Episode 1571 Scott Adams: Lawyers, Criminals, Politicians, and Other Weasels Are In My Target Zone Today
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Rittenhouse raised Democrat awareness of fake news
Merck COVID pill trial
Biden Admin resolved supply chain logjam
Waukesha tragedy, no race filter?
Ahmaud Arbery case, citizen's arrest
Abbie Richards conspiracy chart
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Wow! Hello everybody and good morning and welcome to the best thing that ever happened in the history of the cosmos.
Every single universe, metaverse and simulation, the best thing ever.
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Next time, get up earlier, arrange your schedule, and get here live.
And also, hit the subscribe button if you're on YouTube, because that would be a way that you can repay me without paying me anything.
In case you feel like you need to repay me for anything.
I guess I was a little presumptuous.
So forget I even said that.
Let's instead do the simultaneous sip.
But all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid I like.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
It's the dopamine here of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Yeah, except lawyers.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it's happening now.
Go! This is the only situation in which slurping is accepted.
Don't do it with your bowl of rice.
Don't do it with your soup.
Don't do it with your beverages in general.
But when you're doing the simultaneous sip, yeah, show some passion.
Put a slurp on that thing.
R.E. Rasmussen had a fascinating little poll here that shows us something about our world.
It asked how many people thought the media coverage on the Rittenhouse trial was prejudiced for Rittenhouse versus prejudiced against him.
What do you think people said?
Most of you saw the clips and coverage from the Rittenhouse trial.
How many of you think that it was prejudiced against Rittenhouse?
I'm talking about the news in general.
How many say prejudiced against?
Okay, lots of people think prejudiced against.
Okay. Here's how the poll came out.
47% of the polled public said that it was prejudiced against Rittenhouse, but only 15% said it was prejudiced for him.
That is a huge difference.
47% said it was against him, with only 15% said it was for him.
But it gets even worse when you look at the political breakdown.
The GOP, Republicans, 69% of those watching, 69% said it was prejudice against them.
But what about the Dems?
They were watching exactly the same stuff, right?
Weren't the Democrats watching the same footage, same trial?
So what did the Democrats see?
69% of Republicans saw prejudice against, the coverage would be against them.
Only 22% of Democrats saw that.
Three times as many Republicans saw reality clearly than Democrats.
Now, on some things, I would say, hey, you know, reality is subjective.
You know, everybody's opinion is about equally weighted.
Your religion, my religion, you know, there's no favored one.
Usually I tell you stuff like that, right?
But not this time.
This was actually adjudicated in a court of law, and we know the facts.
We know that the video shows no crime.
A jury decided that unanimously.
And still...
And I've said before that this case, the Rittenhouse case, is like the Rosetta Stone that opens up the awareness of Democrats.
Like, Democrats were walking around in this fog...
Not understanding the world.
Not understanding why Republicans had different opinions exactly.
Maybe the Republicans are just all dumb.
Maybe the Republicans are all just evil.
Maybe they're all just racist.
None of their theories of reality made any sense, right?
And they were trying to figure out why their observations of reality isn't matching their understanding of reality.
And I think the Rittenhouse trial finally explained it to them.
It's because your understanding of reality, the ones you see, you know, what you observe with your own eyes, is completely different from what the news is telling you because the news is fake.
So I think the Rittenhouse trial is where a huge number of Democrats finally learned, wait a minute, are you telling me it's not just Fox News?
You know, from their point of view.
I would still argue that Fox News has the most accurate news.
Now, I've also called out Fox News for having stories that I don't think are true, or at least opinion pieces.
Usually the news people are right on.
I can't think of an example offhand.
Can anybody else? Can you think of an example where the news people, not the opinion people, but the news people had something seriously wrong on Fox News?
I'm sure that's happened, right?
Can you give me an example?
Calling Arizona, well, but they were right on the Arizona call.
They went with the Russia hoax?
I don't think they did. I don't think they did.
I think they reported it.
Chris Wallace was all in on Trump collusion.
Is Chris Wallace a news or opinion guy?
I don't know what he is, actually.
Hannity was into weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Okay, that's a good example. Chris Wallace is news.
I guess you could say that.
The interview ones seem a little different than regular news.
I'm not sure I would call him news.
I think he's a hybrid.
Um... Yeah, it's Mike Wallace, sorry.
Or Chris Wallace, right. All right.
So, anyway, here's the point.
Do you think that the problem is that the media is different or that Democrats are wired differently?
What do you think's happening?
Do you think the Democrats just have different brains, so when they're looking at the same material...
It just looks different? Or do you think they're not looking at the same material because they're looking through the media's lens and the media is just lying like crazy?
I think it's both, yeah.
But I think in this case it's the media lens.
The media tells them what to think and then they just do.
Here's an experiment for you.
Find a Democrat who has an opinion that's different from the media's narrative.
Find a Republican.
