My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Vivek Ramaswamy vs. President Trump
Tucker's take on the J6 videos
Qanon Shaman exculpatory video
Should Trump have pardoned J6 people?
Whiteboard: Real World vs. Screen World
Chris Cuomo interview last night
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of civilization.
It's private over there on the locals platform where we do extra special things behind the curtain and eventually on March 13th it'll be the only place you can see the new Dilbert's which will be called Dilbert Reborn.
It's at Locals.
If you want to look for it, just look at my Twitter profile for the link, or scottadams.locals.com.
It's a subscription site.
Alright, well, if you'd like to take your experience up, and I promise you, today will be not only entertaining, you'll laugh, you'll cry, But probably only because of your own problems.
Nothing I'm going to say will make you cry.
But you'll probably laugh.
And you'll probably cry at, you know, your own stuff.
But have a good cry if you need it.
I mean, I'm just saying, if you need it.
And you'll probably be educated in a way that, well, it's hard to even describe.
Or, as somebody we know says, like nobody's ever seen before.
But first, to take your experience up, all you need is a cupper, a mugger, a glass, a tanker, a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug, 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, and it happens now.
Go.
So good.
Well, toward the second half of this, I will talk about my interview last night with Chris Cuomo, which was really interesting.
And I'm going to talk about the communication techniques and the persuasion techniques that you can see happening.
What I attempted to do was move the frame, and then we'll talk about whether I did that.
That'll be later.
We'll talk about the news first.
I tweeted just the other day that having Vivek Ramaswamy in the primaries makes Trump a better candidate.
Would anybody disagree with that at this point?
Because Trump came out saying he wants to disband the Department of Education, which Vivek had said just the other day.
Now once Vivek said it, and sort of focused on it for a little while, Trump kind of had to play catch-up, didn't he?
He had to catch up.
So he had to at least match it.
And how happy are you about that?
You know, I always tell you that I like to look at things from a systems perspective.
The goal perspective would be, I want this one candidate to win.
That would be a goal.
A system perspective is, we are so much better off with Vivek in the debate.
You know what nobody can say anymore?
Republicans are dumb.
Or Republicans are too old, or they're not They're not reading the room.
He just eliminates a whole bunch of arguments.
Or even that conservatives won't back somebody who's a person of color, even though he's clearly not making that a point of anything in his campaign, which is, of course, brilliant.
Which is, of course, why he gets attention, because he's brilliant.
Wouldn't it be nice to have somebody in charge of the country Who you legitimately said, well, I might not agree with everything, but that guy is brilliant.
Like, just once, right?
Now, this is the reason that I like Bill Clinton.
I'm far less party-bound than maybe my reputation would suggest.
I like Bill Clinton because he was freaking brilliant.
And I didn't care who he banged on the side.
Any more than I care what Trump did or did not do with Stormy Daniels.
Completely irrelevant.
Give me smart.
Give me capable.
I'm good.
So, good job for Vivek.
Making things just better.
No matter what happens, I think he made things better.
And it looks like that'll continue.
I would like to announce a death.
I know that's a bummer, but sometimes things die.
And it should be...
I think we should take a moment of silence for it, but here's what happened.
You've probably heard this quote.
Quote, it must be true because I saw the video with my own eyes.
Well, that absurd belief was born around 1951 with the advent of video, and it had a long life.
But in recent years, it started struggling with a bad illness, and it finally died yesterday, February 6, 2023.
And RIP, rest in peace, it must be true because I saw the video with my own eyes.
Yes, that's how all hoaxes are created, making you think there's no other interpretation than the one you saw in the video.
If you learn nothing this year, learn that all video is a lie.
All of it.
All video is a lie.
Every time.
Even if it's not edited wrong.
It's still focusing your visual persuasion on one point, almost always to the exclusion of whatever the other point of view is.
Because if you're looking at it, you're believing it.
If you're hearing it, you're like, ah, concept, concept.
Retreat to my team views.
I didn't hear what you said.
But a video is establishing the argument, right?
All video lies.
All video lies, all the time.
It can't do anything else.
I don't even know if there's a possibility for it to not lie.
I mean, think about it.
It's always going to focus you on one thing, at the exclusion or at least the diminishment of the other things.
It's always a lie.
At least in, you know, in part.
So yes, we're talking about Tucker Carlson got a hold of the January 6th footage and his take, and most of the people who are looking at it from the right, their take seems to be that it proves the January 6th videos that the so-called Select January 6th Committee showed to the world to build their case were a disgusting lie and
Although not illegal, because I believe Congress, and people do a fact check on me, I believe Congress is allowed, in terms of it being legal, they're legally allowed to lie to you as much as they want, are they not?
Legally.
Am I right?
Yeah, there's no law against it.
It's actually... So we watched Congress frame a bunch of American citizens.
You might call them patriots.
And I wouldn't argue with that.
We saw our own Congress frame them because they have this apparently some kind of loophole where they can destroy lives by lying in public in a way that an ordinary citizen couldn't possibly do the same thing.
Now, like I say, it's not illegal.
But if it were illegal, what would the penalty be?
Pretty serious jail time, wouldn't it?
Now, I don't think there's any practical way to make it illegal, so I understand why it's not illegal.
Because everybody's lying all the time.
Like, you couldn't even have a government.
If you went to jail for lying, everybody'd be in jail.
So I get why it's not illegal.
But if it were illegal, this would have been 25 years in jail.
Allowing, what, dozens or hundreds?
How many people went to jail for effectively trespassing?
A lot, right?
If you send dozens or hundreds of your own citizens to jail, and you know you're lying, or at least you know you're showing things out of context, that should be like a 25 year jail term.
Does anybody disagree with that?
It's hard for me to think of anything worse than that, that's not actually murder, or rape or something, right?
Pedophilia, I suppose.
There are a few things that are worse.
But it's one of the worst things I've ever seen.
One of the worst things I've ever seen.
Unless... Unless... Did anybody have the suspicion that you just went from one misleading set of videos to another?
Did anybody say to themselves, how do I know that Tucker's videos are giving me the right story?
