Episode 2041 Scott Adams: Closing Mexico, J6 Lies, Reparations, A Persuasion Lesson And More
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Governor Newsom's reparations committee
Ward Connelly's Black youth crime solution
Vivek will make all Republican candidates better
Suppressed J6 exculpatory videos
Tucker interviews Tarik Johnson
George Soros and Marxism
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Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of civilization.
Wow, it's good to be alive, isn't it?
Seems like we're in the middle of all this swirling chaos of badness, but maybe that's just our perception.
Maybe things are going great.
Let's talk about that.
But first, we need to prepare our minds.
If you have something at home that will prepare your mind better than coffee, well, go nuts.
But for the rest of us, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine here today.
The thing that makes everything better is called the simultaneous sip.
It's famous around the world.
Eh, maybe a little bit more famous this week.
And it happens now.
Go.
Ah, yeah, that's good.
Savor it.
Savor it.
Well, let's talk about all the things.
There are some funny things and some other things.
I heard it's International Women's Day.
Is that right?
Today?
Or is it like a month or something?
All right.
Well, we'll talk about that.
So I saw a tweet from John Quakes.
He said that as of December 2021, at least according to one source, China is building more nuclear capacity that's already planned than the entire world put together.
And apparently the USA is like this little dot.
How in the world can the United States compete in the future with inferior energy sources?
I'm not positive that what I'm going to say is 100% true, but I'll bet it is.
If I had to bet, I'll bet it's true.
Has any country ever lost a war When they had the most abundant energy sources.
In modern times.
In modern times, the one with the most energy sources wins everything, right?
I think so.
And I would think that nuclear would be a big part of making you a safe country.
Here's the thing, the United States, maybe everybody does wrong, but maybe China does it right, actually, because they have more of a comprehensive view of war.
I've heard, I'm no China expert, but I've heard that China has the concept of total war, You know, the economy is war, influence is war, all that stuff is war.
But in the United States, because of the way we like to lump things and report things, you know, literally the news has somebody who covers the military stuff, and then a different person covers the economy.
Am I right?
The way our news is organized is that the economy is separate from military.
It's just easier to talk about it.
And although it's easier to talk about it, it also gives you a completely misleading idea of what defense is.
Military defense is economy.
Military defense is energy.
Because energy is basically your economy.
That's an oversimplification.
You could call it hyperbole.
I've been known to use it.
But nobody would disagree, who knows anything about the world, that the economy is basically your military.
I mean, it's almost a one-to-one correspondence.
And that energy is pretty much your economy.
So energy is your homeland security.
That's the thing that Trump got right.
Trump was the one who said, you've got to get rid of that pipeline from Russia to Germany, because that's a military problem, essentially.
He's the first one I remember framing it correctly.
I might be wrong.
I was listening to Russell Brand talk about the fact that Blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline was more about economics than any kind of military security.
To which I said, Russell Brand, you can't separate those things.
Now, his point that there might be a, not might, his point that some people would have a purely financial reason for it, For sure.
I mean that's completely right.
Some people in the larger drama would have a purely financial interest.
Surely those people exist.
In power too.
But as soon as you say that you're doing it for one reason, you've really lost You've sort of lost the bigger picture.
The bigger picture is that taking Europe away from dependence on energy from a potential adversary was the smartest security thing you can do, even if it's really expensive.
In the long run, you've got to get your energy under control and not under your adversary's control.
That's just the dumbest thing you could ever do.
I just want to add that frame.
I guess that would be called a reframe.
So instead of thinking that the military and the economy are two separate questions, they're always the same.
And then the third thing is that energy equals economy.
They end up basically being a proxy for the other.
Well, let's challenge your IQs here.
Let's see if you can get the answer before I ask the question.
Go.
There you go, that is the correct answer.
Very good, very good.
This is the only audience that can answer a question accurately, accurately, before the question is asked.
Am I right?
Have you ever seen any audience that can get the answer before the question is asked?
And here was the question.
According to Rasmussen, what was the Congress' approval, let's say in December?
They have an update.
Oh, you're right, 25%.
25%, that's right.
So Congress had a 25% approval in December, but Rasmussen's update is it's up to 28%.
28%.
28%.
That's roughly 25.
So a quarter of the country thinks that Congress is killing it.
Wow, I love Congress.
I like what they're doing now.
Do you ever wonder how that conversation goes?
