Episode 1550 Scott Adams: The Political Earthquake That Happened Last Night in Virginia and Elsewhere. Plus Funny Tweets
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Lessons learned from the election
Always bet on the pendulum
Jemele Hill jumps the shark
72% say cancel culture out of control
Democrats: A political movement or a medical condition?
Republican narcissism vs. Democrat narcissism
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I've been talking to the subscribers on Locals before you got here.
They get to get a little bit extra.
That's right. By the way, there are two ways to consume this content, if you didn't know that.
One way is to just listen to it for its excellent content and insightful analysis.
The other way to listen to it is like you're just talking to a friend who watches the news more than you do.
And you're just having coffee or you're just working out.
Somebody's just chatting. And here's the best part.
If you have real friends, like the kind that are in the same room and stuff...
Can you make them talk faster just by pushing a button?
You want to, don't you?
Don't you say, oh, can you buzz through this story a little bit faster?
I got the point on the introduction.
But you could do that with me.
I'm your virtual digital friend, and you could just find a podcast and hit fast-forward, not in the live stream, but if you play it recorded, you could actually just make me talk faster.
Or... And this is the beauty part.
You could make me totally shut up if you have something else happening.
Let's say you get a phone call or a text and you need to handle it.
You could just say, shut up, Scott.
Shut up. And then I'll do it.
Every time. You just push that little pause button.
Well, if that's not happy enough, boy, do we have some things to talk about today.
Is anything happening in the news?
Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
Soylent Green and the Matrix.
And let's go, Brandon.
If you'd like to take the simultaneous sip up to a level which is compatible with the excellence of the news today, all you need is a cup of margarita glass, a tank or gel, so sign a canteen jug or a flask of 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 except the democratic turnout.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
It happens now.
Go. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
I feel my antibodies firing up.
Mm! Mm! Mm!
Well, here's an observation.
I don't know if any of you realize it, but because we live in a simulated reality, and the simulation likes to send us hints about our true nature, here's one of the hints.
Did you ever notice that Let's Go Brandon includes, of course, the name Brandon, but have you ever thought that Brandon is Brandon?
And that Donald Trump is the brandingest brander of all time.
He brands things.
He brands his opponents. He brands his business.
And we have a phrase that refers to him that's called brand Don.
And he is actually a brand.
Trump himself is a brand.
He's brand Don.
I don't know. I just thought that was interesting.
I gave you a warm-up joke.
Okay. The first joke of the day, because there are a lot of them coming about the headlines, there are a lot of them, the first one's going to take a little bit of work, okay?
So pay attention. Because I'll tell you the joke, but then you have to do the work of completing the joke in your brain.
Those are the best jokes.
The joke where it's not complete, your brain has to complete the joke.
Are you ready? Here it is.
It's been a bad month for Democrats shooting themselves in the foot.
Anybody? Anybody?
I don't know if you saw the story about one of the crew members on the movie Rust with Alec Baldwin literally shot herself in the foot.
Like her actual foot.
She didn't just misfire a gun.
Misfiring a gun?
Plenty bad.
If you misfire a gun, that's bad.
But literally shooting yourself in the foot, that actually happened.
Now, as luck would have it, it was blanks, so I don't know what damage happened, but probably not as bad as a real bullet.
But, yeah, it's been a bad month for Democrats, shooting themselves in the foot.
That was just my warm-up joke, people.
Don't judge the rest of this by the warm-up joke.
Can't judge by that.
All right? Ready for another one?
Well... Turns out that in New Jersey, and I don't think this race went the way it looked, but for a while there it looked as though a truck driver in New Jersey was going to win the New Jersey State, was going to beat the New Jersey State Senate President, a Democrat. And he was right in, I think he actually lost, but it looks like he was headed toward the end of the night.
And he spent only $200 on his campaign and he was a truck driver.
And his name is Edward Durr.
D-U-R-R. Durr.
Come on. This has got to be a simulation.
Because I don't know if you know this, but at least on Twitter, it's sort of a Republican meme thing.
Durr. You know, they just go durr at things.
How perfect is that last name?
That he almost beat the New Jersey State Senate President, who's an incumbent for years.
He was almost beat by a truck driver named Durr.
That can't be more perfect.
The simulation is winking at us.
But my comment was, maybe we're better off than he lost, because if he'd won, it just would have made the supply chain problem worse.
We need the truck drivers in the trucks.
We don't need truck drivers running for office.
And now I'm starting to wonder, is this what caused the supply chain problem?
Did too many truckers run for office because it looked like it was easier work?
It is easier work than trucking.
And apparently there's nothing to stop you from winning.
He got pretty close, but I think he lost in the end.
All right. I told you in a prior live stream...
That I was not going to make jokes about the story that, first of all, I think is fake news.
I think it's fake news.
That President Biden had a bell movement in his pants in the Vatican while meeting the Pope.
