talking to a monkey person and they've got...
They've got their phone in one hand, and they've got a pen in another hand.
And you say, can you pass the salt?
Well, can a regular person do that?
Well, not easily. You'd have to put something down.
But not a monkey person.
You've got a tail. So you'd be like, pass you the salt?
Sure. There you go.
And their tail would come up, a little salt shaker.
And you wouldn't even have to stop what you're doing.
Monkey people have lots of advantages.
If I had a choice of artificial insemination...
And I wanted to create a baby.
And somebody gave me a menu and said, well, you can have a variety of babies by choosing the donors, etc.
But we'd like to offer this new option for a monkey person.
And I would say, I don't want to have a monkey baby.
And they'd say, no, no, it's not a monkey.
It's a monkey person.
Part monkey, part person.
And I'd think about it and I'd say...
There might be some advantages.
If you raise a regular child, you have to buy clothes.
That's expensive. But would a monkey person need clothing?
Or would they just be furry and they would always be warm?
Would they have an advantage in sports?
Because, you know, you like your kid to be the star athlete.
I believe a monkey person could excel at sports.
You know, a little extra muscles per weight, etc.
And, you know, forget about the tail.
How good would you be at sports if you had a tail?
I feel like it would help.
So let's not make any racist jokes.
I know you're dying to do that, but we don't do that here.
Let's just celebrate the fact that we could be creating monkey people.
All right, here's your propaganda alert.
In The Guardian, a British publication, they say that apparently there was some data breach, and they found out that there are some U.S. police officers and public officials who donated to Kyle Rittenhouse's, I guess, defense fund.
And that's a story.
Why is that a story?
Why is that a story?
Should you care that...
Police officers, or even ex-police officers, and public officials donated to Kyle Rittenhouse's defense.
What makes that a story?
Because I'm pretty sure if you're a police officer, you can donate to a GoFundMe.
You can have an opinion.
And keep in mind that the video of Kyle Rittenhouse shows him not committing any crimes.
Or at least the ones I saw.
What if the police also saw a video of Kyle Rittenhouse not committing any crimes?
If you're a police officer and you want to donate money to a cause for somebody who is on video not causing any crimes, why is that a story?
Why can't you do that?
Now some of you would say, Scott, Scott, Scott, you don't know he wasn't committing any crimes.
You know, maybe the courts will rule differently.
That's possible. You know, because the law is sort of opaque to non-lawyers, and even to lawyers sometimes.
So you don't know what's going to happen with Kyle Rittenhouse.
Maybe there's some crime he committed, but I watched the videos.
I didn't see any crimes.
I saw horrible tragedies I wish had not happened, but I didn't see a crime.
And so this is a non-story.
This is just propaganda. The way it's presented to you is with the assumption that Kyle Rittenhouse had done something so bad that no proper police officer could back him.
And that is not true.
Based on what we know.
Later we can find out that's true.
But based on what we know now, There's no evidence of a crime that I've seen.
And if these people saw the same thing I saw, yeah, they can donate to anything they want.
And that's not even inconsistent with their jobs.
Here's more propaganda.
Twitter has apparently banned Project Veritas, who, as you know, is breaking some really shocking stories about CNN, in which they got a technical director to admit in very clear terms that they're engaged in propaganda.
They know they are, they do it intentionally, and they're not even trying to be news.
Now that's a big, big story.
Twitter has banned Project Veritas, who I think is banned in enough other places that this really does make a difference.
And the reason for the ban is that, allegedly, their organization, Project Veritas, had some kind of fake users.
So Project Veritas said, what fake users?
We're not aware of any fake users.
Tell us what you're talking about.
What did Twitter do?
Did Twitter say, oh, here's our evidence, here are the fake ones, and here's how we know it tied to you, and therefore you've violated our rules and we kick you off.
Do you think they're going to do that?
No, because they don't have to.
They don't need to make their case.
They can simply say...
This is our service.
We say you violated it.
You're gone. Now, how do you feel about being kicked off of social media without a specific reason that you can verify?
It's sort of specific, but not one you can verify.
Now, I told you, let's put some context on it.
I told you that YouTube had taken down one of my videos for saying that I had made a claim about the election integrity that was against the rules.
And then I said, I'm not aware of that.