You know, the conversations we're most used to are smart people talking to each other, because you see them on TV, you see the pundits arguing.
But in the real world, the 25% of the public, the voting public, this is voting public.
Likely voters.
Just to make it a little worse, this isn't the general public.
This is the elite part of the public that votes.
And the 25% of them think Congress is, they're really putting up some good numbers.
Do you wonder how that conversation goes?
Like, well, I feel like it goes like this.
You know, Carl, I've been noticing that Congress has really been killing it lately.
Was that so, Eric?
You know, like what would be an example of that?
Well, there was that time they approved the budget.
Did they approve the budget?
I don't know.
But other things, a lot of other things I did were pretty darn good.
Yeah, a lot of other things.
Pretty darn good.
I feel like it went like that.
Like there wasn't a lot of depth of the conversation.
See what I'm saying?
Not a lot of depth.
There were not layers.
What I'm saying is there were not layers upon layers of complexity.
Probably not.
Alright, well that's good.
Approval of Congress is up.
I am enjoying watching CNN try to give something embarrassing out of the Not personal, but the communications within Fox News about Dominion during the aftermath of the election.
And there are lots of emails that you could consider maybe embarrassing.
I'm not even sure that's the right word.
Because they're being sort of presented as embarrassing, but when I read them, I'm having the opposite conclusion.
Like, they're trying to say, look, they knew the coverage was wrong, and they knew that the election was rigged, but they said otherwise.
And then they show the email, and I read it, and it says, I don't see that.
I see them wanting to serve their audience.
To give their audience the news that the audience is most interested in as citizens of the United States.
Is that nothing?
Is it nothing that there's an enormous audience that has an intense interest in a specific story?
That's not nothing.
Now, even no matter what your personal feelings were, as long as you were talking about the facts, you know, and opinions around facts, I think it's perfectly appropriate to give the audience the news they crave the most.
They're the country.
The audience is the country.
You know, half of it or a third of it or something.
So, like, how is that embarrassing?
But they try to make it.
But here's the newest one.
Apparently Tucker Carlson was reported in some email to somebody else or something that he would be basically glad that Trump was out of the scene because he's sick of reporting on him and that he, quote, passionately hates Trump.
He passionately hates him.
Now, keep in mind that the context was immediately Right in the middle of Trump complaining about the election, which sort of put Fox News in a bad situation.
Now here's the thing.
Is that embarrassing?
Is it embarrassing that maybe the most prominent Fox News opinion person... Let me just finish the reframe here.
Here's my reframe.
Somehow I didn't know that.
I didn't know that.
I watched Tucker Carlson during that entire period, and I did not know that he had a bias against Trump, like a personal bias.
And I guess Tucker went on to say that he hadn't accomplished much.
Now, how is that an insult?
How is that embarrassing?
In what world is it embarrassing that his audience couldn't even tell, and I couldn't tell.
I didn't see a bias.
I thought he reported Trump right down the middle as his opinion matched up with the facts.
I feel like that was almost a compliment.
The fact that the audience couldn't tell That he had a very serious bias.
How do you do better than that?
What's the level above that?
I mean, to me, they just reported he's the pinnacle of objective reporting.
Not objective about his own opinion, because he's an opinion guy, but objective about who was the President of the United States.
I don't know.
To me, that's like worthy of applause.
And that's the best the CNN could come up with.
All right.
I'm going to give you... Oh, and here's another one.
I think they were trying to embarrass Murdoch or something.
Murdoch must have testified.
And I guess the lawyer said, quote, you've never believed that Dominion was involved in an effort to delegitimize and destroy votes for Donald Trump, correct?
That was a Dominion lawyer asking Rupert Murdoch And Murdoch says, quote, I'm open to persuasion, but no, I've never seen it.
Okay, that's why he's rich.
Is that not the perfect answer?
How do you beat that answer?
Am I right?
That is the perfect answer.
See, he starts the answer Yeah, probably assuming that this would get out.
He starts the answer by respecting his audience.
That is respectful of the audience.
I'm open to persuasion.
But I haven't seen the evidence.
You can't beat that.
And they're reporting it like maybe it's a little embarrassing or something.
No.
If Murdoch were my boss, I'd be pretty darn happy about that.
That's a good answer.
This is a persuasion lesson as well.
Saying you're open to persuasion doesn't even say it's necessarily going to be facts that change people's minds.
That's like the highest level you can talk about.
It's like, we can be persuaded, but I haven't seen anything that persuades me.