Now, maybe, you know, could have happened.
If it really happened, then I don't want to joke about it.
Because that's just a medical problem, and, you know, that's not funny.
But if it didn't happen, which is my assumption, that it didn't really happen, and it's just sort of a meme idea going around, well, then I can have some fun with it.
Then I can have some fun with it.
And I think that's our situation.
Did you see the best meme of all time going around that has a picture of Biden standing next to Kamala Harris and the caption is simply, shits and giggles.
Okay. If there were an Academy Award for memes, there's your winner.
Shits and giggles.
Hold on. For those of you on YouTube, if you haven't seen it, this was just posted on Locals.
So, shits and giggles.
Now, this is sort of good news, bad news, if you're a humorist.
If you're a professional humorist, as I am, and you see somebody pull this off, shits and giggles, It just makes you feel terrible because you didn't think of it at first.
I look at this and I go, oh, I do this for a living.
Did somebody really beat me to that?
And, you know, maybe an amateur?
I hope it was a professional, at least, because as a professional, I feel totally, totally lapped by this.
That's really good.
All right. So you got that going on.
Other funny stuff happening?
Here's my own contribution.
Do you know how Democrats feel this morning?
I think Democrats all over the country woke up and they felt like Biden's pants.
You're welcome. Just put that visual in your mind.
Yep, every Democrat in the country feels like Biden's pants right now.
That was one of my jokes.
Here's my other joke. And you can evaluate them for me.
Somebody was tweeting at me that Biden had soiled his pants.
And I said, you know, that's not so bad.
That's called leadership.
If it's true that Biden crapped his pants, that is leadership because today three-quarters of Democrats just woke up and shit themselves too.
So that's leadership. Your leader goes first and three-quarters of Democrats wake up and they shit their pants too when they see the news.
It's a little thing called Virginia.
We'll talk about that, of course, in detail coming up after the jokes.
Gotta do the jokes first.
Jokes first. I got priorities.
There was a tweet from The Last Refuge I saw today.
And it showed a picture of a shipping container ship in the port, and there were lots of shipping containers on it.
And The Last Refuge tweeted with that picture, the supply chain problems caused by McAuliffe's extra ballots from China to be delayed.
I think I paraphrased the joke.
Basically, the idea was that the only reason Biden won is that the supply chain problem causes extra ballots from China to be delayed.
Just so I don't get cancelled, I don't believe that there were really extra ballots from China delayed on the ship.
Just to be clear, I don't think that was necessarily true.
I can't say it wasn't true.
Can't prove a negative.
But I don't think it's true.
But it's pretty damn funny.
All right. Let's talk about the lessons that we learned from, you've all heard by now, that the Republican has unexpectedly, at least a month ago it was unexpected, the Republican challenger, Youngkin, has managed to count a victory, actually a pretty solid victory, over...
What they call Democratic royalty, Terry McAuliffe, meaning a very established Democrat with lots of support.
Now, why did it happen?
Why did it happen?
What exactly was the problem?
Well, I'll read you Joel Pollack's tweet this morning.
He says, the lessons of Youngkin victory.
Hold on.
Hold on. A lot of the election was about school children, wasn't it?
It was about school children.
That seemed to be the biggest issue in my mind.
And the guy who won was called Young Kin.
People worried about their young kin voted for the guy named Young Kin.
People, this is actually happening.
There's a great book I read years ago called The Celestine Prophecies.
Has anybody read that? That was sort of a new-agey kind of fictional book.
But it talked about how you could tell there was going to be a giant shift in human perception because it was sort of, let's say, presaged.
Is that a word? We had a warning about it.
Insert your own perfect good word for that.
What is the perfect word? Foreshadowed.
So that book says that big changes in perception are foreshadowed by coincidences, so that the rate of coincidence ramps up right before there's a major perceptual change in the world.
Now, that's just a fictional thing.
But we're seeing an insane amount of coincidences, aren't we?
Maybe it's just the confirmation bias, because once you start seeing coincidences, you start seeing more of them.
So it's probably just a perceptual thing, but just for fun.
Anyway, back to Joel Pollack's tweet about the lessons from the Youngkin victory.
He says, number one, Republicans can win on education.
What do you think? Is that one of the lessons?
That Republicans can win if they focus on education.
I say true. I say true to that, but it doesn't mean that's what happened this time.
So I agree with the premise.
I don't know if this proves it, because it's a one-off.
There's a lot going on with this one case.
But people are going to believe it, and I actually think it's true.
I think Republicans can win on education, even if that's not exactly what happened here.
Joel's second point is, Biden is a problem for Democrats.
True? I think that's true.
How about phony accusations of racism aren't enough?
Well, obviously they weren't.
That was not enough in Virginia.
Trump derangement syndrome isn't enough.
True. Because I think they tried the Trump card, but he isn't...