Find a Democrat or a Republican, somebody who's actually registered that way, who has an explanation of the world that differs from the media's narrative.
It's really rare.
Yeah, Tulsi, Manchin, those would be good examples.
All right. But I'm not talking about the politicians.
I'm talking about voters.
Well, I'm not a registered anything, so I'm not a Republican or a Democrat.
In fact, I did the ground news test, I tweeted, where you can see if you're consuming more left news or right news.
And mine's almost perfectly balanced.
If you look at the news sources that I consume, it's about equal left and right.
And I would argue that that keeps me...
It protects me from cognitive dissonance, but not completely, because nobody can be completely clear of it.
But I think if you look at both sides, you have at least a chance of knowing what's happening.
All right, there was a study on intermittent fasting, which I must tell you I have never tried.
How many of you have tried intermittent fasting?
The reason I've never tried it is because it looked like bullshit to me.
And now a study says it doesn't make much difference.
So a study of a bunch of obese people, there was a difference, actually.
The fasters lost...
18% of them lost weight versus 15% of the non-fasters.
So not a gigantic difference, but a difference.
A difference. So here's how I would put it.
This is what we learned in hypnosis class.
Did you know that hypnosis doesn't work for quitting smoking or for overeating?
And yet it's one of the main things that people go to a hypnotist for.
It doesn't work at all.
And when I say it doesn't work at all, what I mean is it works sometimes.
Just like everything else.
No matter what you try to lose weight, and no matter what you try to quit smoking, something like 20% of people will succeed.
You know, give or take.
Do you know why 20% of people succeed at losing weight or quitting smoking, no matter what technique they use, hypnosis, willpower, go to a program?
Do you know why? Because that's exactly the number who decided to lose weight.
And that's exactly the number who decided to quit.
And I've told you a million times this difference between wanting something and deciding.
But the more you see the examples of it, the more you see it as a valid filter on what's really happening in the world.
The people who decided to lose weight, it didn't matter what method they used, because they decided.
So whatever technique they used worked for them, because it gave them a fake because.
Oh, I'm losing weight because I got hypnotized.
Or I'm losing weight because I'm fasting.
I'm losing weight because I'm watching my carbs.
You need a because... Because that keeps you motivated that you're doing something right.
But the because is random.
It could be any because.
Oh, I changed my favorite color.
That's why I'm losing weight. That would work with about 20% of people.
Now, that's a ridiculous example, but you get the point.
20% is going to work no matter what you do.
All right, so I'm not a believer in intermittent fasting, but I can be convinced if there's, you know, someday if there's some better science or something.
To me, it looks like a lot of pain for not enough gain.
So the Merck COVID pill is being analyzed, and we could have it soon.
I don't know, maybe by the end of the year or something.
So how good is the Merck COVID pill?
Well, let's put it this way.
Out of 762 participants in a trial...
You know, half were given the placebo, half were given the real pill.
And after a month went by, 45 people who received the placebo were hospitalized.
Doesn't that seem like a lot out of 762 participants?
Where do you find 762 people in which 45 of them would end up in the hospital?
How do you even do that?
In a month? Is there something wrong with that?
Now, again, yeah, maybe they took...
Oh, nurses? I don't know.
Yeah, they must have found some kind of group that they knew was likely to get infected a lot.
I don't know where they find these.
So here's my first impulse is, you couldn't possibly study this.
I'm not saying that they studied it wrong.
I'm saying, I don't know this could ever work.
Could it? How do you get 762 participants and end up with 45 people hospitalized in a month?
In a month? Something's going on here.
We're not talking about infections.
I would understand that.
If you're in a high-infection area, a lot of people get infected.
But how do 45 people end up hospitalized out of 762 in one month?
So here's my first comment.
The study looks like bullshit to me.
Without knowing what the explanation for that is, it looks like not enough people, and it looks like bullshit.
Now, I'm an optimist, so I'm going to say that it does work.
So the optimist in me is working against the observation.
Here's one of the things I've told you to look for as a red flag to what's not true.
When science says something's true...
And then you see it in the real world as acting exactly the way science says it should act.
Probably true. Cigarettes, for example.
Science at the moment says cigarettes will give you lung cancer.
And sure enough, when you hear somebody you know who has lung cancer, nine out of ten times there are cigarette smokers.
So the world and the science are together.
But... I don't know.
There's 762 people.
This whole trial just looks like...
I don't know. It doesn't make sense to me.
In any world which I observe, I observe no world that looks like this study.
So there's a red flag there for me.
Or a yellow flag, at least.
But here's the shocking news.
Let's be optimistic and say this pill works.
Because there's lots of background to suggest it actually does.
So I do think it probably works.
I don't know if this study is valid exactly.
But among the group that received the drug, half as many were hospitalized.
Still an alarming number.
28 and a 762 in one month were hospitalized.
And that's the people who were on the drug.
I don't get these numbers.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
But there were nine people who died who didn't take the drug.
