Content: A universal pronoun suggestion Military Industrial News Complex Commonality: Alex Jones, Adam Schiff, Kim Kardashian Biden blames the oil industry? Lawyers caused all the J6 problems...legally Democrats red flag gun control law --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
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| Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of not only your life and my life but civilization itself. | |
| Something like 13.9 billion years have passed since the Big Bang and all of that leading to this moment. | |
| Think about it. | |
| If things had been just a little bit different You wouldn't even be here. | |
| And then I would be talking to, I don't know what, a dinosaur? | |
| Anything could have happened. But if we want to take it up to a less absurd level today, and probably do, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or a cellist or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind. | |
| Fill it with your favorite liquid. | |
| I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure The dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, it's called the simultaneous sip. | |
| Has anybody ever done it before? | |
| Anybody? Yes, of course you have. | |
| It's the best thing that's ever happened to you. | |
| Go. I tried to get all of my senses involved. | |
| You got the touch, the smell, the taste. | |
| I sort of listened to myself slurping a little bit there. | |
| I looked at it. | |
| Yeah, everything. That's what you call a full-body experience. | |
| And I think we just had it together. | |
| Not that there's anything wrong with that. | |
| Now, I have a question for you. | |
| How do you plan a vacation in the current environment? | |
| Is anybody having that problem? | |
| You think to yourself, you know, a few weeks from now or whatever, a few months, I think I'll book myself a plane trip and I'll take myself a trip. | |
| You don't know if masks are coming back, which would ruin a trip, and you don't even know if you'll have an airplane. | |
| Because the flights are so bad right now, the number of cancellations, that you can't be entirely sure that if you book a flight, it'll actually happen. | |
| Now, that was always the case that you couldn't be entirely sure. | |
| But I feel like it went from a 95% odds in your favor to closer to what? | |
| 65%? I don't even know what the odds are of missing your flight these days. | |
| Or at least being a day late or something like that. | |
| I mean, I don't know how you plan to do anything these days. | |
| Anyway, get your flight insurance or something. | |
| Because if you plan a big vacation, you don't want to blow it. | |
| You don't. Alright, I saw the best suggestion I've seen from a tweet by David Boxenhorn. | |
| And he's helping us out with this whole pronoun stuff. | |
| I was saying that what we need is some pronouns that everybody can agree on that aren't being used for something else. | |
| Don't use they, because that's sort of already being used for something else. | |
| So David suggests that since there are all these different pronouns, you get your he, she, it, they, that if you just took the first letter, From the pronouns that are out there, you could create your own sort of universal one. | |
| So let's see what we'd get. If you just took the first letter, let's say she, he, it, and they. | |
| Now that would be an S, an H, an I. Oh, wait. | |
| All right, so it wasn't the best idea in the world. | |
| But I like where it's heading, generally speaking. | |
| Maybe you need to arrange the letters a little differently. | |
| Now somebody mentioned that This had already been done with the letter Z, like calling people Z, you know, instead of he or she. | |
| Yeah, Z did that. | |
| And I said to myself, hmm, almost there. | |
| I mean, I can see what you're doing there. | |
| It's a brand new word, so that's good, right? | |
| But here's what I suggested. | |
| Could we have a word that sounds less like a Nazi invasion? | |
| That's all. I'm not asking a lot. | |
| I'd like a pronoun that's not being used for a completely different purpose already. | |
| It's clear. I mean, I'm not asking a lot. | |
| Doesn't make you sound like a Nazi stormtrooper. | |
| Is that a high bar? | |
| I mean, I didn't think it was, but nobody's crossed it yet. | |
| So let's see if somebody can do that. | |
| Now, as you know, reality and parody merged sometime in the 2021 period, I think, would be when historians will call it. | |
| And that's the period where you really can't tell the difference between a joke and something serious. | |
| Because the serious stuff became so ridiculous that the jokes, you stayed where they were, and then they just merged. | |
| You want another example of that? | |
| Does that sound like hyperbole? | |
| Does it sound ridiculous that parody and reality have merged to the point where you just can't tell the difference? | |
| Well, here's a little story from today. | |
| Apparently, the Atlantic magazine... | |
| This is fake news. | |
| So somebody did a fake headline that made it seem as if the Atlantic... | |
| Magazine had done it. | |
| And the fake headline was, The Heroism of Biden's Bike Fall. | |
| And then the subtitle was, The President Gracefully Illustrated an Important Lesson for All Americans. | |
| When we fall, we must get back up. | |
| Now, how many of you thought that probably was a real headline in this magazine? | |
| I'll bet you... | |
| Well over 90% of the people who saw it probably thought it was real. | |
| Wouldn't you say? Before you knew it was a fake. | |
| Wouldn't you say that that sounds real? | |
| It actually does. | |
| Because as absurd as it sounds, it's not more absurd than the news that you'll see today somewhere. | |
| There will be more absurd things than the real news today. | |
| No difference. Well, as part of our understanding of why things aren't the way they used to be, Adam Dopamine on Twitter, AdamMD, he points out that Eisenhower missed one key element when he warned us about the military-industrial complex. | |
| So remember, Eisenhower gave a big speech in his day and said, watch out for the people who make the weapons. | |
| Working with the people in government to make money by starting wars, essentially. | |
| And sure enough, it looks like there's some of that going on. | |
| But the part that he left down, as Adam Dopamine points out, is you shouldn't include the news in that. | |