What a perfect answer that is!
That's the way you should answer questions like that.
Respect who you need to respect, Say you're open-minded, talk about the evidence.
Can't beat it.
Alright, here's your next persuasion lesson.
This one comes to us courtesy of Newsom.
Governor Gavin Newsom in California.
Now, I've talked about this before, but I'm going to add a little flavor to it.
So, apparently there's a So, as you know, reparations is a big question, and Gavin Newsom told the people interested in reparations to form a little committee and come back with a recommendation.
Now, I've told you already that that's a brilliant way for any bureaucracy, or any boss, to make an idea go away without saying no.
You just make them go away into a committee.
Alright, so that's the first persuasion lesson, but I'm going to go deeper.
So, if the only thing that Gavin Newsom did was tell the reparations people, yeah, I'm open to persuasion.
I'm open to persuasion.
Right?
Just like Rupert Murdoch.
I'm open to persuasion.
Can you go show me the facts?
You know, give me something I can say yes or no to.
See?
That's good technique.
He's respecting his public, saying, You know, go form a committee, and they're like, yes, finally we're being taken seriously.
Good technique.
But here's the brilliant part.
It's not just about the fact that it will die in bureaucracy and in fighting.
It's about the fact that in the end, they have to put it in writing.
They have to put it in writing.
Here's your persuasion lesson.
If somebody has an idea that just doesn't hang together and couldn't possibly work.
And I think reparations is one of those.
No matter what you think about the morality of it, as a practical matter, We're way beyond the way that you could insert that into current society and not cause a revolution or something.
I mean, it can't work.
You also can't price it.
You can't figure out who should get it.
You can't figure out who should not get it.
So here's what I would do if I were in charge of this and I wanted to persuade it out of existence.
I would respect my audience.
And I'd say, all right, you have a moral argument, and it's not unlike reparations that have been paid for other things in the past.
So that would be respecting the audience.
There are people who care about it.
You've got a moral argument.
It's not unlike things we've talked about before.
Let's talk about it.
But then I would go further and say, you need to come up with a number But because this is so racially charged, you need to break it down by race, not just in terms of who would receive it, but how the tax burden would be distributed.
So I'd like to know, for example, if you're recommending, I think they went from recommending $220,000 per black Californian, they've upped that to $360,000 per black Californian.
And keep in mind there was no slavery in California, by the way.
But that doesn't mean that people didn't come from places where there were.
Here's how I would ask them to do it.
I'd say, I want you to come up with a number, let's say that's 360,000, figure out how much that is per year, what that does to the budget, and then figure out what each ethnic group will be contributing to it.
So you'd say, OK, white people, you make a lot of money.
So you'd be paying, I don't know, 40% of it, 60%.
And it'd be like, Hispanic Americans, this would be your share.
And then Asian Americans, here's how much you're going to pay for black reparations.
And then you publish it.
And you say, here's the recommendation from our reparations group.
And then you let the public do the rest.
All you have to do is ask somebody to write it down.
Just write it down.
And if they don't write down, you know, of course they would leave out anything embarrassing to their case.
You just say, all right, you know, you've got to do both the pros and the cons.
I don't want to put the cons on top of your idea.
You're the experts.
So give us both the pros and the cons.
Tell us who benefits, what it costs, who's paying, and just really map out some details here.
So it might come out that the average Hispanic immigrant who came across the border on Tuesday would maybe be on the hook for some of those reparations too.
And then you'd have to deal specifically with what about people who live here but are not residents?
What about that?
What if somebody is not a resident of California but they do live here?
You know, they might not have changed the residency yet.
Do they get paid?
Because if they do, then what about people who move here just temporarily to get some reparations?
Do they get some reparations?
How about that?
So, you simply ask the people to describe their plan in a little more detail.
Make sure that they've got the pros and the cons, so there's an argument in both.
But here's the argument you would be sure to ask them to include, and I saw this today.
Equal Opportunity Activist Ward Carnley.
He was at some California board, and he got up and he spoke and he said that there's only one way to stop all the crime, and that's to... He said, there's only one thing that would stop our children from busting into these liquor stores.
There's only one thing that would stop our kids from busting into these jewelry stores, stealing watches and jewelry, and that's reparations.
So I would say make sure you include that argument like right up in the summary.
You want to put that right up top?
And not only that but I would highlight this and have you ever heard me say embrace and amplify?