Nine of them died in a 762, which seems like a lot.
Again, for one month, right?
If you took 762 people randomly from the population, you wouldn't expect nine of them to die that month, would you?
Somebody says it's a nursing home study?
Maybe, but I would think a nursing home study would be the wrong kind of study because it would only tell you if it works in a nursing home, right?
Am I wrong about that?
I mean, a nursing home study would be excellent to have, but I don't know if it would tell you enough about the rest of the population in terms of the risk-reward.
But anyway, I was taking the long road here to get to the shocking number that the number of people who took the pill and died was zero.
Zero. None.
Nobody who took the pill died.
And nine people died in the control group out of just 762.
If these numbers are valid, and I've got a big question about it, this would be the end of the pandemic.
Because when it talks about hospitalizations, it doesn't specify ICU or how critical it became.
Because even the hospitalizations might have been, you know, the milder hospitalization types.
It's a little unclear. But if you took the number of people who died down to zero or anything close to it, we're done.
Get your rapid test.
If you have a symptom, you take the pill, whether you're sure it's COVID or not.
And nobody dies.
We're done. So we might be that close.
I don't give investment advice, but I'm going to be looking at investments in which the end of the pandemic would really make a difference.
Like if you really knew it was ended.
Now, I don't know that this pill will be the end.
There could be another variant that makes everything different.
Who knows? But on a risk-reward basis, I'll probably make a...
I'm going to place a bet.
I'm not going to tell you ahead of time what it is.
I'll tell you after the fact.
But I'm probably going to place a bet on at least one industry...
That would make a big difference if this pill works.
Yeah, the travel industry.
But I won't tell you specifically how well I'll play that.
Now again, this is very much not, not, not advice.
It's not investment advice.
The only reason you should make an investment of this type is if you're already rich.
And it's, you know, your play money.
But don't invest in this if you don't have money to burn, basically.
All right. One of the reasons I make investments like that is to see if I can predict.
Because I can afford it.
So if I, you know, throw some small number of dollars at a bet, part of it is to make sure I remember I predicted it.
Because you know how you forget things you predicted wrong?
I'm not immune from that.
I'll remember all the ones I got right.
Don't remember the ones I got wrong.
But man, you put money on your bet.
You'll remember that.
You'll remember that. All right, Michael Cohen thinks Trump won't run in 2024.
And his reasons were that his fragile ego won't let him risk losing twice.
What do you think of that reasoning?
That Trump's fragile ego won't allow him to lose twice?
You know he's leading in the polls, right?
This is the worst analysis I've ever seen.
I'm starting to think that all lawyers are dumb.
Or criminal? Now, I know it's really because the sample we're seeing in the news is all the worst lawyers in the world.
We're going to talk about some lawyers who are even worse than this.
But how is it that you become a fixer, as Michael Cohen was called for Trump, how is it you get the job of being a fixer?
What's the path to becoming somebody's fixer?
I think the path is through being a bad lawyer, isn't it?
Do you get the job of the fixer if you're a good lawyer?
Because I think if you're a good lawyer, you go work for yourself and make a lot of money.
I think you have to be a terrible lawyer to find yourself as some billionaire's fixer.
Anyway, if I had to analyze Trump's fragile ego, as it's called, I would say, number one, he has the strongest ego I've ever seen.
All right? So my first statement is, it's the opposite of a fragile ego.
It's the strongest ego I've ever seen.
Trump has taken more criticism than anybody I've ever seen.
And he knows it. He puts himself in situations where the criticism will be brutal.
You don't think he would change his hairstyle if he was concerned about criticism?
How hard would it be for him to, you know, just change his hairstyle?
I've got a feeling that Trump...
And if you look at the way he ran for office, he said the most provocative things that would guarantee people would call him terrible names, and then he kept saying it.
Well after you knew that if you keep saying these things, people are going to be calling you the worst things in the world, he kept saying it.
Trump... Every action that Trump takes is the opposite of somebody who has a fragile ego.
But suppose you put a different frame on it.
Instead of saying he has a fragile ego, what if you just framed it differently and said he's competitive?
Would it look different?
Would it look different if you simply said he's super competitive?
It would look exactly the same, right?
He would say it was unfair when he lost, because he would believe it true.
He would act exactly the same.
So this is a media narrative.
Don't fall for the fragile ego thing.
All evidence suggests the opposite.
All evidence suggests that his ego is incredibly strong.
In fact, maybe stronger than I've ever seen.
Imagine thinking you could be president without practice.
He had no practice, being a politician.
And he thought, you know, maybe I could be the president of the country.
That's the biggest ego you've ever seen in your life.
They can't call him a narcissist and then also say he has a fragile ego.
Well, I guess you can.
Technically, you can do that.
But I think that would be a definitional issue.
All right. Ridley Scott was complaining because his bad movie didn't do well.
And he's saying that... I'm just guessing it's a bad movie.