I'm not aware of making any claim, and I certainly didn't do it intentionally.
So if they don't tell me what I said, I either have to never talk about the election again.
You see how dangerous this is?
I only have two choices.
Never talk about elections again, so take my voice off the field, or get banned completely and totally Because I make the same mistake again because they never told me what the first mistake was.
How do you avoid it when you don't know what it was?
Do you see that the social media companies have created a model in which they can ban anybody for any reason without giving a reason?
And that we know that Project Veritas was uncovering CNN's propaganda ways.
How do you feel when somebody who just uncovered another media entity's plain and obvious propaganda intentions, how do you feel when another platform bans them for a reason that you can't and Project Veritas can't confirm even happened?
What if there are no such thing as these fake accounts, or they've been attributed to the wrong place?
That's a really big problem.
That's a really big problem.
Now, every case is different, so it's a little dangerous to generalize from Project Veritas, because there might be something they did that violated the rule, and this might be totally appropriate.
But I'm not arguing whether it's appropriate or inappropriate.
I'm saying that if we allow the standard to be, we'll tell you when you're no longer welcome, but we don't need to give you a specific reason.
If that becomes the standard we accept, the country's lost.
That little bit of accepting the unacceptable would be the end of anything.
Because all critics would just disappear.
You just couldn't be a critic.
You would make a few comments.
The Democrats would say, hey, there's one.
There's somebody who's hurting us, making some comments.
Social media says, well, you violated a rule.
Which one? Well, we're not going to tell you.
Oh, you violated a rule again.
Seriously? Which one?
We don't have to tell you.
Three strikes and you're out.
Now that we know that the Democrats use major media entities as essentially a subsidiary of the Democratic Party, this is the end of free speech.
The Democrats have literally captured enough of the right assets that they can eliminate your free speech.
And you're watching it happen right in front of you.
There's no doubt what's happening.
You can watch it right in front of you.
Plenty of evidence. It's all plain.
And yet it works anyway, because they have all the power.
There's not enough power to push back, so they know they can just take it as far as they want.
So I have to think that there are some conversations going on about me at this point.
Now, I don't like to be the paranoid who says, you know, everybody's looking at me or everything's about me.
It would be easy to be that guy.
But don't you think, now that they started with Alex Jones and they got the president and now they're going after Project Veritas, don't you think that if you look at that continuum, Alex Jones, President Trump, Project Veritas, where am I? Where am I in that continuum?
I'm next.
Right? I'm next.
Now, I've told you that I don't like buying into the slippery slope arguments because it's lazy.
Things either have a reason to go in a direction or they have something stopping them.
So I like analyzing things that way.
Saying something is a slippery slope is like just waving your hands at a topic.
It doesn't say anything. Things either have a reason to go or they have a reason to stop and that's it.
What's the reason to stop?
In this case. So given that I believe they will be successful banning Project Veritas, they certainly succeeded with Trump, they succeeded with Alex Jones.
Now I'm not defending anything any of those people said, right?
That's their job. It's their job to defend their content.
That's not my job. But I'm kind of next.
Or people like me, right?
Am I wrong about that?
I feel like I'm next.
And if that happens, I feel like that's a whole other level.
Because, you know, the strategy of starting with people that even their supporters now have a problem, like no matter how much you love Alex Jones, and no matter how many times he gets proven right in the long run, which is scary, by the way, the number of times Alex Jones ends up being right, Way more than you think.
But at the same time, he's a provocative character.
Well, he has said things that you and I can't agree on.
So you get the easy ones first, and then if people are okay with that, it sets the stage to get the ones that are a little bit more of an argument.
So people like me are not trying to lie to you.
If they take me out, that's too far.
But what can you do about it?
Yeah. No, the slippery slope is a dumb argument because it doesn't give reasons.
It's like an appeal to magic in my mind.
Things have things that stop them.
They have friction. They have things that cause them.
If you can't see the parts of the machine, calling it a slippery slope is just the dumb way to look at an engine, basically.
Let's talk about some others.
So, Andrew Sullivan, who you know as one of the few people who can be trusted in this world, I'll add him to my credible people list.
Now, I believe he would...
Does he identify left or right?
That's what's so awesome about him.