How quickly did you buy into the narrative that the other narrative was completely wrong and that it was all a big ol' op?
Pretty quickly, right?
Pretty quickly.
Because that's what agreed with your preconceived notions, didn't it?
Didn't it?
Yeah, you kind of expected that you'd see that the narrative had been false.
So you saw what you expected.
How much should you trust your own, let's say, rational senses if you see something that totally agrees with what you thought was going to be true?
You ought to be a little bit cautious.
Here's the thing I'd like to see.
I'd like to see somebody who does not agree with Tucker Carlson about anything have access to the whole catalogue, give them a little time, And then give them a full hearing, right?
This is the sort of thing where you need to hear the other side.
So now Tucker's shown a counterpoint to the January 6th people, and I think that was a huge service.
Would you agree?
I think what Tucker Carlson is doing, somebody said it, maybe Cernovich said it, that it's maybe one of the most useful important things anybody ever did in journalism.
It's like right at the top of important things, in my opinion.
So what Tucker's doing is like real good work.
Real good work.
But you as a smart consumer, and I'll bet Tucker wouldn't disagree with this.
I'll bet if you were sitting here, he'd say, yeah, that's true.
Which is, until you hear what other people say, if they also have access to the full catalog of the videos, just see if they can come up with a narrative that makes his narrative weaker.
I don't know if they can.
Let me tell you how every hoax was done that fooled other people.
Here's how those hoaxes were done.
Here's a video, or a series of videos.
Here's the video.
How could you possibly interpret this any other way?
That's how all the hoaxes are done.
I can't imagine any other way to interpret this video.
There's only one way to interpret this video.
As long as they can get you to not imagine any other way to interpret it, you won't.
You probably just won't imagine there's any other possibility.
But I would say, imagine there might be.
I kind of trust Tucker on this story.
So if I had to guess, I don't think anybody will be able to refute his narrative in any important way.
Like there's always ways to pick at the edges of anything.
But I don't think anybody's going to take the heart out of his narrative.
But, that's exactly what you say before you get fooled.
I can't imagine anybody doing that!
Right?
So I'm actually describing myself in the same blind spot I'm warning you not to be in.
It's almost impossible to avoid it.
All right, so let's talk about some of the details.
So it looks like the horned guy, the Q-shaman, right?
Q-anon shaman, they call him.
The videos of him are so clearly indicating he needs to be released from prison, like right now.
Like, right, right now.
Now, if somebody else has other video that shows something we didn't see, maybe, but he was actually hanging out in a friendly way with a number of, I don't know, guards or law enforcement, what they were.
One of them opened a door for him.
It seemed like they enjoyed him.
I mean, they weren't smiling or anything, but it looked like they were either amused, certainly not threatened, certainly not threatened.
It was just a guy in a fun outfit walking through a hallway, and they opened a door for him.
And they were walking with him at one point.
Yeah, when you see that video, again, it's impossible to imagine that what that one person was doing was in any way a four-year criminal sentence.
I'm not entirely sure what he got convicted of, but wasn't it something like protesting or interfering with official proceedings or something?
Yeah.
And as somebody said, I think it was Tom Fitton said on his spaces, there could be things that are technically illegal.
that are not appropriate to prosecute.
Would you agree?
That the world is full of things that are technically illegal, but you do not get a better world by prosecuting them.
Now, here's a perfect example of that.
Did he do things that were technically illegal?
Probably.
Probably.
Is anything he did worth prosecuting in the sense that it would make the world a better place?
Would it prevent him from doing it in the future?
I don't think that's a risk.
Would it prevent anyone else from doing something similar in the future?
If it did, I don't think it was worth putting him in jail, right?
So you could be technically You know, breaking a law and still the right thing is not to prosecute.
There are probably infinite examples like that.
All right.
So the general tone of the Tucker's narrative, I guess, is that the evidence shows something like patriotic protesters who clearly were not looking to hurt anybody.
Everybody agrees there were dangerous people there who definitely had some bad ideas.
All of those people are condemned.
If they go to jail, I don't care.
But that wasn't the character of the crowd, and it wasn't the point of it.
There certainly wasn't an insurrection.
So the insurrection narrative is dissolving, and Tucker Carlson gets to be right again.
And every time he's right about this, I'll tell you what I'm talking about.
Every time he's right about this, it pisses me off.
Because for maybe a few years, I would just shake my head when I heard him say it.
Because it just sounded so, just like team play, narrative stuff.
And he would always say that whatever the Democrats are accusing you of, you can be sure that's what they're doing themselves.
Here it is.
Here it is.
That they were literally trying to do something just incredibly disreputable.
It wasn't illegal, but certainly unethical, certainly unwise, certainly bad for the country.
Now, it wasn't exactly what they were accusing people of, but the accusations did seem like a cover-up for their own behavior in a way.
So, I mean, I hate it when Tucker keeps being right about that over and over again.
Poor Josh Hawley.
who was, there was one video of him seemingly, you know, skipping fast or running or something, which the Democrats used to say, that guy, he encouraged things and then he ran away like a coward, like a coward.
Now I didn't see the, I couldn't see the video when I was listening to it, but apparently that was debunked.
When you see the greater context, Apparently it doesn't look weird or cowardly if you see the context.
Surprise!
Surprise!
A hoax.
It was a hoax within a hoax.
So the first hoax being that it was an insurrection.
Obviously it was a protest, not an insurrection.
Second hoax within the hoax was that Holly was running like a pussy.
I think that's what people said.
I only use that word because I think that was actually a congressperson used that word.
And then that turned out to be a root bar edit, as we call it, where you cut out the context.
Have we ever seen this first?
Is this the first time we've seen a hoax, and then a hoax within the hoax?
Have we gone to hoax squared?
It's sort of like the Russian egg of hoaxes.
Oh, what's inside here?
Oh, lovely.
But what's inside here?
Oh, another hoax.
But wait, what's inside here?
Oh!
And repeat.
Alright, so, what do you do about all that?
What do you do about any of it?
Do you think anybody will pay, either politically, or legally, or lawsuits?
I don't even think you can sue them, right?
I think Congress is exempt from being sued, as far as I know.