| It should have been the military-industrial news complex. | |
| Because unless the news is complicit, you can't get away with it. | |
| So you really need that whole complex. | |
| And I think that's sort of a useful foundational understanding. | |
| Follow the money, but there's somebody running cover for the money and diverting you. | |
| So there's somebody on the, let's say, the bank heist team whose job it is when the bad guys run out and turn left and the police arrive, it's his job to say, he went that way and point the wrong direction. | |
| And when I say he, I mean shit. | |
| All right. What do these people have in common? | |
| Let's see if you can get this. | |
| In the comments, here's your quiz. | |
| Three people, what do they have in common? | |
| Alex Jones, Adam Schiff, and Kim Kardashian. | |
| Go. What do they have in common? | |
| Something major, you know. | |
| And it's not the funny stuff. | |
| Something real. Dog punchers, that was a good guess. | |
| But we have no information about Alex Jones ever punching a dog. | |
| So that was a good guess. | |
| Somebody said they're all dog punchers. | |
| And I thought, Kim Kardashian? | |
| Probably. Adam Schiff? | |
| Definitely. But no information about Alex Jones. | |
| He might be a dog lover. | |
| So it was a good guess, but I don't think it fits. | |
| All had sex tapes. | |
| That's a good guess. | |
| Yeah. Probably. | |
| Probably. But that's not what I was going for. | |
| All have dated Pete Davidson? | |
| Checking the list? Yeah, that too. | |
| Well, okay, I didn't realize there were that many coincidences. | |
| There were quite a few of them. | |
| But here's what I was going for. | |
| I was going for they're all in the same line of work. | |
| They're all in the same line of work. | |
| Let me read them again. Alex Jones, Adam Schiff, and Kim Kardashian. | |
| Same job. | |
| You know, different bosses. | |
| Same job. And here's what their job is. | |
| It's an attenuated reality. | |
| Attenuated reality. | |
| They start with something that's like reality-ish, but they create something that's not reality from it, For the purpose of getting attention. | |
| And then they can monetize that attention or turn it into power, in the case of Adam Schiff. | |
| Maybe also monetize. | |
| So, none of them are different, in my view, from wrestling. | |
| When you were a kid, did you ever watch wrestling? | |
| And you thought to yourself, people are saying this is fake, but I'm not so sure. | |
| This wrestling looks real to me. | |
| I think they're really fighting. And then later you learn it's an attenuated reality. | |
| It's not reality. | |
| It's sort of a base reality. | |
| There's fighters, and there's a ring, and there's an audience, and people probably get hurt, and there's contact. | |
| But it's attenuated. | |
| To get your attention, it's more interesting. | |
| Alex Jones is an attenuated reality. | |
| He takes things that are at base or true, but adds to it. | |
| You could call it a theater. | |
| A theater would be exactly the right... | |
| Yeah, thank you, Sean. | |
| And is it a coincidence that Adam Schiff actually had some script-writing ambitions? | |
| I think he's written a few scripts. | |
| So he actually has a theatrical background? | |
| Yeah. And Kim Kardashian, there was recently a story that there was some family meeting or something that was in the reality show, but the complaint was that they scripted it and it was an artificial gathering in which they pretended something was real. | |
| To which I said, you just figured that out? | |
| Is there somebody who watches reality shows and thinks they're actually watching them just filming what's happening? | |
| Is there anybody doing that? | |
| Is there anybody who still thinks wrestling is like a real sport? | |
| I wonder. | |
| Do people think that? When you watch Alex Jones, do you believe that the purpose is that you're seeing reality? | |
| Is that what you think you're watching? | |
| Because you should watch Alex Jones, the Kardashians, and even Adam Schiff doing any of his public stuff as the same... | |
| It's the same thing. They start with reality. | |
| They attenuate it in ways that get your attention for their own purposes. | |
| But to imagine that any of that is real is a serious misunderstanding of... | |
| I won't call it parody in reality. | |
| But if you think that attenuated reality... | |
| And reality, you can treat them the same. | |
| I think you should rethink that. | |
| These are obviously attenuated reality situations. | |
| And there's a new documentary or movie, I guess you'd say, coming out about Alex Jones, I think at the end of July. | |
| So we'll talk more about that. | |
| But I was looking at... | |
| I just looked at a little trailer for that. | |
| And you see just a snippet of Alex Jones defending... | |
| What he does. Now, his defense is this, that he believes what he says to be true, and that sometimes he's wrong. | |
| And I look at that and I think, maybe? | |
| Maybe? Like, you can't really rule that out, can you? | |
| I mean, think about it. Think about how easy a target Alex Jones is. | |
| And then I'm going to give you his defense. | |
| It's really simple. | |
| It's a very simple defense. | |
| He believes what he says. | |
| But sometimes he's wrong. | |
| And I hear that and I think, all right, nobody has ever presented evidence that he doesn't believe what he says. | |
| Am I wrong? And then here's the second part. | |
| Here's the mic drop. | |
| Alex Jones asks us, why would we treat him differently than the New York Times, which also presumably believes what it says, but sometimes they're wrong. | |
| Like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. | |
| Like really wrong. Like wrong, start a war wrong. | |
| Like that's as wrong as you can be. | |
| And Alex Jones says, why would you treat me differently? | |
| We both believed what we said, and we both could be wrong. | |
| To which I say, oh shit, that's actually a complete defense. | |
| There's nothing wrong with that defense at all. | |
| The only way he could be thwarted in that defense is if there's some recording of him saying, you know, I make all this stuff up. | |
| Now, apparently there is some evidence that he likes the conspiracy theory domain. | |
| So that part I think he said directly. | |
| I believe that's also part of the trailer. | |
| But that doesn't mean he doesn't believe it. | |