Like, I have trouble remembering if Andrew Sullivan identifies left or right, because I think he just looks at topics individually, which would make him very unusual.
And I think he gets blowback from both sides.
So that's exactly why I like him.
But he's talking about how the mainstream media had concocted this story about the police massively shooting black people.
And this is his statement about it.
He says, fascinating insight.
He was referring to a graph showing how many liberals believe that there's a gigantic problem of police shootings, whereas the data doesn't show that.
He says, fascinating insight into how the MSM concocted a massive, hyperbolic lie and succeeded in getting most people to believe it.
Well, I wouldn't say most people.
I would say most people on the left to believe it.
But I'll go ahead. Then the falsehood became the unquestioned premise for future stories and lies.
Yeah, so there's a whole industry built on the lie of how big the problem is.
Now, let me say it again clearly.
If the total national problem is 27 black people got killed by some entity of our government, meaning the police, that's a huge problem.
It doesn't matter that 27 is a small number and it's 300 million or whatever.
So Andrew Sullivan's calling it out as pure propaganda.
So there's another one.
I would argue that police shooting the wrong people for the wrong reasons could literally be the smallest problem in the country.
I can't think of anything smaller, actually.
Now, obviously, if you're a victim of it, it's the biggest problem for you.
But if you were to simply make some objective list about how many people were killed or influenced by whatever problem, it would be pretty close to the bottom, wouldn't it?
You know what would be close to the top?
Improving schools. But the mainstream media protects the teachers' unions, protects the Democrats, and so you believe that the smallest problem is the biggest problem, and you believe that the biggest problem is the smallest problem.
Now, I'm not talking about you with the word you.
I mean the public.
You're all smarter than that.
All right. Here's some propaganda from conservatives.
Are you ready? This one's going to be a little harder for some of you.
Because when I call out the conservatives for fake news, a lot of you identify conservative, and the first thing you think is, really?
My team does that?
Yeah, your team does that.
Both sides, left and right, produce a lot of fake news.
In my opinion, here's some more.
You saw the story about Kristen Clarke, Joe Biden's nominee for the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division.
Now, if you're a nominee for a Civil Rights Division, you better have a pretty good past about civil rights and about racial things.
But it turns out that when she was in Harvard, she wrote a letter for the Harvard Crimson, which is being held out as very, very racist.
And I was just reading a story by David Harsanyi in National Review, in which the headline is, There's absolutely no evidence that Kristen Clarke's racist letter was satire.
Ah, so here's the question.
So nobody is doubting that the letter she wrote in 1994, nobody is doubting that it was really racist-looking.
I'm going to add the word looking.
Hold that for now. Nobody left or right, no person who read it, doubts that it's super, super racist-looking.
Okay? Everybody agrees on that.
And so when I heard that, I said, I don't even need to see the letter, do I? Because even the little hints about what's in it sounded so super racist.
I was like, well, obviously, if it were a joke...
It would be obvious, right?
And then I read it.
And it's really much better than you think.
And I'm going to back Kristen Clarke, and I'm going to call fake news on the conservatives who are doubting her explanation of what it was.
So her explanation is she called it satire.
Now when you hear that something's satire, does your brain say, oh, it's supposed to be funny, right?
And then you read the letter, and it's not funny at all.
So is it satire?
It's not funny.
You won't laugh even once.
So how can it be satire if it doesn't even look like it was trying to be funny?
Well, here's how.
It's really good satire.
It's so good that you can't tell it's satire, in my opinion.
So here's the setup.
The context was she was arguing against the science in the Bell Curve.
So the book The Bell Curve makes some claims about IQ, which lots of people see as racist.
Now I'm not going to argue the details or the truth of the book The Bell Theorem, right?
Okay, you can have that argument on yourself.
That's not part of this broadcast.
But there are critics of it.
And in her criticism, this is how she worked against it.
And I've got to say, this is A+. And part of the reason it's A +, is you can't tell she's kidding.
That's what makes it so good.
It's really good.
And what she does is she goes through some alternative theories...
Of why black people are scientifically superior to white people.
And she lists them.
This researcher says, and it's crazy stuff like the melanin in their skin and some gland is superior and therefore they have better competitiveness or brains or something.
Now as you're looking through her examples...
In which she is saying that black people are clearly biologically superior to white people.