So here's a sort of a side issue.
Again, Mike Cernovich is going hard at Trump for having the opportunity to preemptively pardon the nonviolent January 6ers before he left office.
And he didn't do it, which Cernovich properly points out.
Needs some explaining.
Now, that's my take.
My take is it needs some explaining.
Because, again, I haven't heard Trump's argument.
Can you imagine any argument that Trump would make that would make you happy?
Like, what in the world could Trump say that would make you satisfied having not pardoned those people before he left?
He can't think of one, right?
He can't even think of one.
All right.
Suppose he had one.
Suppose he had a reason that's not obvious, because I don't see any reason.
I mean, the only reason that's obvious would be something like cowardice or not caring.
Those would be the obvious ones.
But what if there's another reason?
Don't you think there could be some other explanation that's just not obvious?
Let me give you one.
I'm going to give you an explanation that I'm not saying is the accurate one.
All I'm doing is stretching your imagination a little bit, right?
This is just an imagination stretcher, not a claim of truth.
Imagine being Trump and you're being accused of running an insurrection.
It looks like Trump had a private army.
Do you remember what people were saying?
It's Trump's private army.
And all the MAGA people basically are insurrectionists and they don't love the country.
They're definitely not patriots.
They're all criminals and they're running a coup.
And then he pardons them.
Think about it.
Just put yourself in Trump's shoes.
He's got to make a decision that's good for himself.
But also not damage the country.
Not damage the country.
If you put me in that position and you say, Scott, the ethical thing to do, the moral thing to do, is to pardon those innocent people right away.
Would you agree that the ethical and moral thing to do was to pardon those innocent people before you left office?
I would.
That would be the moral and ethical thing to do.
However, would it be good for the country?
Would it be good for the country?
Because it would confirm the false narrative that he had formed a private army.
Because if he just says, I'm going to ignore the law, I'm going to ignore the legal process.
Now, keep in mind he also didn't know how long they would be held or what they would be charged with exactly.
Right?
Do you think that Trump knew that today they'd still be in jail for basically nothing that matters?
Nothing that matters.
No, he couldn't have known how bad it would be, but even still, I'm going to agree hard with Cernovich, this is a hard agreement, that he didn't put it this way, but I think you would agree with the following statement, that it was unethical and immoral, frankly immoral, to not help them when he knew that they were just good patriots.
And I would have said the same thing if a bunch of Democrats had been picked up on sketchy charges.
In both cases, it would be immoral to leave them there.
But number one, he could not have known how bad it would get, because he was only in office, what, two more weeks?
But he could have suspected that it would harden the narrative that Republicans are nothing but an insurrectionist party and the MAGA movement has to be uprooted by its roots.
But playing it this way, again, John, if you're coming in late, this is not spinning it.
This is just helping you imagine that no matter who it is, whether it's Trump or Satan, there might be something more to the story.
Every time any of us have been fooled by a news story, and that's all of us.
I remember the Covington Kids thing fooled me for a little less than a day, but it definitely fooled me.
We all have the same blind spot.
You can't imagine what you can't imagine.
Does that make sense?
You can't understand what you can't imagine.
And it could be just there's more to the story.
Look at the quality of this comment.
Scott is a liar.
I'm a liar?
I've not even made a claim of fact.
All I've made is a claim that you should expand your imagination.
You're having a little trouble with this NPC.
You can tell the NPC is like the first level.
Can't get past.
Anyway, so I do not defend Trump, but just as I try to be consistent with every story, if you haven't heard the other side, if you haven't heard the other side, you do owe that to Trump.
You owe Trump his explanation.
Because I think there's a possibility that he had to choose between destroying the country and doing something clearly unethical, which is keeping them in jail.
Or immoral.
Pick your term.
With that choice, I don't know.
It might have been the choice.
Just saying.
All right.
How about that lab leak theory?
I haven't talked about that too much.
You know, the fact that now the consensus of the experts is it must have come from the lab.
But it doesn't feel like news to me.
Like the news is that the government is no longer denying you the obvious explanation.
But doesn't it feel like we've known it for so long That the fact that the government had been lying or was useless in terms of helping us understand, that feels like business as usual today, doesn't it?
Like the fact that the government was lying or misleading, once again, once again, I couldn't generate any outrage at all.
I've been trying for days to generate some outrage over the fact that we were denied the obvious explanation that came from the lab.
And it's now just baseline government weaselness that I'm so frickin' used to it, it didn't even register in my outrage orb.
So I guess I need more.
I need more to get me outraged.
I mean, it's an outrageous story.
I'm just so used to it.
Here's a logic question.
Let's say everybody knows there's some excess deaths that are continuing long after the pandemic peak.
And there's a lot of question about what is causing the excess deaths.
If the COVID itself starts fizzling out, or at least the most dangerous forms of COVID fizzle out, let's say the hospitalizations go to practically nothing.
It looks like that could happen in the next six months or so.
But let's say if the excess deaths still continued climbing after the COVID itself had gone away, what would be the logical theory Somebody say vaccinations.
Vaccinations.
Now that was the theory I heard, but I want to test the logic with you.
At some point, most adults are going to be vaccinated.
Most.
Not you, necessarily.
They'll have at least two boosters.
Most.
And they will also have been exposed to COVID.
So if you've got both the vaccination in you and the COVID, Let's say one of those had a long-term effect.
Let's say both of them stay in your body forever.
I'm not saying that's true.
But let's say it did.
Let's say the spike protein stays in your body forever and does bad stuff.
And let's say that the COVID...
Maybe stays in your body and does some bad stuff.
Or maybe either one of them weakens some key system in your body so that you don't die right away, but that excess death just stays up there because people are just generally weakened from one or the other or from some third or fourth effect.
Do you think that the decrease of COVID with the increase of excess deaths Or even staying the same, excess deaths.
Do you think that narrows it down to the vaccinations?
Because that would only make sense to me if the only kind of harm was short-term harm.
Now, most harm is short-term, I think.
But everything about this virus... Well, not everything.
A lot about this virus has surprised us.