| And I'm not entirely sure that believing things is a real thing anymore. | |
| I feel as if we all choose things to believe and that... | |
| The reality is now so obviously subjective that we're a little bit aware of the fact that we're just choosing a reality. | |
| Does that feel true? | |
| In a small way, But you can see that this is like a trend, you know, like it's a socially expanding trend. | |
| That people understand that what they believe or what they act on as their reality, they know is a selected reality, a decision reality. | |
| Not an actual reality. | |
| It's just one they choose to live in. | |
| And I think that conspiracy theorists often are making almost a lifestyle choice to say, I'm going to live in a world in which I treat this as true. | |
| And it's just a choice. | |
| And on some level, maybe they know it isn't true. | |
| Because did you ever see somebody who had a religion that wasn't yours? | |
| And you talk to them and you're like, I don't know what's going on with this other person. | |
| So whatever your religion is, is probably the real one. | |
| But suppose you were talking to somebody who got it all wrong, they had the wrong religion. | |
| And you look at them and you think, do they actually believe that? | |
| Like, actually, really, really believe that? | |
| Like, if you put a gun to the head of a loved one and their family and said, I'm going to kill your loved one, You know, I have some way to know the truth. | |
| It's not possible, but I have some way to know what you're really thinking. | |
| Do you really believe your own religion, like all of it? | |
| Like all the important parts, do you believe all of that? | |
| And I think you'd find that people say, well, okay. | |
| If the life of my loved one is on the line, it is sort of a chosen belief. | |
| And while many of you are still saying, no, that's not true with me. | |
| I'm actually living in reality and living in the real world. | |
| And maybe you are. Maybe you are. | |
| How would I know? The only thing I'm sure is I don't know. | |
| But maybe you got the right one. | |
| Speaking of reality, here's why you could say with certainty we have no news industry in this country. | |
| The most basic fact that you would want to know as a news consumer is this. | |
| So Biden recently said, I think yesterday, we need more refining capacity. | |
| And he says, this idea, they don't have oil and they don't have oil to drill and to bring up is simply not true. | |
| So basically, Biden is saying that the oil industry is to blame for any shortages because there's plenty of oil with the leases and the drilling capacity they already have. | |
| They just can't refine it. | |
| And so that's a problem with the industry itself having not built enough refineries. | |
| Now... Wouldn't you expect if you had a news industry, they would fact check all that and then put it in context for you and then you would read it? | |
| And it wouldn't matter if you were reading news from the left or the right, because these are just really objective facts. | |
| Is it true that the industry just didn't build enough refineries and there's nothing stopping them? | |
| So if they did, everything would be fixed. | |
| Does that even feel a little bit true? | |
| I don't know what the true story is. | |
| So here are things I've heard unreliably, but also assumed to be true. | |
| I believe the government is the problem with building refineries, isn't it? | |
| Isn't the problem that it's either state or local or federal or regulations of some types? | |
| But did I not hear a quote, and give me a fact check on this, so I'm operating from faulty memory here. | |
| I think this week the CEO of Chevron, this is the part you need to check, said that he believes there will never be a refinery built in this country again. | |
| Did he say that? | |
| The CEO said he doesn't believe it'll ever happen. | |
| And I assumed that the context was the regulatory burden is too hard. | |
| Am I right? Yeah, it's just impossible for regulatory reasons. | |
| So, why not put it in Central America? | |
| Can't everybody win if we put the refineries in Central America? | |
| Are you telling me that Nicaragua is going to say no to a refinery? | |
| With all the jobs and whatever positivity it could create there? | |
| And they probably have lower regulatory burdens. | |
| So couldn't Kamala solve her problem and the CEO of Chevron can solve his problem and basically work as a system? | |
| Try to figure out how to make all that work as one thing. | |
| So one of the big problems, and you see this all the time, is we treat all of our issues like they're little silos, but sometimes you can just connect two problems. | |
| For example, you've got a labor shortage, and that's the economy, and you've got an immigration problem. | |
| Can't we figure out how those two silos could work together to fix something? | |
| Feels like we're handicapping ourselves by thinking all of our issues are in their own little channel. | |
| Anyway, so it's obvious we have no news industry because I can't tell if Biden is telling the truth that the industry is to blame or the industry is telling the truth that the government is to blame. | |
| And I would think that both the news on the left and the right, if they knew the answer, would report it exactly the same. | |
| Oh, yeah, they would love to build a refinery, but the government's too burdensome. | |
| Or not. Whatever it is. | |
| So I was watching the new press secretary, Biden's press secretary, trying to answer a question about the economy. | |
| She attempted to answer it by saying there's a bunch of stuff that isn't that bad right now, which is true. | |
| So it's not all bad, we're not in a recession now, blah, blah. | |
| But my overall impression of her was she didn't seem qualified for the job. | |
| Does anybody else have that feeling? | |
| She seems unqualified for the job. | |
| Now, I couldn't remember her name. | |
| Is it Jean-Pierre? | |
| Is that her name? What is her actually name? | |
| So I'm at least being respectful when I'm talking about her. | |
| Because I feel somewhat disrespectful. | |
| I couldn't remember her name. | |
| All right. Well, look. | |
| Corinne Jean-Pierre. | |
| Karen? Corinne? | |
| But I'm going to put a positive spin on it. | |
| Do you remember when Conan O'Brien first became a late-show host and he would do his monologue? | |