It's as if he isn't a big enough presence at the moment.
It doesn't have the same bite it would have if he were tweeting every day and still present.
And Democrats are too far left, but the left will say not far enough.
And I think that actually happened already, right?
I didn't see it, but my understanding...
Is that MSNBC says the problem is that the Democrats didn't go far enough.
And CNN is reporting that they went too far.
Is that true? If I characterize it correctly, the CNN is reporting Democrats went too far, and MSNBC is saying the problem is they didn't go far enough?
Has anybody watched both of them enough to know?
Roughly. Roughly.
Alright, so that's one take.
Alright, I'm going to give you some other possibilities, things we learned.
Number one. Well, I feel like I have to...
I was going to save this at the end, but I feel that's unfair.
I'm going to ruin your fun a little bit, but then we'll get back to the fun.
John Harwood tweeted that Biden is now the eighth consecutive new president to see opposition party win the Virginia governorship in his first year.
That follows Carter, Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, G.W. Bush, Obama, and Trump.
So, eight times in a row we got the result we got last night, which is the winner in Virginia is the opposite of the president who just got elected.
Eight times in a row.
Do you think that's a coincidence?
Because apparently it doesn't matter which party the president is.
Virginia is just going to go the opposite direction.
So, is it possible that none of the stuff we're talking about mattered at all?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not only possible, it's probable.
It's probable that literally nothing happened.
It just went the way it always goes.
And we're treating it like it's this giant earthquake tsunami, but maybe it's just the way it always goes.
It's the way it's gone eight times in a row.
But I think that's too simplistic because there are obviously reasons.
There are reasons things go the way they go.
And I think that beating a Terry McAuliffe is sort of a bigger deal than beating somebody who isn't Terry McAuliffe.
Is that a fair statement?
That beating Terry McAuliffe is probably a bigger deal than, you know, an ordinary governor race.
So maybe this is special.
Maybe it's not. I'll give you my take on this in a moment.
All right. My take is I didn't spend a lot of time listening to the candidates talk, but having heard McAuliffe talk in public, you know, just clips, and hearing Youngkin talk in public, which one of them is the better communicator slash persuader?
Now, again, forget politics, right?
Because I think we would agree that, say, Obama, for example, was a great communicator and a great persuader, even if you hated him as a president.
Bill Clinton...
Great communicator, great politician, even if he didn't like his policies, right?
But, and then, you know, the opposite, Hillary Clinton, terrible communicator, etc.
So I think we can be objective about both parties, right?
If you were to just look at them objectively, just on the skill of a communicator, who is better?
Who is better?
Having a little problem over here...
Let's do this. Somebody's saying McAuliffe.
I thought McAuliffe is a whiny, average communicator.
Whiny and average.
I thought that Youngkin's presentation, I would say the confidence of his voice and how capably he shaped his message was better.
So I think the better candidate won.
Could that be just the whole story?
If we knew it was going to be close, and one candidate is just more capable than the other one, is there anything else to talk about?
Because that could be the whole thing.
In my mind, his voice and the way he presented himself was just more leaderly, and McAuliffe seemed weak and whiny and sort of irrational.
I just didn't think it was close in terms of their personal approach.
Now, here's another thing.
Critical race theory is Democrat suicide.
Another theory is that it wouldn't matter who the candidates were.
Critical race theory had finally reached a level where white people especially weren't going to take it anymore.
And, of course, they're not alone.
There are plenty of black people who are saying, hold on a second...
Hold on a second. We wouldn't like this if this were the other way around.
Why don't we treat everybody equally and maybe try to get along or whatever?
So certainly there are no ethnic unified, everybody's on the same side of this or anything else.
But I've got a feeling that an opening has been made that...
Well, let's put it this way. Permission to swear...
Anybody? Permission to swear.
I'd like to use one well-placed curse word to describe a specific point.
And I think I'll...
Oh, I got a yes. That's all I needed.
I only needed one yes. For some reason, the comments have stopped on local.
So I'm going to have to restart.
Not the feed. So the feed will be the same.
But I have to restart the comment where I was looking at there.
Hold on one second.
I know this is fascinating to watch me fuss with my technology, but it's worth it.
Totally worth it. Oh, shit.
All right. I got a problem.
Okay. So my technology just went crazy on one of my iPads.
So I'm still watching the feed for...
So I still have a feed for locals, but the comments are delayed at the moment.
All right. Here's what I think.
And you gave me permission to swear, so I'm going to do it now.
I have a theory about white people.
And, of course, any theory about any group doesn't apply to all people, right?
Could we agree that nothing applies to all members of a group?
So I think we're adult enough to say that.
Here's just an impression, and I want to see how many people agree with me.
That there's a characteristic of white people that is slightly different, and this could be just a racist comment, so maybe you'll tell me.
It seems different than the way black people handle the same issues, on average, right?