First of all, if you're white, your brain's on fire, right?
You're like, oh my god, this doesn't look like science.
Ah, even though these points she's making are dressed up as scientists and researchers, just on the surface, she's saying to yourself, I don't think these things are true.
And then she plays it like she's completely serious and just leaves it there.
It's kind of brilliant.
Because she created a structure where you can talk yourself out of the bell curve without ever giving you a specific argument against it.
She simply created a context where if you're going to buy one person's idea of science that happens to have a negative implication for black people, She said, basically, this is my interpretation, right?
She didn't say this directly. My interpretation is she simply put it out there and said, this is your Bell's theorem.
Here are some other theories that are crazy that have as much backing.
Now, I don't know if they have as much backing, and I don't know the details.
I don't know if you looked into it.
You would find that they're all equally credible or not.
But putting them on the same page with the same argument...
Was really good satire.
Because you couldn't tell it was satire.
And that's what makes the persuasion so strong.
So she called it satire, because I don't think there's a word for it when it's this good, right?
There's not like an extra word that's super powerful, extra good, persuasive satire.
Then it turns into a Jonathan Swift, eat the babies kind of situation, where you weren't laughing at Jonathan Swift.
By the way, just Google Jonathan Swift if you want to know what I'm talking about.
It's a famous piece of satire.
So, number one.
I have the 20-year rule that says if somebody did something bad more than 20 years ago, let's just forget it.
If it doesn't intrude on today, it's just something they did 20 years ago, they're different people.
Let it go. If you're conservative, you're liberal, just let it go.
We don't want to be held to a standard or to something we did 20 years ago.
But that's not exactly what's happening here, is it?
Because the way she's talking about it today...
Is either true, in which case I would say, okay, let it go, especially it was just satire.
But what if it's a lie?
What if it was serious?
And she's lying when she says it's satire.
Unfortunately, that takes her 20-year problem right to today.
So if she's lying about that, and I say she's not, I'm going to declare it completely adequate clarification.
If she's not lying, I think her defense was good.
And I would say that we should accept people's clarification.
And she's not saying today that she backs any of those wacky, batshit, crazy theories.
But it was really good satire.
A+. And here's the thing.
If I didn't mention, she was writing for Harvard.
Right? She was in Harvard.
So if somebody does something that's smarter than you...
And they're also in Harvard.
Don't be surprised.
That shouldn't be a surprise.
So I think this is a case of bad reading comprehension.
But again, let me add some.
Somebody says in the comments that I should mention that she's black.
Did it matter? What part of the story is influenced by her ethnicity?
Because had she been white and written exactly that same letter, wouldn't you have the same reaction to it?
I feel like her ethnicity isn't actually important to the story.
But we conflate these things and act like it is.
And I don't believe I'm saying this, but the New York Times editorial board also says it's satire.
So they agreed with my interpretation.
Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin also backed the satire clarification.
And I hate to say it.
I agree with both of them.
That is my interpretation.
So anyway, even if you think I'm wrong, I think the larger thing is that if it's ambiguous and it was 20 years ago and somebody wishes to clarify it away, I'm not too concerned if the clarification is genuine.
I'm more concerned That I and the person in question also don't want to deal with it.
Like we're on the same page that it doesn't matter.
That's fine with me. We have new pictures of UFOs.
The newest one is a triangle.
It's some kind of a flying triangle.
And I looked at the video of the flying triangle, and here's a weird coincidence, that the play button on the video, so you're looking at the screen, And, you know, here's the screen, here's the video, and then on the bottom left is exactly the same triangle that seems to be flying through the sky, except it's the icon for the play button.
Now, that could be a coincidence.
Might be a coincidence.
And I'm sure it's a coincidence.
I don't think the play button is what the picture is of.
But if I ever saw anything that looked less like a flying aircraft, it would be the play button flying through the sky.
It does not look like an aircraft to me.
I mean, I don't know what it is.
But I'm going to say, if you were to list all the things it might be, aircraft would be the last on my list.
Flying triangle? I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, I can't go with you all the way to flying triangle.
I'd love to. All right, I would like to recommend a grand deal, a grand deal to remove systemic racism from schools.
And there's one topic that black Americans and conservative Americans of all types completely agree on, which is the schools need to get fixed.