| And I don't know if he had the same reaction I did, but my first reaction to Conan O'Brien was, oh, God, he makes me nervous because he looks like he's not qualified or he knows he's not qualified or he just seemed so uncomfortable. | |
| In his own skin on stage, that it made me uncomfortable. | |
| But, but, then he got better. | |
| Because it's one of those things you can't really practice. | |
| There's no way to practice being a late-night show monologue guy, because it's not real practice. | |
| And then I would argue that he became one of the best at it. | |
| Because he got to practice. I feel as if she could follow the same arc. | |
| But at the moment, the spokesperson is looking a little too uncomfortable with what she's saying. | |
| And you do not want your spokesperson to look uncomfortable with what he or she or shit are saying. | |
| So... Anyway, I was just wondering, do you have the same impression that she seems to lack confidence in her own answers, and that lack of confidence makes you think maybe the administration doesn't know what it's doing? | |
| It's a bad combination to have somebody who looks uncomfortable in their job talking for you. | |
| Anyway, but on a positive note, if I may be positive, She looks like she's smart. | |
| She looks like she has, you know, basic, you know, great capabilities. | |
| So maybe she becomes really good at this in a month. | |
| You never know. Could happen. | |
| Give her a month, see what happens. | |
| So Biden administration wants to ban or greatly reduce nicotine in cigarettes. | |
| And basically it would throw the whole cigarette industry into a tizzy and it would make it easier for people to quit. | |
| So apparently, at least there's some science, of course the industry disputes it, surprise, to suggest that it would get people to quit. | |
| What do you think of that? | |
| Now, I've been an anti-smoking proponent and even public advocate. | |
| For decades in public places. | |
| But I'm much less interested in what people do in their private lives. | |
| So do you think the government should get into this business? | |
| What do you think? I mean, I do believe that this is likely to be something that would save tens of millions of lives in the long run. | |
| That would be my guess. | |
| If they get away with this, and I'll say it that way, If they actually basically wipe out the cigarette industry and make it less addictive, I feel like it would save tens of millions of lives. | |
| Which doesn't mean you should do it. | |
| Somebody says it's like prohibition. | |
| Yeah, so would there be immediately counterfeit cigarettes? | |
| Seems like it, right? | |
| Yeah, it would just become an illegal industry and we would just get them from the cartel like we get everything else. | |
| I don't know if it would work. | |
| So I guess I'm anti-smoking, but I'm pro-freedom, so this one's a tough one. | |
| Because cigarette smoking mostly hurts yourself, but on the other hand, it might make my health insurance cost more because other people are doing the wrong things, I guess. | |
| But you can't really go down that road either. | |
| Because that's an infinite problem, because everybody's doing stuff that's dangerous. | |
| You can't take into account all of it. | |
| All right, I'm going to defend Ivanka Trump's opinion about January 6th here, because it turns out it's pretty close to my own. | |
| So CNN is trying to point out that in one video, Ivanka said she accepted Barr's opinion that the election was fair. | |
| And in other videos where she was not, you know, being asked by, I think, the committee, she had said separately and earlier that, you know, there were things that needed to be looked into in the election, meaning that maybe there's some questions that should be answered about the election. | |
| Now, that's pretty different from saying that election was rigged. | |
| And do you think that those two things are necessarily incompatible? | |
| Because here's my take. | |
| I'll overlay my opinion, and maybe that's unfair, but I feel like yours is so close to mine that I can do this. | |
| So I'm going to defend my own opinion. | |
| I separate the question of whether the election was fair from the question of whether you should support the system. | |
| Because I often think, maybe always, but I'll say often, that protecting the system is going to be a higher priority than maybe fixing any individual outcome. | |
| I just think the system's more important. | |
| So as soon as the system elected Biden, I, like many people, said, huh, I don't know, maybe, maybe not. | |
| Maybe and maybe not. | |
| So I had my questions. | |
| Many people had questions. | |
| But some of you will remember that I also immediately congratulated him on Twitter and have never backed off from my decision that the system elected Biden. | |
| So when I say, congratulations, Biden, I'm saying, okay, I got some questions, but I'm not going to dismantle the system. | |
| You're going to have to give me a lot better evidence before I'm going to break the system. | |
| Because that's like the backbone of the country. | |
| So I also have an assumption, this is part of the context for my opinion, that probably elections have been rigged in this country for hundreds of years. | |
| Maybe in small ways, maybe in big ways. | |
| Maybe it made a difference, such as the Kennedy election. | |
| Maybe it made a difference in Johnson's political life. | |
| Maybe not. I don't know. | |
| I wouldn't know. | |
| But in all of those cases, I would still support the republic and the voting system. | |
| So I believe that Ivanka is saying something at least consistent with what I'm saying. | |
| I won't burden her by saying that her opinion matches mine, but at least it's consistent, which is that when Barr said the election is fair, he couldn't know if there was any unknown fraud, right? I mean, by definition, you don't know the thing you don't know. | |
| So if there had been problems and nobody knew what they were, how would Barr know that? | |
| How would anybody? So Barr couldn't know what he can't know. | |
| So when Barr says the election is fair, here's how I interpret it. | |
| The system elected Biden, which is what I say. | |
| Yeah, the system did what the system did. | |
| We observed it. | |
| It might have had problems. | |
| But I'm going to support the system until you give me really, really good evidence, really good evidence, and we're going to talk about that in a minute, that there's something wrong. | |