I haven't seen it. But it looks like it would be bad.
You know, you look at the stills.
You go, oh, that looks bad.
Don't you make your decision about a movie in the first...
Is it just the first second?
You know, the first picture you see, you go, oh, that looks pretty bad.
Anyway... I guess he did a movie called The Last Duel and it didn't do well in the box office.
And he says the problem is that the young people basically are using their cell phones for their entertainment and they've trained themselves not to watch movies.
Is that what happened?
Do you agree? Do you think that the young have trained themselves to watch the movies on their phones and such and therefore movies in general are not so good?
Well, that's part of it.
It's part of the story.
It's definitely part of the story.
Here's the rest of the story.
Movies are terrible. How about that?
How about movies used to be good, and now they're terrible?
That's the whole story.
The reason people don't go to movies is because they're terrible.
Let me give you my impression of me watching a modern movie.
Okay, a man loves his wife, so something bad's going to happen to the wife, probably the kids.
Okay, so you're kissing your wife.
I get it. You love your wife.
Now you're talking in this movie Sweet Talk stuff that makes me want to vomit.
To prove that you really, really love your wife, I get it.
Something bad is going to happen to the wife.
Okay, you have established that you and the wife have a close relationship.
You're really in love.
I get it. Okay, now they're talking some more to show us that they're still very much in love.
We get it. You're in love.
Get, you know, shoe somebody.
Can you do something?
Okay, they're still in love.
Now they're kissing because they really need to show that they're...
Now they're making love. Now they're having sex to show us that they really, really, really, really, really care about us and only the slow class doesn't get it yet.
Now compare that to a YouTube clip.
Five-minute clip.
Boom. Jumps right into the topic, gives you something good, and then gets the hell out of your life.
Ten minutes. The reason movies don't work is that they suck.
They are no longer tuned to the modern mindset.
Now, when there was no entertainment in the world, which wasn't that long ago, going to a movie was a big deal.
And also, seeing things on the big screen was really exciting.
Is anybody old enough to remember the first Star Wars movie?
You wouldn't want to watch Star Wars on a little screen, right?
But if the new Star Wars movie comes out, let's imagine that they still made good ones.
If you imagined a good Star Wars movie came out, I would still be tempted to watch that on my phone.
And the reason is, they all look the same.
Have you seen a car chase lately?
Do you remember that car chase with the really innovative...
No, I don't either. I mean, they do do a really good job of trying to add variety into car chases, and I'm impressed at how much variety they can add into something that's basically the same scene.
But here's me watching a car chase scene.
Okay, now they're chasing in the car.
Let's see what's on Twitter until the car chase is over.
Car chase, car chase, still chasing the car.
Let's see. Still chasing the car.
Chasing the car. Okay, the car chase is done.
I'll watch some dialogue. All right, all right, all right.
Oh, God, now they tied a guy to a chair.
They tied a guy to a chair.
He's going to be tortured. Back to Twitter.
Guy tied to a chair.
He's going to be tortured, but he's a good guy, so he doesn't fold.
Somehow escapes from the chair with the help of a confederate or possibly smuggles something in his hand.
Cutting the ropes now.
Killing his captors.
Guy tied in the chair. All right.
Done with that scene. What else is next?
Tell me I'm wrong.
Right? Isn't that how you watch movies?
You see what they want to tell you, and then you say, can you get past it?
Can we get past this scene, please?
All right, that's what you're feeling about this live stream right now.
Well, apparently there's a spacecraft set to launch from NASA to knock an asteroid off course.
It's not heading for the Earth.
So let me say that up front.
The asteroid they're testing on to see if they can knock an asteroid off course is not heading toward the Earth.
They're seeing if they have the technology to change an asteroid early on if it's first detected.
So if we think there's one that might come to the Earth, maybe we could nudge it.
So the one that they're testing on is absolutely not heading toward the Earth.
I need you to know that. At least until they nudge it.
Because I'm not sure they have the nudging technology nailed yet.
Now... Obviously, it would be a tremendous coincidence if the way they nudged it incorrectly made it hit Earth.
But we do live in a simulation where the least likely thing seems to happen all the time.
So I'd be a little careful about which side you nudge that asteroid on.
That's all I'm saying. But I love the fact that we're thinking so far ahead that we're nudging asteroids.
All right, I'm going to give the biggest compliment I've ever given to the Biden administration, and I'm not going to listen to any criticism of it.
Of course I will, but I'm trying to set you up here.
All right, I'm going to tell you something that the Biden administration did right that's really, really good.
And I think Trump might have done it too, so I'm not going to say, you know, nobody else could have done it or anything.
This is one of the best pieces of management I've ever seen.
Are you ready for this?
The supply chain problem.
The Biden administration formed a task force.
They decided to impose these $100 per container fines, which after nine days, you know, $100 per container, you say, well, that's not that much.