So if you've got a surprising and engineered virus, is it possible that it could be eating at your systems in a slow way and then either the vaccination or the COVID, because both of them have some long-term, at least hypothetical risk, is it possible that people could be dying at greater numbers in the future only because they had been so degraded by one or both of those things or three or four other things?
Because I think the math still works.
I believe the math works to keep excess deaths even if COVID goes down.
I think it does.
But I wouldn't bet my life on it.
And by the way, the more likely explanation would be exactly the theory that it's the vaccinations.
That's just sort of a logic question, whether there's any scenario in which you could not narrow it down.
But it would definitely be a strong, strong signal that the vaccinations were a problem.
We'll see.
And apparently we won't know for sure for maybe until May.
So I saw this from the ethical skeptic tweets.
You heard about four Americans kidnapped by a cartel in Mexico.
That's war.
That's war.
How many Americans need to be kidnapped by a cartel in Mexico before it's war?
One.
One car full.
I think it was four people.
Somebody says two are dead?
Oh, shit.
Yeah, I figured.
No surprise.
Two are dead.
That's war.
Yep, that's war.
You don't walk away from that.
That's war.
Now, do you think having Vivek Ramaswamy in the race now makes sense?
Yes.
Because he said, go into Mexico.
First, try to work with the Mexican government.
But if that doesn't work, we take care of it ourselves.
Trump also said that.
Trump said it first.
Which I think also raises, you know, Vivek's bid.
So now you have two strong candidates, one of them the one who's leading in the polls, saying war with Mexico.
Like, actually invade.
Just the cartels, not the government.
Yeah.
So, these deaths should be the turning point if we're a serious country.
It should be the reason to vote Republican.
You know all of your other reasons to not vote Republican?
Don't care.
Don't care.
I'm a single issue voter.
If we can't fix this one thing, like what's the point of a government?
You can't do this one thing.
Just give me one thing and I'll vote for you.
Marsha Blackburn, Republican, has an idea on fentanyl.
She wants to increase sanctions on China because that's the source of the precursors.
I think we all know that even if China shut down the precursor business, it'd probably just move to Mexico or someplace else, some other country.
So I'm definitely in favor of this plan, but it's not the end of fentanyl.
It might make a difference.
It might make a big difference, but it wouldn't be the end of fentanyl.
So her idea is to increase the sanctions on China until they shut down their business.
Now the way China games the system is they say, we do make it illegal and if anybody does it we do pick them up and put them in jail.
But the criminals simply change the formula a little bit of the precursors and then it doesn't technically trigger the law.
So as long as the Chinese government allows them to tinker with the formula every time the law is specified, it's like doing nothing.
Right?
China knows how to stop it.
So that's why I'm in favor of sanctions.
But here's what doesn't work.
Doing the sanctions that you haven't announced.
Like, oh, we're going to give you some sanctions because you've done this.
I don't like that.
I like putting it on a schedule.
I like publishing a schedule.
On this day, we're going to do this, if the fentanyl is still coming in, which it will be.
On this day, we're going to do this additional thing.
On this day, we're going to do this additional thing.
And just show them the menu, and you see that by the end, it's full destruction of their economy.
Now, they can go as far down that list as they want to.
As long as we don't stop going.
At some point, they're going to say, you know, after three of the things on this list, I don't want to see number six.
Because this is starting to sting a little bit.
But I think the entire threat is useless unless it's completely mapped out on a schedule.
This is what we're going to do Tuesday.
This is what we're going to do Wednesday.
And then you've got to do it.
No matter how brutal it gets.
The Matt Hancock story.
I don't know that story.
The Matt Hancock story.
Does that ring a bell with anybody?
He's British?
Okay.
Anyway, so that's the start.
Have you heard about, this is like the worst story.
In Iran, for I guess over a year, there have been all these poisoning attacks in girls' schools.
Over 50 schools and more than 400 schoolgirls in 21 provinces across Iran have been poisoned in school.
Like, intentionally.
I guess it's obvious that it's intentional, but they don't know who's doing it.
They assume the best guess is some religious extremist who doesn't like girls' education, which is a pretty good guess.
But I can't even imagine that.
Can you?
It's like it defies imagination.
It's like a level of evil that your brain can't wrap its head around.
So, you know, this is one thing where I guess I can say I agree with the Ayatollah.
The Ayatollah says if they find who's doing it, they're going to execute him.
And I hate to agree with the Ayatollah, but yeah, that would be a big yes.
You need to execute whoever that is.
Wow.
President Xi was getting a little more pointed about the America, no surprise, and he's saying directly in his speeches that the U.S.
is hurting China's economy.
And I don't know how much is the U.S.
hurting it with sanctions, and how much is just the natural situation, but here's some of the bad economic news for China, no surprise.
China's exports fell 7% in the January to February period.
I don't know if that's a big deal.
Could be seasonal.
I don't know what that's about.
Extending a decline from previous months.
Okay, that's even worse.
As global demand weakened and imports dropped 10%.
China's exports to the US plunged 15%.
Of course, the U.S. plunged 15%.
There we go.
Good work, America.
China's exports to the US plunge 15%.
Now, here's something that you wouldn't necessarily know if you're not an economist or you don't study this stuff.
You don't have to take 100% of anything to destroy it.
Things have a breaking point.
And, you know, you don't have to get down to zero exports to America before China's in serious trouble.
15% sounds like a catastrophe to me.
Doesn't it to you?
A 15% decline in exports to the U.S.?
To me, that sounds like a catastrophe.
Like, it's not a end-of-the-economy catastrophe, but what if it hits 25 or 30%?
If it's 30%, it's probably game over.
And we're heading in that direction.
Now, you know, that's always hyperbole too.
Have I ever used any hyperbole before?
Resist the first time.
I think maybe I've possibly done that before.
I have like some vague memory where I've done that before.
But no, it doesn't mean the Chinese are going to collapse, but it would be a serious adjustment they'd have to make if they lost, if U.S.
exports declined 30%.
15 is pretty big.
All right, who would like to hear about my interview last night with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation?
Only available initially on your cable if they carried it, but now it's available on YouTube.
So if you go to my pinned tweet on YouTube today, you'll get a link to the full interview.