| And in my opinion, I haven't seen it yet. | |
| I could. I mean, it's possible. | |
| And I'm not sure it's possible to audit the full system. | |
| I'm pretty sure it isn't. | |
| So I would say Ivanka is on good territory if she says she accepts the, you know, the Barr interpretation that the election was fair. | |
| I interpret that just meaning that it happened. | |
| There was an election. | |
| We observed an election. | |
| It picked a winner. | |
| So yes, that happened. | |
| But then you should also look into it if you've got questions. | |
| That just seems like common sense. | |
| You know, the system is... | |
| Is better, the system is healthier, if you look into any allegations. | |
| Because then you can keep making sure that you're finding anything that's a problem. | |
| I've got a theory that maybe lawyers should not be allowed to run for office. | |
| And it's based on a very obvious and simple concept. | |
| People do what they're trained to do. | |
| That's why training works. | |
| It wires your brain to think in a certain way. | |
| The benefit of learning economics actually has very little to do with economics. | |
| I don't know if I've ever told you that before. | |
| But the benefit of learning economics is that it wires your brain to simply view things a certain way that's productive. | |
| That has nothing to do with the economy in many cases. | |
| If you took economics so you could predict the future, Well, good luck with that. | |
| Nobody can do that. | |
| All the economics in the world isn't going to tell you what's going to happen next year. | |
| Too many surprises. But it does wire your brain to know, for example, that if you're saying something is good or bad, you better be comparing it to something. | |
| Which, as amazing as this sounds, is not automatic thinking. | |
| It's not even common sense. | |
| People will often just look at a thing and say, that's good or bad. | |
| Without regard to what they're comparing it to, which is the only relevant question. | |
| So once you take economics, you automatically see things as pairs. | |
| It's either this or that, or this or that, or the third thing, etc. | |
| So that wiring just completely changes how you act all the time. | |
| You can't turn it off. You could not force me to not consider alternatives when I look at a question. | |
| It's just automatic. Now, suppose you've been taught to be a lawyer. | |
| Don't you think lawyers get a certain circuitry burned in? | |
| And, you know, I'm not exactly sure what that circuitry is. | |
| But if you look at Adam Schiff, and, you know, I believe he's an attorney, am I right? | |
| Correct me if I'm wrong, he's an attorney, right? | |
| I feel like they all are, so... | |
| Can you confirm that? | |
| Somebody says, nope. Somebody says, yes. | |
| Anyway, it feels as if, whether he's a real one or wanted to be one, it feels as if these public hearings are attorneys who couldn't be attorneys, like actually successful big trial lawyers. | |
| It feels like play acting for attorneys. | |
| This show trial thing that we're seeing, and now it's like we've seen several of them from the Democrats, it looks like attorneys trying to be attorneys. | |
| Doesn't it? It's like they're play acting. | |
| They couldn't do it in the real world. | |
| So it made me think of the old joke, those who can't do, teach. | |
| Those who can't do, teach. | |
| And then those who can't teach, teach him. | |
| Well, in the lawyer world, it's like those who can't become successful lawyers, teach. | |
| And those who can't teach you how to be a lawyer run for politics. | |
| And they're in Congress. | |
| So you end up with the lowest level of a lawyer by the time you have a politician who's also a lawyer. | |
| Not every time. | |
| I'm making sort of a generalization. | |
| But then you've got these people who are wired for this model of how to solve things. | |
| I'm a lawyer, so the model of how to solve things is you have some kind of this public event where evidence is displayed and there are representatives and there's somebody who's like a Like a defendant, you know, like you're accusing somebody. | |
| And then there will be other people who will be like a jury, but not really a jury because it's not a trial. | |
| But we'll make it like it's a pretend trial. | |
| And then I'll get to stand in front of the world, like I'm a famous trial lawyer, and I'll make my impassioned case, and then everybody will look at me and they'll say, wow, look at that impassioned case that that excellent lawyer made. | |
| Who was not good enough to be an actual lawyer, so he had to run for office. | |
| So, so much of this looks like play acting, because it is. | |
| I think it actually is. | |
| If you put me in government, what would I be doing so much that you would hate it? | |
| I would be saying, have you considered the alternatives? | |
| Have we really seen both sides of the arguments? | |
| I would be doing that until you were so fucking sick of hearing it that you would puke. | |
| Because I'm wired that way. | |
| I'm just wired that way. | |
| Because I studied economics and business, etc. | |
| If you randomly select a lawyer from anywhere, throw that lawyer into government, and say, we've got this problem, what do you want to do about it? | |
| What's the lawyer going to do? | |
| Well, the lawyer's going to do whatever the lawyer was wired to do. | |
| Huh, how do you solve a problem? | |
| Probably some kind of a... | |
| Evidence gathering, then a public event. | |
| There's got to be a villain. | |
| There's got to be a jury. | |
| They're just wired that way. | |
| So we keep getting all these, you know, impeachments and show trials and stuff. | |
| Why? Because that's who we fucking hired. | |
| We hired people who can only do this. | |
| If we wanted to get some plumbing fixed, we should have hired a plumber. | |
| If we wanted to solve a fucking problem, you don't hire lawyers. | |
| Lawyers aren't there to solve a problem, they're there to fight. | |
| They're there to put on a trial. | |
| They're just wired a certain way. | |
| And they're wired the wrong way for what we need them for. | |
| Are you ready for the point where I make my case so strongly that you'll never be the same again? | |
| January 6th. | |
| Imagine January 6th if all the lawyers were not part of the story. | |
| Number one, it is alleged... | |
| And I may have some of these facts wrong, so help me on the fact-checking. | |