Every individual is different.
Don't have to say that every time.
And it goes like this.
If you confront a black man or woman in America with some annoyance, they're probably going to let you know about it.
Would you agree? That a black man or woman, if you do some kind of injustice or unfairness, and they're there, they're going to tell you about it right away, right?
Would you say that's a fair statement?
Compare that to the average white person.
I feel as though you can push white people pretty far.
And you don't know how far you've pushed them, because they don't tell you.
Oops, okay. Well, I'm not going to die on that hill today.
A famous white person saying, maybe everybody says it, but I only hear it from white people, is you don't want to die on that hill today.
That fight is not worth having.
That's too small.
Worry about other things.
But white people have this other quality, which is they'll bend and they'll bend and they'll bend, But when they break, get out of the fucking way.
It's just sort of a stereotype, right?
And I won't say there's any science to this.
It's just a personal observation.
It feels to me, and I would guess that this has everything to do with the experience and the history, that when black people are pushed, they push back right away.
Makes sense, right? It would make sense from a historical, experiential perspective that they don't want to take anything.
Because if you push them a little, it feels like it's going to continue, right?
So it feels like a black man or woman in America, if you push them, they're going to push back pretty aggressively and right away.
Now, I'm not saying one of these is a better approach than the other.
So hear this clearly. I'm not saying one is a good system, one's a bad system.
I don't know. I don't even know which is better.
But I feel that white people, on average, will let you push them and push them and push them until they become mass shooters.
Am I right? If you look at all these mass shooters that are white, often they were bullied.
And they didn't push back.
Didn't push back, didn't push back, didn't push back, and then bought a gun.
I think, damn it. .
Oh, okay. So I'm seeing some comments now from locals.
Good. So I'm wondering if what we saw in Virginia was simply a lot of the white public, and of course a lot of Democrats must have crossed over, probably of all types.
I'm wondering if they just reached the limit and said, and I'm going to use another swear word, are you ready?
I'm willing to take that abuse.
Okay, I'll take that one too.
All right, I'll take that too.
Oh, wait a minute. You just fucked with my kids.
Now we're done. That feels like what happened.
I'm willing to take some higher taxes.
Yeah, I don't want to die on that hill.
I'm willing to wear a mask for a while.
I hope it's temporary.
I don't want to die on that hill.
Oh, you know, they're calling me a racist.
God, I hate that. But, you know, I don't want to die on that hill.
Oh, they're making me get a vaccination.
Damn it. Damn it.
I really... Maybe I'll make a stand.
No. No, it might be temporary.
I don't want to die on that hill.
Now we're going to ruin your children.
Okay, we're done now.
You pushed too far.
And I think what CR, the critical race theory stuff is, is that a lot of people say, wait a minute, you're ruining my kid.
You're breaking my kid.
You just reached the limit.
They're fucking with your kids.
Are you going to die on that hill?
Yup. If they fuck with your kids...
You're going to die on the hill.
No question about it.
I think that's what happened.
And I think that all that happened mainly is that enough people became informed what was actually happening to their kids.
Am I right? I think as soon as white Virginians, and probably, you know, of course, there's no generalizations that hold.
Lots of other people, too.
Probably said, probably people of every ethnicity said, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Now you're fucking with our kids?
We're done here. Could be just that.
And maybe nothing else mattered.
Don't know. All right, um...
I believe that Democrats have chosen a strategy of self-immolation, but the hard part is, I don't think they can get back.
Do you? Now, of course, any time you say this, the pendulum just swings back.
A few months ago, we were saying, oh, Republicans are dead forever, and they'll never have a good time again.
That might have been true if Biden did a good job, or if things just in the world in general had gone his way, maybe just got lucky.
Maybe Republicans would be in trouble.
But as it turns out, literally everything in the world turned bad as soon as Trump got out of office.
I mean, the pandemic started when he was in office.
But it seems like from the economy to immigration to relations with China to everything, it just seems worse.
Energy. It's hard to think of something that got better.
So under that context, I don't see how the Democrats can recover.
Do you? I think that the Republicans just discovered their soft underbelly.
The children. And by the way, this is not a political strategy.
It's actually trying to save the children.
Like, literally. There's nothing political about it.
Like, when the children become the topic, politics just goes out the door.
It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm a Democrat, but don't fuck with my children.
You know, that's just too far.
That's Went too far.
I see Senior Rude says, I think you're wrong.
Yeah, you know, if you were to bet on it, what would be the smart bet?
The pendulum? Or that the Democrats have just really ended themselves?
Which would be the smarter bet?
Always the pendulum. It's always the pendulum, yeah.
So if you want to bet on it, bet on the pendulum.
Likewise, if you were going to bet on this race, had I known that seven times in a row the governorship goes in a predictable way, opposite of the president in the first term, if I'd known that, which I didn't, I probably would have put a sizable bet on Youngkin without even knowing anything about the race.