They're a source of holding down the people who are already down, which I call systemic racism.
It happens to include lots of folks, but certainly it limits the ability of the different ethnic groups to rise to their best level.
So there's complete agreement.
You know, of course, individuals disagree, but in terms of groups, quite a lot of agreement.
Now, why couldn't black leaders get together with conservatives and say, look, we disagree on all this other stuff, but at least on this one thing, we're on the same page.
Got to fix the schools.
And then the black Americans work with conservatives, together they would be unstoppable.
Have you seen black Americans work with conservatives before?
Yup. Prison reform.
What was the outcome?
Success. Right?
When black Americans work with conservatives on issues that at least they have some compatibility, they can get something done.
And did the Republicans lose any elections because of prison reform?
I heard a lot of people worried about it, but I don't believe I've seen any data that would say Trump got fewer votes because he did prison reform.
Now here's a very important point.
In my opinion, one of the things that's holding back the black population in this country is the same thing that's holding back the Palestinian people in the Middle East.
And they've got a model that can't work.
And it goes like this.
In order to be a leader in, let's say, Black Lives Matter or any black American leader, in order to be credible as a leader, you have to be a little bit more radical than the average of the people you're leading, right? The people you're leading don't want you to be middle of the road.
That's not really leadership.
They want you to be sort of an extended version of what they're feeling.
That's leadership. Trump did that.
A lot of Americans had feelings about immigration.
He took it a little more extreme, and everybody said, that's our leader, because he's being even more extreme than we are.
We'll take that. Because even if he only gets half of that, that's the direction we want to go.
So to be a leader, you need to be radical.
But here's the problem. That radicalness is translated into some kind of hatred for your opponents.
You're not just radical about what you want to do, you're radical about who you blame.
So if you're a black American, you're blaming white supremacists and conservatives and Republicans.
And then what happens when you want to make a deal?
They've created a situation, and the Palestinians have the same situation, Where if your leader made a deal, he would lose his job or his life.
So if you can't lead your own group and simultaneously make nice with the other side and compromise, you can never get anything done, but it's the only way to be the leader.
Now, let me say that This point of view comes from a black leader to me.
So somebody who's a prominent black American leader, name you've heard, told me personally that it would be impractical to be a leader in the black world, and he was trying, if he didn't take a hard stand against basically white people.
That his people needed that in order for him to be the leader.
Now, what happens if you take this radical stand against the very people that you have to negotiate with?
Well, you lose your job if you negotiate.
So if your model is you can only be the leader if you refuse to work with the group you have to work with, you will never get anything done.
And I just noted that the Republicans don't do that.
Even, I would say, for, let's say, the most, maybe, provocative topic would be Let's say, immigration reform.
Now, conservatives have really strong opinions on what immigration should look like, and Democrats have a very strong one.
Don't you think that you could make a deal?
If everybody were just being businesslike, and politics didn't exist, but you had just different opinions about how to handle things, don't you think you could make a deal?
Like, we'll give you these things you want, but I don't like it, You give us these things I want, but I know you don't like it.
But it's a deal. I believe that the framing that Republicans bring to everything is that you can always make a deal.
And that if you make a deal, you did not fail, you succeeded.
But does that work if you're a Palestinian leader?
If a Palestinian leader made a deal, I don't even care what it is, but just made a deal with Israel, what would happen?
They'd be killed. They'd be dead.
It doesn't even matter if it's a good deal.
It doesn't matter. Because once you've demonized the other side to that point, you can't deal with them.
Black American leaders have the same problem.
If they were to make a deal that made complete sense, in the sense that everybody gave something up to get something, with Republican leadership, that black leader would be kicked off the team.
And if you create a situation like that, it can only fail.
There's no other path.
It can only fail.
And this is why I think it made perfect sense for Trump to essentially try to get peace in the Middle East by ignoring the Palestinians.
Because they have a model that they created themselves that you can't fix from the outside.
You can't. So Trump just said, effectively, and his people, effectively said, if we can't fix this, let's just work with the stuff we can work with, which was the other countries, and get a good result.
And that's what happened. I had criticized the Trump administration from beginning to end.
About not doing more to help the black population.
I do think they did quite a bit.