And then they increased it by $100 every day.
And as soon as they announced the fines...
Things cleared out very quickly.
In other words, I guess the container problem has fallen by 33%, which is why it's not been in the news.
And it's not because of the penalties.
It's because of the threat of the penalties.
And because the threat of the penalties works so well, they're holding back on the penalties.
Here is why this is the best piece of management I've seen from our government.
Maybe ever, honestly.
This is one of the best pieces of management you'll ever see.
Here's what they did.
And I'll take a fact check on this, because if I'm over-analyzing or over-interpreting this, it's possible.
So give me a fact check on this if you think I went too far.
When everybody, all the experts, looked at the ports, what did people come away with as the problem?
Now, you know about Ryan Peterson having a good take on the fact that there wasn't enough room for all the containers.
So there was just a physical convention problem.
But on top of that, there were a number of, I guess, regulations that were keeping them from doing some common-sense stuff, and some of those got changed pretty quickly.
So that was good. That was local government, but it was good.
But here's what happened.
It didn't look like anybody was making the changes they needed to, because it didn't look like they had the economic incentive to solve a problem that wasn't one big problem.
It was a thousand little things that needed to be tweaked.
But nobody had an economic incentive to do it.
So they gave them an economic incentive.
And they didn't solve the problem for them.
This is the brilliant part.
If the Biden administration had gone and said, here's what you need to do.
Pile these up in this place.
Or get a train and take them all to this field.
If they had been that specific, it would have been a disaster.
Because it would be people who don't know about containers and shipping telling the people who do know about it how to do their job.
How well would that work?
Unlikely that's going to work.
But instead...
They said, I'll tell you what we're going to do.
We think all you motherfuckers are lying.
This is my interpretation.
Can't read minds, remember?
But here's how I'm interpreting it.
I think the Biden administration looked into it and said, I think all you fuckers are just lying to us.
I think you're all just fucking lying.
Here's what we're going to do.
We're going to put a boot on your head, and we're going to squeeze your fucking head until you solve the problem that you're lying to us about.
And then they put the fines on, which was like the boot on the head, and they said, all right, we're going to start to squeeze, and then watch you solve the problem that you said can't be solved.
And then they solved the problem that they said couldn't be solved.
This was good management.
I can't tell you how many times in corporate America I've seen this scene unfold.
It's sort of like the Star Trek captain scene, where Scotty says, I cannot give you warp four, Captain.
The ship was not meant to do warp four for ten more minutes.
And the captain says, make it happen, Scotty.
He's like, we can't do it.
And then he does it. Now, that's the ridiculous cartoon version of management.
But in the real world...
I used to do budgets. And I would collect the budgets of each of the departments and take it to the head.
And then it would be way over the total budget that he could get approved.
So I'd say, well, we should go back and cut the projects that don't look so good.
We'll keep all the good stuff, but we'll go back and cut the projects that aren't good.
And the vice president, or AVP I think it was, said, no, just tell everybody to cut 10%.
And I said, you can't do that.
Because some of these groups really need all the money.
Some of them probably ask for too much.
You really need to go in there with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
You can't go in there and just say, everybody 10%.
Now, keep in mind, I was very young.
And this executive was very experienced.
So this experienced person was telling me something that sounded batshit crazy to me.
Just tell everybody to cut 10%.
I didn't see how that was a good idea.
But it was my job, so I went back and told everybody to cut 10%.
How do you think it worked out?
Fine. What problems did it cause?
Zero. None.
Not a single problem.
Because what the executive knew, with his experience, that I didn't know as a young 20-something, is that they were all lying.
He knew everybody was lying.
He knew that if he put the screws on them and said, well, you'll be fired if you don't cut 10%, that everybody could do it.
They just had to figure out their own way to do it.
He couldn't specify how to do it, but he could tell them it had to be done, and you're fired if you don't do it, and then it gets done.
So it's very much like the Adams law of slow-moving disasters.
Once it's obvious that you have to fix this problem, we're pretty good at fixing stuff.
You just can't guess in advance exactly how it'll happen.
Because you've got to A-B test your way to it.
So, standing ovation to the Biden-Harris Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force, and you have to give Biden the credit.
Now, I don't think he should be your president, just to be clear.
Not a big Biden supporter.
But when he does something right, or his administration does, this was very right.
So Buttigieg is good now.
Somebody says, I don't know if Buttigieg was involved with the task force, but if it was, it would show some experience and some good judgment.
It took too long?
Maybe. Do you know what else takes too long?
Everything. Do you know what you should have started sooner?
Everything good. Everything good.
So do you know what is the worst criticism in the world?
Should have done it sooner. That's what your spouse says to you.
Oh, you cleaned up the garage?
Should have done it sooner.
Congratulations on that solution.
Let's talk about the race filter.
You know, the Democrats can only see race in everything.
But they will also try to hide it when it doesn't work in their favor.
So you're watching the story about the...