Because it looks like it's pretty predictive.
Now, I think the public quite rightfully likes divided government.
That might be the smartest thing that Americans do, if you think about it.
You know, we complain about it nonstop, about our constipated government, but it's pretty clear we like it, because the alternative has lots of problems, and worse problems than divided government.
So, but take a look at how far Democrats have jumped the shark.
And you tell me if they can find their way back from this.
Jemele Hill tweeted today, It's not the messaging, folks.
This country simply loves white supremacy.
Doesn't that feel too far?
That's a little too far, isn't it?
You know... You can take a lot of ridiculousness, but then there's some point where it just simply jumps the shark, as they like to say.
Now, jumping the shark, if you're from another country, you're not used to that saying, it just refers to something that goes so far it's changed its basic nature into something you don't want.
So when a TV show starts introducing, you know, crazy things...
You say, oh, jump the shark.
It's based on an old Happy Days TV show thing where Fonzie literally went water skiing and jumped over a shark that was in the water.
It was just ridiculous.
It had nothing to do with the way the show used to be.
So that was called Jumping the Shark.
Anyway, when you see somebody literally saying that white supremacy is what caused the election to go the way it did, when there are so many other reasons...
So many other reasons.
This is probably the smallest of the reasons.
And I think they have trapped themselves.
Because here's the thing. In order to find their way back, and we'll talk about Van Jones here in a minute.
In order to find your way back from how badly things are looking at this point for Democrats, they would have to admit they were wrong.
About a lot.
Right? How in the world...
How in the world do you admit you were wrong about such basic things?
You know, about how to tax, how to do everything.
How do you admit you're wrong about it?
And if they don't admit they're wrong, I don't know if they can ever win again.
Because what are they going to do?
Say, you know, we like all the socialism stuff, but yeah, we have to admit you're right about the school choice stuff.
So I guess we'll change our mind on some of the school stuff and the critical race theory.
Do you think that's going to happen?
I don't see it happening.
I think they're sort of an all-or-none category.
They've decided this is their set of issues.
I don't think it's going to change.
Not within the next few election cycles.
Right. It'll change in the long run.
In the long run, you can always bet on the pendulum.
In the long run. But I think you can't move a ship this big that's moving this fast, this long.
You can't move it in the next few years.
So I think for the next few years, it's going to be all Republicans.
It looks like. Now, the wild card, of course, is Trump himself coming back into the mix.
Have you noticed that Trump, without the...
Without Trump as the one who's drawing all the provocation, if you just take Trumpism, let's say just the policy part of it or the philosophical part of it, it plays pretty well, doesn't it?
Because if you take sort of a Trump approach to the world and you just put it into a Ron DeSantis, people just say, well, that looks good.
If you put it into a Trump, then it becomes about Trump.
And then, you know, everything's wacky after that.
So I think one of the things that happened is that Trump wins.
Wins, I mean, not just the election, but I think Trump wins in that he's sort of demonstrated his approach was more right.
And the country seems to be shifting his way quite strongly.
So, from the perspective of election planning and strategy, I think the Democrats just learned that child abuse is not as popular as they had hoped.
Rasmussen has a poll, they said, has cancel culture gotten out of control?
72% of likely voters say yes.
That's all voters. That's Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.
72% say cancel culture has gotten out of control.
That's what jumping the shark is.
It's this. This number says they jumped the shark.
Because you would expect something closer to 50-50 for everything, really, if it's Democrats versus Republicans.
All right. Here's a perceptual shift...
You can also see the shark jumping in this following story.
For how many years?
25 years or so, I've been telling a story in public about how in my two corporate careers, I was a banker and then I worked for a local phone company, that in both of those careers, I had to leave the jobs because my bosses told me directly, we can't promote you because you're white and male.
Now, I've been telling that for 25 years, and whenever I say it, what response have I gotten until this year?
Until this year, the response changed.
For 24 of those years, immediately, if I said it on Twitter, for example, or no matter where I said it, the comments would fill up with, well, that's a lie.
That's a lie. That did not happen.
You did not lose your job or your career because somebody told you they can't promote white male people.
That never happened. Do you know what happens when I tell that story today?
Nothing. Nothing.
It just happened this year.
In the following year, people stopped doubting the truth of that story.
That's a pretty big perceptual shift.
Now, I don't think it's because they believe me more.
Like, I don't think I became more credible this year.
You know, certainly not.
I think that people understand it is true because they've seen enough other things that this is just right in the sweet spot of all those things they know to be true.
So why wouldn't it be true?
Why would I lie about it?
I mean, I don't really have an incentive to do that.
So to me, that's a big shift, that people will accept that as, well, it could be true.
I have a theory for you.
Did you know there are two kinds of narcissists?
There are vulnerable narcissists, and then there are grandiose narcissists.