And I wanted to talk about it, but also give you a little bit of a sort of a lesson.
Would anybody like a media communication persuasion lesson?
Because it's coming up.
All right.
But first, let's go to the whiteboard.
Here's my overview of what life is like for me in the center of a scandal.
There appear to be two very different worlds.
There's the real world, Like the one when I walk outside?
And everybody I see is kind and happy.
And they have genuine good feelings for other people.
I don't know what your experience is in life, but I don't really run into any ugly people in terms of attitude, not looks.
But almost everybody I encounter in real life Is happy to talk to you if you're happy to talk to them.
They can easily like you.
Very easily.
You just have to be a nice person.
The only problem with the real world is you've got a few Karens.
Am I right?
I'm using that sort of generically for, you know, you always have some bad characters and criminals and whatnot.
But basically, the 99% experience of life, if you don't count that co-worker who's a psychopath, everybody has a co-worker who's a psychopath.
Right?
But, you know, not counting that, most of your interactions are just with cool people having a good time.
And it works across race, age, gender, religion, sexual orientation, you name it.
That's the real world.
But we've been hypnotized into thinking the screen world, I call it the screen world, the thing that's only happening on my screens.
So I'm in the middle of one of the biggest Scandals, dramas, cancellation, whatever you call it, and the entire history of America.
It's one of the big ones.
I don't know what would be the biggest, but I think you'd agree that my cancellation is one of the biggest.
I have no real-world feeling about it.
Like, the penalty went from the screen world over to the real world, and I got cancelled, and so it affects my economics.
My income's down 80%.
If your income goes down 80%, you definitely feel it.
No matter who you are, you definitely feel it.
But the screen world isn't any real people.
There are real people who interact, but everybody turns into their worst self.
In person, people like to put on their best self.
Why wouldn't you?
But on the screen, everybody turns into like a monster.
So you got mostly trolls, bots, grifters, narcissists, white knights, click whores, peacocks, the angry uninformed.
They're my favorite.
We love the angry uninformed.
And then political hacks who are just working for clicks or attention or money.
None of this is real.
I didn't even get cancelled in the real world.
It's just that the cancellation bled into a different world.
Like, usually it doesn't jump.
Usually you can keep the screen world in the screen world.
But it broke out of its... It was like a portal from hell opened.
It was like...
And once the portal from hell connected these two worlds, all hell broke loose.
All right, I gotta draw that.
This has to be immortalized.
If I can reach without pulling my microphones off.
This will be the portal from hell.
Portal from hell.
Alright, so that's sort of the big picture.
Portal from Hell.
Take a good look at that.
It's beautiful.
I think you can tell from this that I'm a professional cartoonist.
Like, I don't like to brag and stuff.
But, I mean, look at this.
It's beautiful.
Can you tell that Karen looks exactly like a human female?
Yeah, yes you can.
Or possibly a stain on a napkin.
It's one of those two things.
I do them both very well.
All right, let's talk about, here's the big picture.
So last night I did one hour for Chris Cuomo, and boy do I appreciate Chris Cuomo.
All right, so I think I told you before, he was one of the people who contacted me, but a lot of people contacted me for interviews and comments, and I said no to almost all of them.
But when he contacted me, it was clear he had done his homework, so he actually understood the full context.
Amazing.
Secondly, he promised he'd be close to a full hour so that I wouldn't be timed out before I made my point.
Thank you.
That's exactly what this required.
So I said yes.
And he delivered.
He totally delivered.
Now, News Nation, I was not totally familiar with, but I think they're trying to... I believe they're trying to frame themselves as the non-crazy news, you know, without the super spin.
There's always a little bit of bias in everything, but I think they're trying to find the middle, and I think they did.
I think they actually found the middle of this story.
So he asked hard questions.
I'll talk in more detail.
I'll give you some media lessons.
So he asked hard questions.
By the way, you can see the link to the full thing in my pinned tweet on Twitter.
He pushed on the hard questions, which is what I wanted him to do, because I don't want to do an interview with a friendly, like somebody who just agrees with me.
That's not really going to move anything, talking to people who agree with me.
Not really a good use of time.
So, I knew that he would push, but I also knew that he knew the full context, and I knew that he'd give me time to say what I wanted to say, and he delivered all three.
So, you know, revise your CNN opinions of Chris Cuomo, because that was a solid contribution to journalism, I think.
My objective was to reframe things and move the window.
So those of you who watched it can either confirm or deny, but those of you who have not watched it and plan to, if you're interested to see these little, let's say, communication techniques that I'm going to talk about, if you want to see them in practice, just watch the video after I explain them.
All right.
So the first thing that, this is like a media lesson too, the first thing you want to avoid if you find yourself in a scandal is going on a show with a four minute hit.
Because they're just going to yell at you for three and a half minutes.
You'll get half a minute to do something that takes 10 minutes and then you'll run out of time.
So that's basically just, you know, inviting you into a trap.
But if somebody says, I'll give you an hour, and it'll be live, and the live part's very important, right?
That's what Chris Cuomo offered was live.
You don't want it recorded, that's the 60 minutes trick, right?
The 60 minutes trick is to say, oh, it's a high respectable thing, you sure want to be on here, and then they can cut the video any way they want.
You've seen a lot of people complain about that, right?
So the first media trick is don't go up to anything that's short.
Don't go to anything that's recorded.
You get that right and you get a chance.
And then also, this is important, you want to pick somebody that the audience will think is going to go at you hard.
That's important.
If it looks too friendly, then you lose all credibility.
You want somebody who genuinely is going to challenge you on whatever allegedly you did wrong.
And Cuomo did that.
All right, so here's what I wanted to do.
Number one, I wanted to put my point of view on record without any of those limitations I just detailed.
Did I do that?
Did I accomplish putting on video one full record of my complete thinking?
Yes, yes.
I was happy with the time he gave me, the questions he asked, and he gave me all the time in the world to fill in a lot of context, which made a difference.
So I got my viewpoint on record.
Did you see anybody disagree with my major reframes, which were the point of the entire offense?