The gentleman who ran over a bunch of people in Wisconsin, was it?
Waukesha? Apparently, he ran over the woman that allegedly is the mother of his child with the same red SUV before he ran over the people in the crowd.
So in a whole separate incident, he already ran over a woman with the same vehicle.
And then he ran over some more people, and the mainstream press told us that he was probably escaping from some other thing, for which there's no evidence.
Now, he happens to be black.
And in our highly racial-charged world, people say that matters.
Now, it doesn't matter to the story in any way that I can tell, because there doesn't seem to be a racial component to anything he did.
Well, even if he's a black nationalist, it doesn't mean there's a racial component to what he did.
So we don't know why he did what he did.
Is that true? He hasn't said why he did what he did, right?
So I wouldn't make an assumption one way or the other.
I would just say that the mainstream media seem to be, let's say, downplaying his race because they didn't want it to be part of the story, but...
We're very racially conscious, so it looks like it will be.
But the initial interpretation that he was fleeing the scene of another crime seems to be BS, BS. Now let's talk about the Ahmoud Arbery case, which I had not been following closely.
I try to ignore individual crime stories because I just feel like we make too much of them.
But some of them you can't Can't ignore, like Rittenhouse, of course.
Couldn't ignore that. But Ahmoud Arbery, this is a really interesting case because the situation was there was a neighborhood that there had been some burglaries, and somebody described as apparently a black male was thought to be one of the suspects.
And then a man who was jogging through the neighborhood, Ahmoud Arbery, Was seen looking through, I think, a construction site.
So on video, it looked like he was trespassing.
But he was just looking around, didn't take anything, went back to his jogging.
And some white citizens, you need to know they're white, you need to know he's black, tracked him down, and they had guns with him, and they decided to do a citizen's arrest.
And in the course of that citizen's arrest, apparently Amud tried to grab the gun, And then it turned into potentially a self-defense case.
That's debatable.
And the gun went off.
Well, it didn't go off.
The person with the gun pulled the trigger, killed Ahmoud Arbery.
And now the question is, the defense rests on two things.
Number one, that a citizen's arrest was legal at the time.
Apparently it's not legal anymore.
They changed that because of this.
But at the time, it was totally legal to do a citizen's arrest.
So that part's not illegal.
And it's also totally legal to do self-defense if it can be proven that's what it was.
So that's the defense.
Now, how would you know that it was that?
It was really just they really thought he was a suspect.
They didn't know.
But he fit the description.
And so they thought they would detain him long enough to determine whether he was that person that maybe was on video somewhere.
Was that legal?
It was. At the time, it was totally legal.
Even if he wasn't guilty.
Right? Now, apparently, he had a criminal record from before that.
But it is legal to do a citizen's arrest, or it was.
It's not legal now in that state.
But do you think that the defendants will be charged because the thing that they did was legal was so bad that it was made illegal after they did it?
I think they might go to jail for doing something completely legal because people thought, you know, now that we see it in action, we should make that illegal.
And here's my main point on this.
There is no way to convict these men, that I can see, unless you believe you can read their minds.
Because you would have to read their mind to know that racial motive was not in there.
Because there's no objective evidence of racial motive.
Am I wrong? Somebody do a fact check for me.
There's no objective evidence.
Is there like somebody testifying that somebody thought this way or said something?
But they were also racist.
That could be true.
That could be true that they were also racist.
But you would have to see in their mind to know if that's the reason they stopped Ahmoud Arbery.
So, how do you convict somebody if the only way you could convict them...
Scott's ignorant.
Nicholas Fleming writes in all caps, Scott's ignorant.
Scott's ignorant. Well, Nicholas...
Let me pause for a moment to talk to Nicholas.
Here's some advice.
When you call somebody...
Let's say you accuse somebody of not being a genius.
If you spell genius, G-N-U-S, as in Scott's no genus, well, you didn't do well.
Because that reflects poorly on you.
When you type in all caps...
Scott's ignorant, and you forget to put the apostrophe before the S on Scott's.
That does not make me look as ignorant as the person who made the comment.
Now, if you wanted to tell me what I got wrong, given that I'm literally fucking asking people to fact-check me as I go, you're very welcome.
But if you would like to misspell things in the service of calling me ignorant, let me suggest that that might be the most useful thing you've ever done because you look like a fucking idiot who probably can't do anything right.
So you might not want to jump right into the public displays of your ignorance.
Now I'm seeing people on YouTube misspelling ignorant intentionally.
All right. So that's my bottom line.
I don't see any way that these two people can be convicted unless you believe you could read their minds.
Because it is completely legal...
And again, check me if I'm wrong.
Is it completely legal to be a racist in your mind while you're doing things that are completely legal?
Is there anything wrong with that?
Well, there's something wrong with having a racist brain, I suppose.
But... It's not illegal.
It's not illegal to think terrible thoughts as long as you don't break the actual law.