And they have very, very different qualities.
One of them isn't even bad.
If you're a grandiose narcissist, you try to get credit from other people.
You want to be loved because you did good things for the public.
Is that bad? You could say it's a personality disorder.
But it's people doing good things for the public, and they want to be recognized for it, like me.
So I label myself a grandiose narcissist because I fit the description.
It's not a medical diagnosis, but I certainly fit the checklist.
I do things in public, like I'm doing right now, because I think it will help the public, and then the public will say, hey, good job, Scott, and then it'll feel good.
It'll make me feel, oh, okay, thanks.
I appreciate your appreciation of me.
Now, is that bad?
If I could cure myself of this problem, should I? Do you want me to?
I realize this, and of course I am aware that it's obnoxious.
You know, if I claim credit for things, etc.
It's obnoxious. I know that.
But it has a utility to it, so I do it anyway.
But the other kind is called the vulnerable narcissist.
And I'm going to describe some of the qualities that are typical of a vulnerable narcissist.
And you tell me, does this sound more like a Democrat...
Or a Republican.
Okay? So a vulnerable narcissist, they like to project.
So an example of projection would be if somebody is a racist and they call you a racist when you're not.
That's called projecting.
Do you see the Democrats acting like obvious racists and accusing people who are clearly not of being racist?
Fair? Do you see that happening?
I think so, right?
I think that's the main characteristic of the Democrats, is being racist and accusing people who are not in any practical way.
They might be in their heads, but not in any real-world way that they're trying to change policy or something.
So that's one. Vulnerable narcissists are always cheaters.
Vulnerable narcissists are always cheaters.
Have the Democrats demonstrated any cheating?
Have you seen any cheating?
Depends who you ask.
Now, I think the shenanigans with the elections, the ones we know about, the ones that are confirmed, were all legal.
It was legal shenanigans.
But it feels like cheating, doesn't it?
Doesn't it feel like cheating?
It was all legal. But it feels like cheating.
Here's another quality of vulnerable narcissists.
They attack the messenger instead of the message.
Do you see the Democrats attacking the person or the policy?
It's always the person, isn't it?
They attack Trump. They attack Trump's supporters for being racist.
Where's the policy discussion?
Attacking the messenger is a vulnerable narcissist.
Attacking the message would be somebody maybe who has an argument.
So I would encourage you to learn what a vulnerable narcissist is and look at how Democrats collectively act and ask yourself if you're looking at a political movement or a personality disorder in which all the people who have a similar personality disorder have banded together and called themselves Democrats.
Right. As Bradley says, it's always personal.
It looks like it's political, but it's always personal.
Am I off base?
It's just a hypothesis, right?
I'm just putting it out there. But does anybody else see this?
Now take the Republicans.
I think Republicans are more likely to lean toward the grandiose narcissism.
Trump. Does Trump look like somebody who wants to get credit for saving the world?
No. Yeah.
Yeah. Do you think he doesn't want credit for it?
Like to be appreciated if he succeeds?
Hell yeah. Anything wrong with that?
I don't know. It's considered some kind of a personality flaw, but are you okay with it?
Oh, somebody says Michael Savage has a book about this very topic.
Well, he's a lot smarter than I am, academically.
So if he noticed the same thing, then I would give that some weight.
All right. Let's see what else is going on.
Oh, and also, narcissists think they're smarter than you, right?
And better than you? Does Trump act like he's smarter and better than Democrats?
Does Trump ever say, I'm a better person than you are, you Democrats in general?
He does, of course, go after the leaders.
But does he go after the people?
No. Does he go after the people?
Or does he go after the ideas and the leaders?
I don't think he goes after the public.
I don't think he does that. But Democrats do.
Democrats go after the public.
Do Democrats think that they're smarter than you?
Do Democrats think that they're superior to you morally and intellectually?
Let's say you is a Republican.
Yes. Yes.
Their main theme is that they're smarter than you.
They're more moral, more fair, more More open-minded, more woke, they're better than you.
That is a personality disorder.
I'm sorry, that's what it is.
It's a personality disorder.
I don't see Republicans doing that.
Republicans tend to say, everybody's equal under God, let's see if we can make the system work that way.
You know, we fail.
We being anybody who tries to make the system fair, we fail.
But I'm pretty sure they're trying.
I'm pretty sure they want it to work that way.
All right. So that's my case for that.
Now, Van Jones, he's all over Twitter today, clips of him, because he seems to be the, let's say, the most reasonable of the Democrats.
One of the people who I would say can see the other side even if he doesn't agree.
Now, of course, he plays a role on CNN and he plays his biased partisan role.
But it's pretty clear when he talks about what works and what doesn't.
It's obvious he can see the whole field.
And that's different.
Because I don't think that most of the pundits actually can even see the whole field.
They can see their side and their argument, but they're blind to the other argument.