| It is alleged that lawyer Mark Elias was part of a larger effort to change some of the election rules... | |
| Partly because the pandemic gave some impetus to that, but more largely because they knew those rule changes would help the Democrats. | |
| Now, if as many allege, and I'm not sure how to know this is true, if as many allege that made the difference, wasn't that the thing that shocked Republicans after the election? | |
| It's like, wait a minute. This didn't go the way we were all pretty sure it would go. | |
| And it's so far off from what we expected that we think there's something fishy going on. | |
| So if Mark Elias had simply never existed and the election had been run the way elections had always run before, maybe unfairly, maybe unfairly, Republicans would have had an advantage and Trump would have won. | |
| And then there would be no January 6th. | |
| So am I right? So this is the first case. | |
| If Mark Elias and people he worked with who probably did similar things, if they did not exist doing what they did, Republicans would not have said, wait a minute, this result doesn't look right. | |
| And maybe it was all legal. | |
| By the way, I'm not alleging anything illegal. | |
| They're probably just good lawyers and they made sure they changed laws that helped their clients or their interests. | |
| So here's another one. | |
| Apparently the primary reason that Trump thought there was some path for delaying the vote or getting these other fake people in there, fake electors, is he had a lawyer, | |
| John Eastman, So John Eastman was the one who came up with the theories about how it would be legal for Trump and his supporters to delay things or challenge things or get different electors or whatever it was. | |
| Now imagine if Trump did not have a high-end lawyer, a high-end lawyer, remember, John Eastman's not your neighborhood lawyer. | |
| He's like a high-end government lawyer kind of guy. | |
| If Trump did not have that advice, would he have even bothered... | |
| If no lawyer had told Trump, yeah, there's an argument for this, would he have done anything he did? | |
| No. No. | |
| No, there had to be a lawyer telling him, well, there's a good chance this could work. | |
| Now, in retrospect, as we look at it after the fact, it doesn't look like that was good legal advice. | |
| But how would you know if you were in the moment? | |
| If you're Trump and your lawyer says, this looks like it could work, what are you going to do? | |
| Overrule your lawyer? I mean, you don't know. | |
| I mean, eventually you might overrule. | |
| So if you took Mark Elias and whoever he worked with, probably other lawyers out of it, you wouldn't get the opinion that shocked the Republicans. | |
| If you took Eastman out of it, Trump would have said, ah, damn it, I just lost the election. | |
| I guess there's nothing you could do about that. | |
| Now, by the way... | |
| Oh, and then if you take the lawyers out of Congress, they don't even do the January 6th show trial thing. | |
| So have I made my case that if you took the lawyers out of the story, none of this would have happened. | |
| January 6th, there would have been no riots. | |
| There would have been nothing except an election. | |
| It was only the lawyers that fucked up everything. | |
| And if it were not for their flying monkeys in the press to make us think the problem was somewhere else, it would be really obvious to you that lawyers are the problem. | |
| And by the way, they're not always breaking the law. | |
| How about if... | |
| If Sidney Powell had not told the Trump supporters that they totally had the goods, do you think the Trump supporters would have been so worked up if somebody who wasn't a high-end lawyer, somebody you really expect better know they have the facts before they talk in public like that, do you think they would have been as worked up? | |
| Probably not. This was lawyer problems from top to bottom. | |
| And the fact that we see it any other way is a testimony to how easily we can be brainwashed. | |
| Because, I mean, it's only one of the filters or frames you could put on this, but it's the most productive one. | |
| It's just a lawyer-on-lawyer crime, and we're all... | |
| Basically, we're just victims of the drive-by shootings by lawyers, and we're acting like it's some other problem entirely. | |
| So... So there's that. | |
| What about this gun control bill? | |
| So a lot of Republicans are hopping mad. | |
| I guess a number of Republicans signed on to a Democrat... | |
| Gun control bill that includes some red flag law funding. | |
| So it's funding for states to look into and or implement red flag laws. | |
| And that means that if you think your neighbor or friend or family member is a little crazy, you can have the government take their gun away. | |
| Because you reported that they were somehow mentally unstable or dangerous or something. | |
| Now, as many people have suggested, Doesn't that mean that everybody's just going to turn in every Republican that lives next door? | |
| And every Democrat who sees a Republican who has more than one gun is going to say, hmm, more than one gun? | |
| That's a little crazy to me. | |
| Why would you need more than one gun? | |
| And wow, you take pictures and put them on social media of you at the gun range? | |
| Oh, that's a little crazy. I think maybe the red flag is appropriate for you. | |
| So, there's definitely a slippery slope. | |
| It's not even slippery. | |
| It's like right there. You don't even have to wait for the slide, do you? | |
| Literally on day one, your neighbor can turn you in for being a little too Republican with your guns. | |
| Am I wrong? I would think that being a little too Republican is going to start looking like a mental disorder. | |
| Did we not see the mental disorder... | |
| The psychiatric industry diagnosed Trump in public when that's the last thing anybody should do if they're in that business. | |
| Like, the last thing you should do is diagnose somebody's mental disorder and they're not even your patient, it's just somebody you see on TV. And the psychiatric industry, like, just completely gave up their standard because it was Trump. | |
| It's like, oh, yeah, well, in this case we'll do it. | |
| Yeah, normally. Normally we wouldn't do it, but, you know, Trump. | |
| So when you see how flexible people can be under the right situation, yeah, there's a legitimate reason to be worried about these red flag laws. | |