So it could be that these three people were horrible racists.
I don't have any evidence of that.
Maybe somebody else does. It's irrelevant.
Somebody says you're misinterpreting the law.
Which law? Which law?
The self-defense or the citizen's arrest?
Hate crimes? How could it be a hate crime if you don't know the intention of the people?
You would have to know the intention to make it a hate crime.
And I don't think there's any objective evidence of intention, is there?
Hate crimes aren't real, somebody says, oh, I think they are.
I think hate crimes are real.
All right. Yeah, I'll remember.
Thanks for reminding me. I will remember that.
All right. You want to hear the most disturbing story I've heard this year?
And there have been a lot of disturbing stories this year.
You want to hear the worst one?
Kyle Rittenhouse told Tucker Carlson that his first set of lawyers that were later fired, Linwood and John Pierce, kept him in jail from September until November...
To raise money for themselves.
In other words, to pay for the defense.
And they could have let him out in September.
Don't you feel like you're hearing that wrong?
He was a 17-year-old at the time, literally a minor, and these two lawyers, allegedly, according to Kyle, kept him in jail for two months, a 17-year-old, For a crime he didn't commit when he didn't need to because they could make more money if he stayed in jail.
Now, normally, I would be cursing up a storm.
But this is so bad, so bad, these lawyers should be dead.
Now, I'm not suggesting any violence.
But if you were to come up with a proper penalty for this crime, which apparently isn't a crime, because they just talked him into agreeing to it, I guess, what would be the proper penalty?
I think death.
This looks like a death penalty crime without maybe any crime actually being committed.
Now, what good is the Bar Association if these guys are still practicing?
If Lin Wood is still practicing, does disbarment mean anything?
I mean, it doesn't mean anything if he's still practicing, assuming this is true.
Now, of course, these are allegations.
You have to hear the other side.
All right. Are the J-6 hearings being live-streamed?
Because I haven't seen any.
I assume maybe. Can you tell me?
The January 6th committee that's looking into that, is it being live-streamed?
No. No. Damn it.
Because the new news is that Roger Stone and Alex Jones have been subpoenaed.
Is there any way we can get that video?
Because I think both of them would be way more entertaining if they knew it was being televised.
I think it is a crime to the public if this doesn't get televised just for the entertainment value.
Say what you will about your Roger Stones and your Alex Joneses and people do.
People do. I don't think either of them have been accused of being accurate all the time, if you know what I mean.
I think Roger Stone was once described by, remind me who said this, independent journalist, a fabulist.
Roger Stone is a fabulist.
Somebody who makes up stories.
Anyway, that's just happening, and I think that that's marvelous, and I wish we could watch it.
All right. So the big Build Back Better thing apparently has this part of it that would give some kind of legal status to illegal immigrants.
Now, it doesn't give them citizenship.
It just gives them some kind of work permit status, etc.
And only 21% of likely Arizona voters approve of it.
21%. Now, Arizona is one of those states that you need to win to win the presidency.
Or at least it's helpful.
And they are so against this Democrat plan, it's rare that you see this many people against something.
And here's my question.
What do the economists say about the immigrant legal status provision?
Forget about fairness.
Forget about America first.
I mean, obviously, you care about all those things.
But if you were just looking at this from an economic standpoint...
And not about the economics of any specific individual, but in general, the GDP. Would economists say that giving these workers some work status would make any difference economically?
Because I don't know how that would work exactly, and I'm not sure we'd believe any economics on that anyway.
All right, forget about that. I saw in the BBC that Israel seems to be quite preparing to attack Iran's nuclear sites.
Now, some say it would be easier for them to just keep assassinating their nuclear scientists, which apparently they're doing with great efficiency.
But I read this one fact, and I thought, OK, it's game on.
Apparently, Israel has allocated $1.5 billion to prepare the Israeli armed forces for a potential strike against Iranian nuclear sites.
Um... And they're talking about it non-stop and they say there's no way that the Iranians are going to get a nuclear weapon.
Doesn't it look like they're preparing to attack?
If you had to guess, do you think that Israel's going to bomb?
And apparently American bunker busters are part of that.
Because I don't know that Biden would ever give the green light for that.
And it looks like they would need American bunker busters to get it done.
So it looks like Biden could stop this from happening.
What do you think? Yeah, somebody says Israel has no choice, but would they do the mission if they didn't have our Bunker Buster aircraft, or do they have their own?
Maybe they have their own by now.
I mean, it makes sense that they'd have their own.
All right, I'm going to say...
I think game on.
So this isn't one of my 99% confidence predictions.
I'm going to give this a...
60%. They say 60% likely Israel will attack Iran in the next 12 months.
Alright, there's a controversial conspiracy chart by Abby Richards.
It's a triangle that shows the various things that people believe and which ones are maybe kind of true and which ones are ridiculous.
And it turns out a lot of people had their favorite conspiracy theories challenged in this.