Van Jones is making the same point.
He thinks the Democrats might be blind to...
He says they have to look in the mirror and says their message might be annoying, offensive, and out of touch and coming across in ways we, meaning Democrats, don't realize or recognize.
What do you think? Do you think the Democrats are oblivious to how they're being received?
I think so. They're either oblivious or they don't care, which is the same kind of problem.
So Van says that Trumpism is like the Delta variant.
Or no, he called Youngkin the Delta variant of Trumpism.
It's the same disease but spreads faster.
Now, of course, that sounds negative for Trump and Trumpism, of course, and he means it that way.
But I wouldn't take it too much.
You know, somebody said he's calling us a disease or something.
I don't think that's happening. I think it's just a funny analogy.
Okay. But he's getting a lot of play on CNN, and should, because he's got the best...
I think he has the best take on everything that happened.
And I think, you know, Jake Tapper, etc., I think he's seeing it, too.
I think Jake can see the whole field as well.
So that's what's going on.
And, of course, you want me to mention that the lieutenant governor-elect, who is a black woman, ex-marine, and immigrant, or child of immigrants?
I can't remember. But she won, and her name is Winsome.
Winsome Spears.
Spears is awesome to begin with.
You know, spear sounds like an offensive weapon, so that's awesome to begin with.
And their first name is Winsome.
Winsome. How awesome is that?
It's almost as good as starting a casino in Vegas and your last name is Wynn, W-Y-N-N. That happened, too.
And that worked out pretty well for Steve Wynn.
So, yeah, our name is Winsome.
And, of course, a number of the people who were elected in Virginia were not white men, and so all the claims of racism just look ridiculous today.
All right. I don't think that Democrats quite realize that Trump is the result of their policies.
Here's a lesson that I teach people all the time.
We as human beings are really bad at recognizing where power lies and how to use it.
People like Trump Who is an energy monster, can see energy, can see power, and he knows how to use it.
And in some ways, that's what makes him scary, is that he's so good at that.
And here's an example I like to use a lot.
We often think that the boss has power and the employee doesn't, but you forget how much the boss needs good employees and how hard it is to find them.
So employees have tons of power.
They just don't know it.
Same with kids.
You say to yourself, well, kids don't have any power.
But if kids collectively walked down to school and said, you know, we're not going to do critical race training, they could make it happen.
You don't think kids, if they acted collectively, they'd just say, look, I know we're just kids, but we're just going to walk out of this class every time.
They would change the class immediately.
So the kids have as much power as they want.
And you don't recognize it because they don't use it.
But if they did, they'd have all they wanted.
It's just they don't agree on what to do, or maybe don't care.
But if they wanted it, they could have it.
So power is often sort of mistakenly attributed to the wrong place.
And I would say in this case, the Democrats look at Trump...
And say Trump is the reason for the attitudes and, you know, the approaches and stuff of the Democrats.
He's not. He's the outcome.
He's the outcome of all this.
He's the result. Now, he becomes the active player once he's in power.
But it's the Democrats' policies that made Trump possible.
If Democrats managed differently, you couldn't even have a Trump.
The Democrats have the power...
To make or break Trump.
But they don't know how to do it.
The way to do it is to change their policies.
I think that's invisible.
They don't understand that they make Trump powerful by how they act.
If they acted differently, all of his power would go away.
Tomorrow. In fact, if Democrats just said, and this will never happen, but imagine if Van Jones became the advisor to the Democrats and they listened to him.
It's not going to happen.
But just imagine. And they say, okay, just tell us what to do, Van.
You're the only one who's figured this out.
Just tell us what to do. I think he'd say, stop talking about race and just watch what happens.
Just stop talking about race.
Take it out of the schools.
Just see what happens. And then the Democrats would sweep.
That's what would happen.
They would sweep. But they can't do it because whatever is driving them is either this vulnerable narcissism or something.
I don't know. Fake news. Who knows?
Some mad soup of awfulness.
But they have the power to win easily.
And then once they're in power, they can make some policies that they think can prove things.
But they don't realize they're in power.
I think that's part of the problem.
All right. Let me make one point that...
Oh, and apparently China just announced they're going to make 150 new nuclear power plants, reactors, in the next 15 years.
Let me say that again.
Do you know how long it takes to build a new nuclear power plant in the United States?
20 years? Because of all the regulations and approvals and stuff.
About 20 years. China's going to build 150 of them in 15.
And I think they might do it.
Like, this seems within the realm of something they could do.
It's pretty aggressive.
And how about the United States?
We're going to decommission...
We are so wrong on this.
So wrong. And by the way, Trump wasn't that much better on this.
Both Biden and Trump are pro-nuclear and the Department of Energy looks like they've done good work promoting it.
But not even close to what they should be doing.
Neither Biden nor Trump are anywhere near the right answer on this.