| On the other hand, what do I always say when there's something that you don't know if it would work or not? | |
| What do I always say? | |
| Test it! Test it! | |
| Why are we even arguing? | |
| Just put it in one damn state, let it run for three years, and see if any Republicans get turned in. | |
| I think you would know pretty reliably if it turns out that Democrats are just going to be turning in Republicans. | |
| If you think that's the problem, and I think that's an entirely legitimate problem, Worry. | |
| You just don't know if it's true. | |
| Like, you worry, but you don't know. | |
| It could be exactly the opposite of that. | |
| Here's the other way it could go. | |
| The Democrat calls and says, I need to red-flag my neighbor because he's a little too gun-obsessed. | |
| But maybe it's just a Republican with a hobby. | |
| It doesn't mean anything about violence. | |
| What happens when the police get that call? | |
| Do they act on it? Because now there's a red flag law. | |
| Or do they say, does your neighbor have a red hat that says MAGA on it? | |
| And then the Democrat says, yes. | |
| And then do the police say, oh, we'll put somebody right on it? | |
| Or do the police say, oh, don't worry, that's just how they act. | |
| I feel like it might be the latter. | |
| Because the police are just going to want to use their resources for things that are useful, right? | |
| The police do not want to waste their time. | |
| So the counter to the slippery slope is that the police will hardly ever want to do anything with the red flag. | |
| I think it would be shockingly difficult to get the police to act at all. | |
| On a red flag complaint. | |
| It would have to be pretty damning for the police to act. | |
| Only because the police have limited resources. | |
| So, do you remember I said follow the money? | |
| Do you know why I always speed if I happen to be driving at 4 a.m. | |
| on a Sunday morning? Well, let's say not 4 a.m. | |
| Let's say 8am on a Sunday morning. | |
| Do you know why I always speed? | |
| Well, not only because there's not much traffic, but because I know the police department will not implement resources for a low traffic time of day. | |
| Follow the money. If you know how money influences how everybody acts, you'll never get a speeding ticket. | |
| I realize that's a dramatic claim, but let me give you another example. | |
| Do you ever see those signs that the police will put up to tell you what your speed is? | |
| And the idea is to tell you that you're speeding so you'll slow down. | |
| Do you know what I do when I see that sign? | |
| I speed. Do you know why? | |
| Because no police department in the world is going to put up that sign to warn you to slow down and then also assign an officer to give you a ticket if you didn't follow the sign. | |
| The sign is what you put there when you can't afford to put an officer there all the time. | |
| If you don't understand economics, you might think, oh, there's going to be a police right after the sign. | |
| No. No. | |
| The sign's instead of the police. | |
| Somebody says wrong, but I bet it's not wrong often. | |
| So the point is, if you understand economics, you can anticipate things a little bit better. | |
| Tim Pool was swatted eight times, and the police keep coming. | |
| Yeah, that Tim Pool thing, there's something we need to know about that. | |
| There's something about that story that doesn't make complete sense. | |
| I'm having a little trouble believing he gets SWATed time after time, and it's a fake call, and that the SWAT falls for it one time after another. | |
| Really? There's nobody on a SWAT team who's heard of Tim Pool? | |
| At this point, it would be hard for me to imagine any SWAT organization where there isn't at least one person who knows who the fuck Tim Pool is and they get SWATed all the time on fake calls. | |
| I don't know. I'm just not believing. | |
| There's something about the story that doesn't add up. | |
| So I'd say you have two counter forces that could be tested. | |
| One is, of course people would abuse the red flag law. | |
| Of course they would, because we're people. | |
| People will abuse anything. | |
| There's nothing that can be introduced into the world that people won't abuse. | |
| So yes, they'll abuse it. | |
| But will the police resource constraint Cause the police to be, like, a really useful check on this. | |
| But they won't act unless it's, like, really obvious. | |
| And when it's really obvious, maybe they should act. | |
| So I'm not sure. | |
| The only thing I know for sure is that you could test it in one state, wait a couple years, see if it worked. | |
| Then you don't give up your constitutional rights without getting something in return. | |
| Alex Brogan on Twitter... | |
| Did a thread with a bunch of good ideas about persuasion. | |
| But there was one that he had there that I'm going to push back a little bit on because I have a counter view. | |
| So here's a persuasion tip of the day. | |
| So what Alex wrote was, he called it the rule of three. | |
| I think this came from McKinsey or someplace. | |
| That whenever you're trying to persuade a person to do something, always present three reasons. | |
| Never two, never four, but exactly three. | |
| And the idea is it gets people's attention, and most of us have been hardwired to expect things in groups of three. | |
| So it's more persuasive. | |
| And I can see the argument that maybe there's some hardwiring that three reasons is just the right amount. | |
| But I would push back on that, because my experience is that if you give people three reasons, the argument goes like this. | |
| And see if this sounds familiar. | |
| I'll say, well, there are three reasons. | |
| Reason number one, it would kill you. | |
| Reason number two, it would be expensive. | |
| Reason number three, it's not even doable. | |
| It's impractical. Now, if you give three reasons, people will start arguing with parts of those categories, and you'll never get them to agree. | |
| Because the moment you argue the first one, and they say, no, it's not going to kill you. | |
| And then you do your argument, and they agree. | |
| Or they don't agree. | |
| They usually get to the point where they say, but what about that other one? | |
| And you're like, wait a minute. | |
| Wait a minute. Are you conceding this point? | |
| And they'll never concede the point. | |
| They'll just move to the other point. | |