You know, if you're objective about the things Trump did, I think it was a very good administration for black Americans, income-wise, prison reform, funding of historically black colleges, opportunity zones.
I mean, a lot, a lot of good stuff.
But I criticized him for not doing more.
But I don't know you could have done more because of this leadership problem.
There's nobody to deal with on a lot of topics.
But it did work on prison reform.
So that's a good model. Alright.
Here's a tweet from a black American mom.
That's That's her own Twitter description of herself, is a black American mom.
And, or did she say, I may be intuiting the black part because the photo is a black person.
But here's the tweet.
And it was in a conversation about whether the police are the cause of the killings or the suspects.
And he or she says, or just spitballing here, Listen to that sentence.
It has never been on me to make sure you don't murder me.
What do you think of that sentence?
Is it your responsibility to make sure somebody doesn't murder you?
Or is it just that other person's responsibility?
Here is a perfect example of what I call the loser philosophy, which is to say a person whose worldview is this, that it's not on you to make sure somebody doesn't murder you, you will never succeed in life.
You cannot succeed with that point of view.
Let me tell you the productive point of view.
And this gets back to, remember I said, there's a difference between what is true and what is useful.
Not always, but there can be big differences like this.
So what is true?
From a legal perspective, if the only thing you're talking about is the law, the person who does the murdering is the only one responsible.
We don't have anything in the law that says, well, you had a really bad personality, so I guess he could murder you.
So unless you're actively engaged in some really bad or violent or threatening behavior, you don't get to kill people.
But my philosophy is I completely control, in the real world, when you take it out of the legal framework, which we all agree with.
I don't think there's anybody who disagrees.
With the legal framework that the person who does the murdering is the guilty one.
You never send a wounded person to jail because they're the victim.
No matter if they did something unpleasant that brought it on themselves or not.
Because you've got to blame the shooter.
But that's just the legal world.
We don't live in the legal world all the time.
I mean, it's always there, but we don't have to It's not influencing every decision.
In the real world of just getting things done, the right philosophy is that you control the cop.
And if you don't believe that, then it won't happen.
You have to believe you can control the cop to have any hope of doing it.
Now, that doesn't mean it'll work every time.
It doesn't mean that you have complete control.
I'm not saying that. I'm not even saying that any of the shootings were anything but the police, you know, bad training or mistakes.
It's just a general philosophy of life that if you think other people are making decisions and just influencing you, it's a loser philosophy.
Nothing you do will work because you're seeing the world wrong.
And let me put it in...
In more clever terms, all right?
There are two kinds of mentalities in the world.
One mentality I would describe as seeing the world as reciprocity and abundance.
Reciprocity and abundance as a worldview.
Now the way you would see that work is, I like telling this story about a A young salesperson who was trying to sell salt into grocery stores.
And salt is just based on cost.
So you can't really sell salt.
It's just one is more expensive than the other.
That's basically it, because it's still salt.
And what he would do is go in and just help the store owners.
He would just volunteer his time, go help them restock the shelves, reorganize and stuff like that.
And then he would get the sale.
Because he was the only salesperson who was giving something without asking something in return.
So the reciprocity engine, I call it, is what drives largely conservative Republican worldview.
It's about what can I do for you?
Because if I can give you an amazing service, I'm going to get rich.
But it starts with, what can I do for you?
With the understanding that if I do enough for you, stuff comes back.
If you listen to the smartest people in Silicon Valley, let me use Naval Ravikant as my prototypical smartest person in Silicon Valley.
One of his tweet-sized tips for success goes like this.
Make something that people want.
That's it. Make something that people want.
And you're successful.
Now, you might not do it on the first try.
It might take you a lot of work to get to that point where you're doing it successfully.
But that is a reciprocity slash abundance worldview.
It's just compressed into make something people want.
If your worldview doesn't start, this is the important part.
I'm not saying that it should include The idea that reciprocity matters.
No, that's wrong. I'm saying it starts there.
That's like, moment one is what can I do for you?
If you don't take that opinion or worldview, you will fail every time.
We have a world that just doesn't work the other ways.
Now let's compare that.
Reciprocity and abundance is one worldview.
Works every time. And within that, I would say, is deal-making.
Because deal-making is about reciprocity, and deal-making says we can make a deal where both of us get more.