Now, I'm not saying that Abby Richards is the Authority on what's a real conspiracy theory and what isn't.
But it was a real good chart.
So I love visual representations that really clarify stuff.
And this was a good one. But there were two things that people disagreed with that she called conspiracies.
One of them was George Soros and the other was the deep state.
So Abby put them both in the total conspiracy category, no doubt about it.
What do you think? Are the George Soros...
Conspiracy theories and the deep state conspiracy theories fake?
What would you say? Well, I think this is a definition thing.
That's what I think. I do think it's biased, because how could it not be?
It's made by one person. So here's my take on both of those things.
I think both of them depend on how you define it.
You could define them both as true, and you could define them both as not true.
Am I right? I think he could go either way.
So here's how you would define the Soros thing as true.
Does George Soros give a lot of money to groups that are doing things that apparently will destroy the United States?
Yes. Yes.
George Soros gives lots of money to groups that you could easily imagine, if they got their way, it would destroy the United States.
I don't think that's a conspiracy theory.
That part's public, right?
That part I don't think anybody even questions.
And he also has some open borders, kind of thoughts that if they became the standard, it would destroy the country, for sure.
So I would say that's true as far as those things go.
But if you believe the next level, that George Soros is intentionally wanting to destroy the United States, I don't know that that's in evidence.
Could be. Maybe.
But I feel like there's a level to this that's not true, even though there's a base to it that we can all observe.
It's observably true that he funds things that you think would destroy the country.
That's observably true.
Now, how about the deep state? Deep state exists?
Again, it depends how you define it.
If you define the deep state as all the people who colluded on the Steele dossier, yeah, it totally exists.
That's about as clearly in existence as anything could possibly be.
Those 17 intel agencies who all lied?
If you can get 17 intel agencies and the head of the CIA, ex-head of the CIA, to lie to you directly, that's the deep state.
And they're doing it to support one political party?
Yeah, that's the deep state.
So I would say the deep state is unambiguously true, but like the George Soros thing, there's also a level you could take it to that probably would lose your credibility.
All right. I promised the people and locals that I would, if I had time, I would talk about crypto and inflation and the metaverse and inflation.
What does...
Crypto due to the money supply?
Let me ask you.
What does it do to the money supply, the regular money supply?
Nothing. Martin says nothing.
Well, it stabilizes it.
Does it take money off the table?
Because people will buy crypto and hold it.
I don't think so, because they bought it from somebody, so that money is still in the system, right?
It expands the money supply.
Okay, what happens if somebody buys crypto and then they use the crypto to buy something instead of buying cash?
It's kind of complicated, isn't it?
Bitcoin does not expand the money supply.
Does it change it at all? Does crypto change the velocity or anything about the regular money supply?
I'm not sure we know.
So I'm going to put a question mark on this one.
I would say that I don't see how it would change inflation, but it's such a big effect, I feel like there might be an indirect way it's pushing something around.
That's sort of an instinct that I have just from sort of living in the world.
but I don't see the direct effect.
There's a Gelman effect with you Every time you talk about something I know about, I see that you're wrong.
How do you know it's me that's wrong?
If I talk about something that you know is wrong, give me an example.
Give me one example of that.
I'm not sure I'll see it, because I'm going to be looking away for a moment.
All right. Now, what about the metaverse?
Will the metaverse change inflation?
Suppose you are spending a bunch of money in the real world and enjoying yourself, but then the metaverse comes along, you put on your VR goggles, and you spend all day in the metaverse.
And you're making money in the metaverse, but it's crypto.
So you do something in the metaverse that makes you some money in the metaverse, and then you spend that money that you made in the metaverse on metaverse stuff.
So maybe you're buying some furniture for your metaverse house, and you're spending some time in there.
Can you imagine that people would shift their spending from real money to metaverse crypto?
Because they're spending more time in the non-real world, and that's the money they use in there.
They earn it in there, and they spend it in there.
Now, you could also bring it from the outside into it, of course.
But could people spend so much money on the metaverse that they don't spend as much entertaining themselves, for example, or even furnishing their helm?
Imagine if you thought to yourself, well, I could buy a new chair for my house, or I could buy a mansion in the metaverse for the same amount of money.
Which one are you going to do? So, what is the metaverse?
The metaverse is the digital simulated world that Facebook is promoting and others are, in which you'll put on virtual reality goggles and live in a world that doesn't exist.
But it'll be a full world with other characters and scenery and stuff.
If you live in that world and it's compelling enough, it should reduce spending in the regular world.
Unless the metaverse itself costs money from the regular world in which all bets are off.
So I guess there are two things going on.
One is crypto and one is the metaverse.
And I wonder if there's going to be some way that they interfere.
And I don't know exactly the answer to that, but it's a provocative question.
Yeah, NFTs are going to be huge in the metaverse.
They will be huge.
Alright, I've got to do some other things, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.