They have the right answer, but they're not pushing it.
In a productive enough way.
So that's a criticism of both presidents.
All right, on a different topic.
Are we done talking about Virginia?
Well, here's a comment on the locals' platform.
Every time I fill up with gas, I hate Biden.
Does anybody have that same reaction?
Because that's a pretty insightful comment.
Do you feel every time you fill up the gas tank that you hate Biden?
Because he's the reason you're paying double.
Right? And you know that.
It's his policies. Yeah.
Yeah, that...
You know, we look at all these, like, big causes.
It might be as simple as people fill up their gas once a week, and once a week they curse at the president for making them spend double.
And that's the thing that touches their life...
The most directly, besides CRT, depending on where you are.
Could be that. I would like to add this contrarian idea to the mix.
Now, I'm going to change topics and politics for just a moment.
Everybody says we should trust the experts.
Do you agree? You should trust the experts.
Now, we know that experts have gotten a lot of things wrong, so, you know, you have to be skeptical.
But would you trust an expert versus someone who is not an expert in the field?
Let's say there was a debate between a bona fide expert and somebody who's not an expert in the field.
Who's better in that debate, the expert or the non-expert?
The answer is it depends.
The answer is it depends.
That's right. Some experts are so bad that an amateur can be better.
It has been my experience that I have encountered a number of experts who simply because I'm reasonably smart and well-informed are not as capable as I am in their expertise.
I hate to say it, but can I get a confirmation from those of you who are unusually smart?
How many of you, you don't have to be humble, if you're unusually smart, and that would apply to a lot of people watching this live stream, if you're unusually smart, have you ever had the experience of knowing more than an expert and you knew it?
At least on the topic you were dealing with.
Not on everything. So maybe not an expert on everything, but your little slice.
So here's what I'm going to propose, because I think everybody gets this wrong when looking at people's opinions.
You ready for this? This is going to hurt those of you who had not thought in this way before.
This is going to hurt a little bit.
Here's my claim. A smart engineer, and I'll just use an engineer as my example because they're good at analyzing stuff.
A smart engineer can do a deep dive on one slice of a medical expert's larger field and come up with a more credible opinion on that one slice than most experts in the same space.
True or false? Let me give you an example.
I remember a case where, who was one of the founders of Intel?
Andy Grove. Andy Grove came down with, he had prostate cancer.
And the medical opinions about prostate cancer were all over the board, and different experts were saying, you know, surgery, no surgery, all kinds of stuff.
So he was a very smart engineer, so he decided to become an expert on this one little slice.
Which is, how do you treat this specific prostate cancer?
And so he wrote a large article about it in Forbes or Fortune or something.
And it was probably the best, most informative and useful analysis of what to do if you have prostate cancer that has ever been created.
And I believe that he would have been more of an expert than all of the experts on his narrow question.
On the narrow question.
Now you say to yourself, Scott, the trouble is, if he's just trying to be an expert on the narrow slice, he's going to forget maybe some variables from related stuff that actually make a difference.
To which I say, no, he checked that.
Because he checked everything with the experts.
He said, am I missing anything?
Did I leave anything out?
And if they say no, that looks pretty good, then he doesn't have to worry about that.
Let me say it again.
A smart, non-expert can come to understand much better than the experts can if it's a narrow slice and they do their homework.
And we see that.
We do see people doing a deep dive on a narrow slice.
Here's my own example of it, and then I've got to go.
I had an exotic problem called a spasmodic dysphonia.
I couldn't speak for three and a half years.
And I went to my doctor, had no idea what it was.
Went to my other doctor, had no idea what it was.
Went to my ENT. Now I've gone to the expert of the experts, the ear, nose, throat expert.
Didn't know what it was. I googled it.
And finally, I guessed the right search term and I found it.
Found out it was something called spasmodic dysphonia.
And then I taught my doctors what it was.
Is that uncommon?
Nope. I was a smart amateur who did a deep dive on the narrowest of narrowness.
Something that even an ear-nosed throat person had never even heard the words before.
LAUGHTER And that's how narrow it was.
And did I know more than them when I was done?
Absolutely. Yeah.
When I was done, I knew more than, I would say, conservatively, 99% of all doctors about just that one, one little thing.
And how did I know it?
I talked to the one doctor who knew the most.
Now, if I'd met that one doctor, that one doctor would have known more than me.
But all the rest of the doctors, I knew more than them.
Because I talked in person to the one person in the world who knew more about it than anything and cured me.
Because every other doctor said it was incurable.
One said it wasn't.
I took his opinion, and now I can talk to you.
That's the only reason I can talk to you right now, is that I did a deep dive, and the experts couldn't find the thing I found.
Very common. Alright, gotta go.
Hope today was fun.
Hope you enjoyed it. And I can't stay.
Gotta do something else.
But I would love to stay another hour, because today was a fun day.