As I described, I intentionally used hyperbole to draw energy toward me to make a point and to reframe the race conversation.
So my objective was just to put out the idea into the universe that a lot of the race-related training from CRT to ESG to DEI, they're all backwards philosophies or backwards strategies.
Nobody in life goes forward by looking backwards.
You can have small gains, like you can make somebody guilty and they'll give you some money in the short run.
But in the long term, no person, no individual, black, white, any other color, no company, no organization, can thrive unless it's focused forward.
If you take a driving lesson, they will teach you to make sure you check your mirrors, Always be aware of history.
Don't forget your history.
Make sure you're really clear on everything that happened, black history, etc.
But your focus has to be on the road.
Am I right?
I'm not ignoring my rearview mirrors.
That would be bad driving.
I'm looking at my history.
I'm looking at what's behind me.
But my focus is straightforward.
Now that was the main thing I wanted to get across.
And that there are a set of tools that can make any individual successful as long as we work together to fix schools, which are completely broken at the moment.
Schools are broken for black kids, white kids, they're just broken, completely.
And so that's the common ground.
If you look forward, you could say to yourself, hey, how can we work together to fix this thing?
If you look backwards, you just argue about who owes who.
I mean, it just can't work.
Take my exact situation.
What I offered was a set of success tools, because a lot of the audience didn't know that I had more impact in the field of personal success.
That's what I write about and teach online, etc.
So I have way more impact on the world, on that domain.
The audience was not aware of that.
But here I am offering a set of tools to make anybody more successful.
And would be especially useful to anybody who's suffering from systemic racism.
Because systemic racism is a real drag on success.
But, if you learn the right tools of success, you can slice through it like a hot steel through butter.
Butter is still a barrier, but if you have a hot rod to stick through it, that was not a sexual reference, it just sounded like it.
Don't stick your hot rod through butter.
You can.
I just don't recommend it.
So, look at my exact situation.
People are mad at me for what I said.
In the future?
Are they mad at me for something I said in the future?
No, that's not possible.
Are they mad at me for something I'm saying right now?
Like in the present?
Nope.
Nope.
They're mad at me for the past.
Now look what you miss if that's your focus.
If your focus is mad at me for the past, does that ignore the fact that I'm the most persuasive person in the realm of personal success, and I've just told you how to be personally successful in a way that is very likely to work for just about everybody.
I'm offering for free.
You don't have to buy my book.
I'll tell you everything you want for free.
Now, somebody's going to buy the book because it's packaged in a way, but that's not the point.
In fact, if you tried to buy my book, you couldn't.
You couldn't buy my books.
Try.
They're all banned at the moment, so I think they're out of stock.
Yeah.
No, so it's not about selling the books.
I'd love to sell some books.
I usually do things for more than one reason.
So if somebody bought my books, that'd be great.
But I will give it all to you for free.
And I do it all the time.
How many times do I describe what's in the book for free on livestream?
So if you look at me as somebody who said something you didn't like in the past, you would be blind to the fact that I just opened up, you know, this trove of useful things that I want to give you for free that absolutely will change your life in a positive way.
Now, if that sounds absurd to anybody who's new to me, I'm going to do an exercise that I often do.
Can I deliver that?
The people who know me, you've been around a while, can I deliver on giving you tools that would make you more successful, based on your own experience?
Can I deliver?
Locals all say yes, because they've watched me the longest.
YouTube, the people who know me, say yes, right?
This is a real asset, right?
All you have to do is remove your past blindness.
Stop looking at the rear view mirror, And look at me, I'm standing in the road right in front of your car with a big barrel of cash.
Who saw it?
In this entire drama, who was able to see me standing in the front of the highway with a big barrel of cash and it was for free?
It's free cash.
Right?
Now that was the frame that I was trying to reframe.
I was trying to reframe from looking at the past, To frame it as looking at the future always works, if you have the right tools.
But also, you need to fix the systemic racism in the schools, because if you don't get the schools right, nothing else works, basically.
I mean, or it's pretty hard.
Alright, so, I believe I put into the world the idea that you should stop pursuing anything that's a backwards-looking strategy for success.
Now, that's called the high ground maneuver, which I discuss as the most powerful persuasion technique.
Literally, no one can disagree with looking forward instead of backwards.
Because if you said it out loud, you would sound stupid.
You would sound stupid.
If you said, you know, I hear what you're saying, Scott, but I really do like focusing on the past.
Nobody can even say that in public, because it sounds so stupid.
Right?
And yet, everybody was doing it.
Not just black people.
Everybody was doing it.
Everybody was focusing on the past.
And when you deal with me, you're focusing on the past, too, if all you can bitch about is something I said in the past.
Recent past.
Recent past.
Still past.
The recent past is still the past.
It's different.
All right.
So that should act like an earworm.
You know how earworms are?
You hear music and you can't get it out of your head?
The people who heard, you should not focus on the past, are going to have a hard time forgetting that.
Would you agree?
It's a reframe that, and this is how reframes work.
One of the magic of reframes is that a good one, you only have to hear once.
Such as, alcohol is poison.
Just thinking of alcohol as poison is a reframe that actually makes it easier to stop drinking.
That's been proven many times.
So, yeah, a good reframe gets in your mind and it can't get out.
And especially if it's a high ground maneuver.
Zero people.
Now, you saw at the end of the, if you watched the Cuomo interview, he brought in a few guests to get a counterpoint, which I thought was good technique.
Now, you could argue that I should have also been on to counterpoint the counterpoint, but at some point, you know, at some point it becomes too much.
So I was happy with that, even not having a response to the responses.
That was fair, because, you know, it's the real world.
But did you see any of the people say that you should have a backwards focus?
Did anybody disagree with my primary purpose and reframe?
I don't think so, right?
So, here are the things that I think we're not focused on.
Did, and you saw, I didn't see the guest talk, I only heard some quotes, so you'll have to fact check me on this.
Did the guests he had on later, I guess it was Dan Abrams and somebody, Eric Dyson, and then another gentleman whose name I can't remember.
Anyway, did any of them accuse me of being a right-wing MAGA or a racist?
Did any of them say that?
No?