I would embrace this And that would amplify it.
Because there might be a lot of other places we could use this concept of paying large amounts of money to criminals so that they'll be disincented from a crime.
There's a word for that.
So there's a word for that.
What's the word for when you pay somebody money not to do something bad to you?
What's it?
Oh, extortion.
Extortion.
Right.
So the plan here is to sort of morph from the crimes which none of us want.
I mean, none of us want anybody breaking into jewelry stores and liquor stores and stuff.
We'd like that then.
But if we could just convert that into more of an extortion kind of a model, that might be something that we could use in other ways.
For example, We keep talking about using the military in Mexico, but that was before I heard this idea.
We probably could just pay the cartels not to do crimes.
Now, it would be more expensive, but so is war.
So is war.
So why don't we use the Ward-Carnley idea of paying reparations to black Californians as a way to stop the attacks on stores?
Because once they had some money, they would have no reason to do it.
So, sort of, one plus one equals two.
Basic logic.
But you could just extend that to all crime, really.
Why would we stop it there?
One of the things I like is if you try something small and it works, hey, let's pay criminals extortion so they don't rob us.
And we should just get rid of prisons.
There is some amount of money, if we save all that prison money, we'll just give all of our money to the criminals, and then they're gonna let us go.
And I think that would be one way to defund police, is just pay the criminals directly until they have no reason to rob a liquor store.
Now they still might rob a liquor store, because it's easier than taking out your wallet.
And apparently there's no penalty for it.
So it might, you know, the convenience factor still has to be factored in, because it might be just more convenient to pick up the liquor and just walk directly out the door.
Especially if there's like one or two people in line, don't you hate that?
Like you want to pay for something, you plan to pay for it, but there's two people in line and you're like, eh, what time is it?
I want to get and drink my liquor.
Just cut the line, walk out the door.
We don't have law in California.
So that would be a good idea.
But anyway, the point is that all of that should be in the reparations recommendation.
Because you don't want people to think you didn't think it through.
People need to think you thought it through.
So that's your persuasion tip for today.
Also, There's a big unreported thing.
I'm a little bit disgusted with all of the videos that we see that are sort of lopsided race-wise, especially in Fox News and on the right side of social media.
You see a lot of videos of, it seems like they're focusing only on the few videos of black people hitting non-black people, white or Asian American or stuff like that.
If you think about all the videos that they're suppressing, it really makes you wonder about these algorithms.
For example, I've never seen a video of an Orthodox Jew beating up a black person.
You know they exist, but it's probably an algorithm thing.
So, the other thing is, when I watch those videos, I always have the same feeling.
Do you?
And I know we get so biased because it's only one type we're seeing.
It's just one type we're seeing, one type, one type.
And there's no way that doesn't affect your brain and make you more biased.
And when I watch them, I just think the same thing every time.
Whoever talks about all the hand injuries to the attackers.
Every time I see one of them, I see people using their bare hands and punching people into these hard skulls.
And they're usually hitting, like, the hardest part of the body.
They're not even hitting soft parts.
Like, the soft parts are usually using their boots.
But they're hitting bare-handed.
There's a reason that boxers wear those big gloves.
Did you know that?
That's, like, to protect their hands.
And they're professionals.
Professional boxers are protecting their hands with these big things, so if you're an amateur and you just sort of spontaneously get into one of these fights, there have to be a lot of hand injuries.
And nobody's talking about that.
Nobody's talking about that.
So, I thought we should talk about that.
Alright, Vivek, here's some Vivek Ramaswamy persuasion about January 6th.
So he's using an analogy here.
He says, if you're prosecuted for an alleged bank robbery, you get to see all the video footage of what happened.
Not just the time your face is caught on camera at the site.
That's basic constitutional law and criminal procedure.
No one should ever be convicted of a crime without seeing all potential exculpatory evidence.
This is not a right wing or a left wing issue.
Justice demands it.
High ground, high ground maneuver.
That's the high ground maneuver.
Yeah.
So I love the fact that he changes the frame to Really a constitutional thing that every person would agree with, basically.
Literally nobody would disagree, right?
The thing that makes it a high ground maneuver is that there is no argument against it.
Did you notice that?
See, there are tons of professional politicians who will make an argument when there's an argument against it.
Now sometimes you can't avoid that, right?
But if you have a choice, And you can make your argument in a way that nobody can argue.
Well, that's the best you can do.
You can't beat that.