| Then you say, okay, okay, we'll get back to this one, because I think I won this, but you didn't agree, so let me win these other two. | |
| And then you make your great point on the second one. | |
| What did they do? They say, oh, now you've made two good points. | |
| Let's see about this third one. | |
| Never. Never. | |
| They'll just move to the third one and start arguing why you're wrong about that one. | |
| And you'll be like, well, I'm not so sure I've settled the first two. | |
| Did I? And then you'll argue the third one, and you make your point, and now in your mind you've said, all right, three arguments. | |
| I've now supported all three arguments. | |
| We're done here. What does the person who has now been completely vanquished on all three points do next? | |
| You tell me. In your own experience, you've gone down the list of three, you've completely vanquished their points in ways that they don't even have a response to. | |
| They literally don't have a response to it. | |
| They just move to the next one. What happens next? | |
| They return to the first one and start over. | |
| That's right. Name here, that is correct. | |
| They start over. | |
| And they will pretend that you had never already countered their first argument. | |
| They'll just start back on the first one. | |
| And you'll think, do you have amnesia? | |
| We just did this. | |
| And they'll act like you hadn't. | |
| And so you'll think, okay, well... | |
| I'll do it again. And then you'll do the same three again, and you'll say, there, phew. | |
| At least you remember all three debunks, so now we're done. | |
| And what will they do? | |
| They'll start with the first one again, like it never happened. | |
| Now, you've seen this, right? | |
| I'm not the only person who's gone through this, you know, I call it the well. | |
| You keep going down the well and there's no bottom. | |
| Anyway, so I would argue that you should take their strongest argument and debunk it, and then say, boom. | |
| If your strongest argument fell apart, we don't really need to talk about the other ones. | |
| Because I'm not going to let you escape to them, because I know you'll escape. | |
| So the first thing you want to do is destroy their escape paths. | |
| Now, you have to be a deadly debater to do this, but If you're sure you're going to win on the strongest point, make sure you've eliminated all their escape paths before you annihilate their first one by getting them to agree. | |
| How about I just take your strongest point? | |
| And if I can debunk your strongest point, would you agree to maybe rethink the rest of it? | |
| We don't have to do it today, but just your strongest point. | |
| Because if you do that, that gets rid of their escape paths. | |
| You say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but today we'll just talk about the strongest point. | |
| And now that you see you were wrong about that, maybe you should do a little research. | |
| That's about as far as you can go. | |
| People can talk themselves into things better than you can talk them into it. | |
| So if you sort of point them in the right direction, sometimes they'll walk there on their own. | |
| All right. I feel like there was at least one thing that I didn't mention today. | |
| Looking at my notes, looking at my notes. | |
| Nope. That was it. | |
| I guess this is complete. | |
| I believe that once again, your lives have been improved by the time that we spent here together. | |
| And how many of you just got smarter? | |
| Three. Three of you. | |
| But I'll get the rest of you next time. | |
| Can't win them all. DeSantis is pushing back on baby vaccines. | |
| Yeah, I've heard some weird things on the baby vaccine story. | |
| Like, the weirdest one was, and I can't believe this is right, like, there's something about the vaccine companies don't have liability unless it includes kids, right? | |
| Unless kids are part of the program or something. | |
| Did somebody hear that? Like, that doesn't sound right. | |
| I mean, that doesn't sound true. | |
| I mean, just on the surface, that doesn't sound true. | |
| Scott, stop with the self-importance. | |
| I've been advised to stop with my self-importance. | |
| Michael, I'm going to hide you on this channel because you're less important than me. | |
| Goodbye. I would advise all of you to ramp up your self-importance. | |
| Anybody who advises you to think of yourself as less important, you really need to remove them from your life immediately. | |
| Immediately remove them from your life. | |
| So if you'd like to talk to me about how I'm feeling too good about my abilities, that's great. | |
| Just don't do it around me. | |
| I just don't have any interest in you. | |
| And I would advise you to maybe think better of yourself. | |
| I don't know which would make you happier. | |
| I'm no doctor. | |
| But I'll bet you that if you learn to think well of yourself, you'll be happier. | |
| I think. I think. | |
| Did I miss a Jordan Peterson tweet discussion? | |
| Oh, is there a spicy Jordan Peterson tweet? | |
| Can somebody fill me in? | |
| What did Jordan Peterson say that... | |
| Oh, did he say that... | |
| All right. | |
| We'll see if there's a Jordan Peterson thing I need to respond to. | |
| Ask Schellenberger about Biden's oil lies. | |
| Yeah, Michael Schellenberger does the best job of... | |
| Putting things in context, especially for energy questions and homeless stuff. | |
| But yeah, he's been calling out Biden for his claims about refineries. | |
| So, was there a Jordan Peterson tweet? | |
| The one with Gad's ad? | |
| Should I look it up? It's like you're not going to tell me. | |
| Maybe I'll do that for tomorrow. | |
| I won't keep you. Alright, that's all for today. | |
| I will talk to you tomorrow. And I'm hoping that all of you have an amazing... | |
| Peterson said you weren't important. | |
| What's that say? Peterson said you weren't important. | |
| Or that people weren't important. | |
| Is that what he said? All right. | |
| Well, we'll figure out what he said. | |
| And on that note, I'm apparently babbling, even though this is still the best experience that most of you have ever had in your life. | |
| And some of you are going to have an even better experience later today. | |
| I don't know who you are, but probably. | |
| Probably. Because that's how it works. | |
| Yes, an amazing day coming, and I'll talk to you tomorrow on YouTube. |