No, because once you heard the context, That no longer made sense.
So was I successful, at least in the interview, not in the world, but in the interview, was I successful in reframing myself as not a right-wing crazy?
Yes or no?
Yes.
So that would be a big success, communication-wise, wouldn't it?
Because that would be an objective.
Remember how in the first days of my scandal, everybody was focused on the quality and usefulness of the poll?
The Rasmussen poll?
By the end of me giving the context, was anybody still complaining about depending on the poll, knowing that I didn't depend on the poll?
I don't think they talked about it, did they?
So that would be a successful communication.
How about their focus on, you had to know that there would be trouble?
You know, everybody's been saying the same thing.
You had to know.
You had to know.
And then you suffered the consequence.
Did you see that I agreed with that?
And have from the beginning.
You had to know.
Yeah, of course I knew it was a risk.
It was a calculated risk.
But why did you do it if you had to know?
Well, I was using hyperbole.
But you had to know.
Yes, I had to know.
That's why I did it.
I knew that it would cause trouble.
That's the reason I did it.
But you had to know it would cause trouble.
Okay, how many times do I have to say I knew it would cause trouble before you'll agree with me?
I knew it would cause trouble.
That's why I did it.
Okay, I hear you, but you had to know it would cause trouble.
Yeah, I don't know if you noticed that a lot of the conversations are starting to take that form.
But, yeah, did you notice that?
Right.
So, but then there was, why am I complaining?
Remember people kept saying, why are you complaining?
Because you knew there was, you know, the risk.
And I say, when did I complain?
I've described, but I've never complained once.
I think they accepted that because there's no counterfactual.
Nobody's seen me complain.
I haven't complained privately, believe it or not.
I mean, there's no way to know that.
But even privately, I have not complained.
Because I'm not processing it as a complaint.
Do you know why I don't process it as a complaint?
Guess why?
Why do I not process what I'm doing?
Why don't I feel like I should complain?
Do you know why?
Because I'm not looking at the past.
I'm looking at the future.
And do you know what the future kicked up?
The future just kicked up me as the most prominent voice on an important trend and put me exactly where I wanted to be.
If you had asked me in advance, Scott, this is going to cost you, here's the number, it's going to cost you this many dollars, but you get to be exactly where you are now.
Would you take the deal?
Yup.
Yeah, I would.
I would.
Now, I know that doesn't make sense to a normal person.
And I've never claimed I'm normal.
So I get that you wouldn't make the choice.
I get that.
But I'm pretty comfortable with it.
Pretty comfortable.
Alright, what else?
I made the claim and Chris allowed me to interrupt him to make this point because for a moment it looked like we were going to go to break or something before I made an important point.
I claimed that everyone who understood the context agreed with me.
But for a minute it looked like maybe that point was getting lost and there was some, let's say, disagreement that quote everybody agreed with me.
And then I got a chance.
This is why you want an hour, right?
This is exactly why.
Offering me an hour is exactly the right thing to do.
So I interrupted him because I had time, right?
If I didn't have time, I couldn't have done it.
But I had time to interrupt and say, no, I just want to clarify.
It's only the people who've seen the context who are OK with it.
And I got to really focus on that.
In the end, I think Chris Cuomo disagreed with me being canceled.
I couldn't hear at that point, but I think that happened, right?
If you saw it.
Would you call that a, let's say, a communication goal achieved?
Because if the host actually says you shouldn't be cancelled after hearing the whole context and really listening to it, that's about as good as it gets, right?
Now, I never wanted him to agree with the way I said it.
I never asked him to agree with the hyperbole.
Because the whole point of the hyperbole is that it makes you mad.
Now, if you saw it, there was a point where he asked a really good question.
And I think it was based on a caller's concern.
You know, what do you say to the caller who was hurt?
Like, her feelings were hurt by, you know, my statements.
Under many normal circumstances, that would be a normal apology situation.
But I would, I think I would hold an apology for this world.
Anybody in this world, the real one, who wants an apology, I'd probably give it to them.
I'd probably give it to them.
And I wouldn't even, I don't think I'd hesitate.
If somebody was standing in front of me and said, You know, hey, you made me feel bad.
I'd probably say something like this.
Well, I'm sorry I made you feel bad, but I had a purpose in mind, and all change is painful.
I hope you can get over it, and hey, how about let's not focus on the past?
I've got some really good tools for you that would make you more successful.
Are you interested?
So... Let's see, what else?
So when the...
Oh, let me say that I did have a blind spot, which I think explains a lot.
Here's my blind spot, which I think fills in the biggest mystery.
Because when people said you had to know it would happen, that sounds incomplete, because I say I was surprised that it was that big.
And people say, how can you possibly be surprised that the reaction was that big?
And wouldn't you like to know that?
Why was I surprised that the reaction was that big?
Doesn't that seem like a blind spot?
Because I was surprised.
I was genuinely surprised.
I knew there'd be a reaction.
That was the point.
All right.
Here's why.
It is impossible to sit here and talk to two computer screens and feel my impact on the world.
You can't feel it.
There's a total illusion when you're famous that you're not famous.
Did you know that?
I speculate that one of the reasons that somebody like Michael Jordan talks about himself with a third party, like, Michael Jordan would never do that, or Michael Jordan isn't going to let you lose a game in the last second, like he's a different person.
It's because you're a public person and you're a real person are completely different.
So, did I underestimate my own, let's say, I won't say importance, did I underestimate my impact on other people's minds?
And I think I did.
Or influence, maybe?
Yeah, reach?
Reach, maybe?
So I underestimated my reach and my influence.
Now the reach, of course, was accelerated by the fact that, as I talked about on the show, and I didn't see anybody disagree, that we've monetized outrage.
So I definitely underestimated the effectiveness of the monetization of outrage, because I didn't think they would get to my choke points, right?
I did think some newspapers might bail out, that was a risk, but I didn't think they'd get to my actual distributor.
If you can turn the distributor off, then all the newspapers turn off at the same time, which is what happened.
And the same with my books.
It's not like they had to cancel a book.
They went after the publisher.
And the publisher had my entire backlog of books, plus the new one.