You can't make a deal where somebody thinks, wait a minute, I'm just transferring stuff to you, getting nothing.
That's not a deal.
So reciprocity and abundance are embedded in the idea that you can be a deal-maker.
I would say that Trump...
It was really a perfect example of this philosophy.
Trump was a deal-maker, which indicates an understanding of reciprocity first, and he was very much an abundance guy.
You know, we can all win, we can all get more if you just make good deals.
But here's the opposite of that.
Victimhood and zero-sum.
If the first thing that leads your worldview is that there are victims and there are oppressors, You'll end that way.
If that's how you start, that's how you're going to end.
You're going to be living in an oppressed world unsuccessfully.
And to think that life is a zero-sum game.
That if you have something and I can get it from you, I have gained and you've lost.
That's a zero-sum.
That's the opposite of abundance.
Abundance says we can transfer things and we both come out ahead.
Victimhood and zero sum says there's only taking.
It's a world of taking.
And if I can get away with it, I'll take it from you.
If you can get away with it, you'll take it from me.
Now that's true, right?
It's true. We live in a world where if you don't lock your door, your stuff's gone.
We live in a world that if you gave your crypto key to somebody, you lose all your crypto.
Pretty much every time.
Not every person, but you're going to lose your stuff if you don't protect it.
So it can be true that you live in a world of oppressors.
It can be true that you live in, in many cases, a zero-sum situation.
Let's say you live in the inner city, and the only things anybody has is what they stole.
I've got nice sneakers. I stole them.
I sold some drugs so I could get these.
So, although actually selling drugs is closer to an abundance mindset.
So I would say that you can pick up people's mindset by their language pretty clearly.
And if somebody says, it has never been on me to make sure you don't murder me, never hire that person.
Never give that person a job.
The person I want to give a job to is the one who says, you know, I've got lots of ideas where I'm going to make you rich, and I hope in return you give me big bonuses.
And then I say, what did I just hear?
Well, let me say it again. I have lots of ideas that I think can make you a lot more money, and all I ask in return is that I'd be well compensated.
And I say, I don't even need to hear any more.
You're hired. And so here's my take on Race relations and the entire situation.
It's a strategy problem that the mainstream media, through their propaganda, has sold to you as a victim problem.
That comes from the media, and then I think also through the school system.
But had you not been brainwashed to go from the productive worldview of reciprocity and Abundance.
If you had not been brainwashed away from that into the victimhood mentality, you wouldn't be using it.
Because do you know where your opinions come from?
They're assigned to you.
They're assigned to you.
Do you know where conservatives get their opinions?
Well, some of it comes from Fox News, sure, right?
Some of it comes from Breitbart.
Some of it comes from the media they consume.
But there's another source that's pretty big.
Which is parents and church and their culture.
And the conservatives come up through a culture of reciprocity and abundance.
And if black people in America simply understood...
And I don't want to make it sound...
I mean, that sounds insulting, right?
So let me say if they reframed their experience from victimhood into strategy...
They would take off. In one generation, 80% of the difference between the ethnicities would just disappear.
And it would be just that mindset that would do it.
It would have to work through the system for a while, but it would solve it.
Alright, so strategy, like my book, How to Failed Almost Everything and Still Win Big, that's a strategy book.
It's a strategy for success.
It's not a formula, it's a strategy.
And if black Americans knew that the good strategy was reciprocity and abundance, how would they get along with conservatives?
Alright? A lot of conservatives watching here.
You are often blamed as being racist.
Right? Probably 80% of the people watching this right now are in a category who has been blamed as being racist.
But watch this. Black guy comes...
I'll just say black guy. Black guy comes into your business, you're the boss, and that black guy demonstrates an understanding of reciprocity and abundance.
You know, through the interview process, it becomes obvious to you that this person has no victimhood or zero-sum thinking whatsoever.
That everything they say is clearly about abundance and reciprocity.
Who do you hire?
Do you hire the white guy who doesn't have that?
Or do you hire the black candidate who comes in and says, look, I'm all about reciprocity and abundance.
Let's make this work.
It's not even fucking close.
It's not even close.
Sorry, I didn't mean to swear.
And if the black public could understand just that one thing, and again, I don't want to say understand it because that sounds insulting.
I would say it's a change of your frame that has nothing to do with intelligence or Or capability.
It's just reframing it.
It's all you need. And I gotta tell you, it is so frustrating to see a situation in which the solution is so obvious except for the mainstream media's propaganda.
If you took away the propaganda and just let people work it out, just say, oh, what's a good strategy?
Does anybody have a good strategy that's worked?
Yeah, I do. Take a look at this one.
It's in this book, and here's some other books, and Bob can tell you about it.
Here's a strategy that works for everybody.
That's where we should be.
Strategy. Alright, here I, in my ongoing series of defending the hard to defend.
Now when I say hard to defend, that means that they've got some real harsh criticisms, and they're the kind of person who, you know, one team isn't going to like them, so it's hard to defend.
And this one you're not going to like, perhaps, but I'm going to defend somewhat one of the creators of Black Lives Matter, who was accused of having multiple homes while saying that she's a trained Marxist.
And people said, essentially, it's not illegal to be successful and have homes, but we're wondering how you can be consistent with How do you be a Marxist while building wealth in a capitalist society?
And I thought to myself, well, this is going to be hard for her to answer, right?
Pretty hard to answer how you can be a Marxist and being acquiring real estate and money.
And I was wrong.
Completely wrong.
She actually has a really good defense.
Now when I say really good, I don't mean that she sold me to her side.
I'm going to say that persuasion-wise and public communication-wise, really good job.
Here was her answer, that she's taking care of a lot of family members.
She has a brother who's got some, I think, mental problems, she said.
And she's got other family members, and maybe she's the only one in the family who's, you know, hit it big, and it looks like these other homes probably have something to do with taking care of the family.
Now, is that compatible with being Marxist?
She makes money, and she uses some large percentage of it to take care of her immediate family first, while also working on something that she would hope make life better for the larger public.
It's a little bit inconsistent, because you could say, well, she should give her money to the public or something, I don't know.
Don't help her family first?
Is that the complaint?
This isn't bad.
I actually thought there would be just sort of nothing she could say to soften this criticism, but I listened to it today in her own words on video, and I came away thinking, that's not bad.
In the comments, Matt says, like everyone.
Right. If you see somebody who's making money and distributing it largely to their own family, what's your problem?
Is your problem that she says she's a Marxist?
I don't know. Since I like the fact that people succeed and take care of their family, I don't have a problem with this.
If, in fact, she's characterizing it correctly.
I mean, maybe the taking care of the family thing you could question.
But... I'm going to only talk about her persuasion and communication.
And in terms of persuasion and communication, pretty darn good.
Good enough that you can understand how she could be a founder of a large movement.
That was pretty good. Now again, to be clear, I'm not saying I agree with her reasoning.
I'm not saying it's completely consistent.
I'm just saying this was really good persuasion.
And at the core, she started with something that you and I agree with, which is take care of your family, right?
It's pretty good. It was as strong a defense as you could offer under the circumstance.
And so I will give her a compliment.
At the same time, I'm giving Chip Roy a compliment.
So part of my strategy for maintaining any semblance of credibility with my audience is that I'd like you to observe me giving a compliment on both sides as well as criticism on both sides.
And then maybe you'll have some greater belief in my credibility.
Somebody says her defense was embracing conservatism and capitalism.
I don't think anybody is against taking care of their own family.
Is there really a...
Is there some kind of a political point of view that says don't take care of your family first?
That's not a thing. She started with the thing everybody agrees with and then built on it.
It was a good defense. It was a perfectly capable defense.
Somebody says Hitler was persuasive too.
I get it. Nobody's arguing that you have to agree with everything she says.
But it's skillful.
It is skillful.
She spreads her family all over the country.
I believe she probably just had family members who lived in different places.
I don't think we have an evidence whether anybody had to move to a different part of the country.
But I would imagine that that's where her family lives.
Yeah, extended family. I see people talking about how many millions it is.
We don't know how much she owns, because if she has loans on any of that property, she might own 20% of those properties just as a loan.
Oh yeah, look for the video that I tweeted today that says that the glitches in reality are obvious, and that's how you can tell we're computer code.
And the glitches, so-called glitches, you could argue whether they are, are based on quantum mechanics and quantum science stuff.
It was pretty good. I've made the same argument, but he does a more thorough job than I've ever done.