So with one cancellation, they can get my whole catalog of books.
So that's what happened.
Now, I didn't... That was not something I saw coming.
So if you want to call me dumb or say I have a blind spot, because I didn't realize that people cared enough about my opinion... I mean, honestly, I didn't think people cared enough about my opinion.
I really didn't.
That was sort of a surprise.
But I'm not sure they cared about the opinion so much as the outrage machine is so well oiled and everybody gets a payday.
Click, click, click.
Click, click, click.
Everybody gets a payday.
So I think I had not estimated how efficiently the cancellation machine is in February 2023.
So that's on me.
Would you agree?
That's on me.
Because one of the things that people want to say is, you're not taking responsibility.
No, I'm trying to take it as hard as possible.
I'm trying to take as much responsibility as I possibly can.
If there's anything I'm leaving out, remind me, and I'll take that responsibility too.
I'm at 100% responsibility for what I did.
Now, I'm not responsible for the fact That we have a backwards-looking world and there's a cancellation machinery that operates efficiently.
That's for other people to work on.
But I'm completely responsible for any risk management decision I make, if it goes wrong.
And then other people just don't know how to do statistics.
Well, let me get to this point.
So one of the guests who came on, they did some little mind reading.
So one of the guests had two complaints, which he emphasized on Twitter today.
He is surprised that I was baffled by the outcome.
That was his words.
I was baffled by the cancellation.
Does that word fit anything that happened?
Because what I thought happened was, it was a calculated risk, and one of the outcomes was complete cancellation.
Of course it was.
It wasn't my expectation, but of course it was an obvious risk.
And he read my mind, and after all of this, decided that I was baffled that I got cancelled.
Now, baffled is one of those words you use when you don't have an argument.
If you don't have an argument, you read somebody's mind, and then you characterize it in a weird way, and then you criticize your own characterization of the thing you mind-read.
That's called winning the conversation, for me.
If I could give somebody's only best argument to be that they imagined I was baffled, when the evidence suggests exactly the opposite.
But I did have a blind spot, that's true.
But I wasn't baffled that it, you know, that was always a possibility.
Then his other was, he says, he disagrees that I said it was the, quote, only way to fight racism.
Did I say anything like that?
Did anybody hear me say that getting cancelled was the only way to fight racism?
Nothing like that.
So when somebody has to literally make up an opinion for you, assign it to you, and then argue you shouldn't have that opinion, who won the conversation?
That's me winning as hard as you can win.
That's like game over.
All right.
Dan Abrams argued, and keep in mind that he was an attorney, right?
So he's somebody who's really good at arguing and breaking down logic and stuff.
All right, so the guy who is a professional logical communicator had this to say.
He said, I can't have it both ways, claiming that I was using hyperbole, but I was also taking out of context.
So he lawyered me and he said, oh, I found a technical problem with the argument.
You can't use hyperbole, or say you used hyperbole, but also a completely different excuse that you were taken out of context.
To which I say, the hyperbole was the specific sentence.
The context is why I said it.
Yes, Dan Abrams, you can use hyperbole and be taken out of context.
There's absolutely no conflict between those two things.
They work together really well.
Yes, hyperbole.
Yes, also taken out of context.
And that was his best, I think that was his best criticism.
Keep in mind that none of the points I made were involved in the criticism.
Right?
The criticism is that you can't have it both ways.
When obviously you can.
Quite easily.
And it doesn't take much to convince you it's true.
That was the best he had.
He's a lawyer.
He's a smart guy.
He does this for a living.
He does this for a living.
And that was his best take.
That's all he had.
Can I win any harder than that?
Seriously, would it be even possible to win harder than that?
I don't think so.
And then there was some professor guy who somebody said that he was doubting that a qualified black applicant would have an advantage in a big corporation in America that is desperate to increase their diversity.
Did that actually happen?
Did he actually doubt the fact that A qualified black employee would have an advantage in corporate America?
I didn't know that anybody questioned that.
But if there are other people in black America who believe that's true, think of the opportunity that just opened up.
Imagine if that's a common opinion.
And imagine some number of black Americans watch the show.
Because there were a number of call-ins, so I know he's got black watchers, viewers.
So imagine you're a black American, and you heard me say, no, if you get a good education, you're going to actually be at the top of the hiring list.
Imagine you'd never heard that before.
Because I've actually heard other black Americans say that.
They said, no, that's not true.
There's no favoritism in corporate America.
And I have to explain the long story of, It is so true.
It's like the truest thing that's ever been true.
Like, there's no gray area.
This is the truest of all true things.
It just doesn't apply to small companies.
So I think that's where the confusion is.
If your experience is with small companies, yeah, they're probably pretty racist.
So that would be a good strategy to not get a job at the Korean supermarket, right?
Have I ever advised a young black man to get an education and, you know, while he's working through school, go work at the Korean grocery store?
I don't know if they're going to discriminate, but I'd worry about it.
Yeah, go where you have an advantage in bias.
Because the world is going to give you both, you know, bias advantages and bias disadvantages.
Go where you have an advantage, black or white.
Go where you have an advantage.
And that would be corporate America if you're black.
If you're white, start your own business.
If you're a white man in America, I would not get into the corporate world.
You know, unless it's a special case.
You know, it's like all you've lived for all your life or something.
But it's really not the best statistical.
Statistically, it's not your best strategy.
Your best strategy would be start your own business if you can.
All right.
And by the way, that would be a great strategy for black Americans, but a good way to do it is to get some corporate experience and connections and build up some money and stuff and then start a business.
That's not a bad way to do it.
So two ways to do it.
All right.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is my review of it.
If you haven't seen it, go take a look and see if my characterization of it feels fair to you.
Again, big thank you to Chris Cuomo.
I think that was a solid contribution to journalism, frankly.
It's the best thing that's happened so far.
Except HOTEP was great.
The HOTEP Jesus interview, I thought was terrific.
And I'm very appreciative for that.
All right.
Did you learn anything?
Did you learn anything about media communication?
Hope so.
And somebody says no.
There's always a no.
All right, that's all for now.
I'm going to go talk to the locals people privately.