Like, by definition.
You can't beat something that just shuts everybody down.
Who exactly is going to argue that the accused should not have access to the evidence?
Most basic thing in America, right?
Can't get more basic than that.
So yeah, that's what Ramaswamy brings to the game, and I think he's going to make all of the Republicans better.
Because he, once again, once again, this is like, how many times have we seen it?
He set the standard for how to talk about it.
And I think that Republicans have done a poor job in the past in finding frames that are the high ground.
They go to the partisan stuff.
Now the partisan stuff is how you win stuff in the past, but nobody's ever tried to use a high ground where everybody could be happy.
Politicians typically don't know how to do it.
It's actually a rare skill.
So if you think this is an accident, This isn't an accident.
Ramaswamy actually knows how to do this.
You know who else was good at it?
For a while.
Obama was good at it for a while.
He got a little more partisan, but for a while he was good at it.
All right, so Tucker talked to a security guard who was working on the January 6th day, and everything about January 6th is disgusting.
Am I right?
Like, everything about it is not just wrong or inaccurate, not just fake news, not partisan.
It's disgusting.
It's just disgusting.
And I'd have to say, that should be the one thing we can agree on, right?
Left and right.
That everything about this is just disgusting.
How happy am I that violent people, there were some violent people, right?
We don't know the percentage.
How happy am I that people that I would have identified as roughly on my team at the time, and they go and ruin things for all of us?
I'm disgusted by that.
The violence.
Disgusted.
Violence is bad enough.
All violence is terrible.
But this is violent and disgusting.
The way the news treated it is disgusting.
The way Congress did their special hearing, at least some part of it was total bullshit, is disgusting.
They were sending Americans to jail knowing that they were, apparently, if you were to take the current reporting at face value, it does look like There's a good argument for evidence was withheld.
I mean, I guess that's a fact, right?
I think we could say it's a fact that the defendants did not have access to this video.
So that's just a fact, right?
That's not an opinion.
So that's the end of the story.
That should be the end of the story, right?
Why in the world Is anybody keeping these people in jail?
At this point, whether or not they committed a crime can't be the question.
We cannot reframe this as, did they commit a crime?
And again, I'm only talking about the non-violent ones.
Everybody understands that, right?
100% of us, I think, oppose the violence, whether you're left or right, close to 100% of us.
But the left wants to make it Whatever the violence is, characterize the entire thing, which is totally disgusting.
That's disgusting.
But it might be no more disgusting than the right characterized Black Lives Matter.
So here's a question for you, the question of the day.
What percentage of a crowd of protesters would have to be violent and or destroying property, let's say, before you would say it's a violent protest?
What percent of actual participants are violent?
Because it doesn't need to be that big.
And I think this is where the bias comes in.
I think if you're on the right, and you see Black Lives Matter, and 1% of them are violent, it's going to feel like 30%, because that's what was on the news.
And you're going to say, that's too much.
But you wouldn't know what percentage it was.
I have no idea.
If you said, Scott, Gun to your head, you must come up with an estimate of what percentage of the Black Lives Matter rioters were actually destroying things or violent.
And I'd have to say, first of all, I have no idea.
Do you?
Like, I couldn't even guess.
If you put the gun to my head, I'd say 1%.
say 1% gun to head 1% and that's a that's maybe something in that in that neighborhood if we round if If you round, it's probably around 1% for these protesters as well.
What would you say?
Some are saying as high as 25% for Black Lives Matter.
If 25% of those crowds were violent and destroying things, the rate of destruction would be way beyond what we've seen, I think.
But that's without data.
That's just sort of living in the world.
It has that feeling about it.
You know what I mean?
Sort of my collective experience of the world says that if 25% of those crowds were destroying things, there would be no cities left.
I think it's 1%, but I don't know.
So before you decide that Black Lives Matter was or was not violent in their protests, Or the January Sixers were or were not violent.
You're going to have to figure out what percentage you would say makes them violent.
And then also it would be fair if you treated both sides roughly the same.
That would be fair.
In your thinking it would be fair.
So I'd love to know that.
Anyway.
So Tucker talks to the security guard and it's important to the story that, you know, he was a black guy.
He's a Biden voter.
Biden voter.
And the way he was treated is disgusting.
Now, we may be missing some facts, but the facts that are reported based on his story is that he was there that day.
He was a Capitol Police guy.
He says they were not informed that the protest was going to be as big as it was, so he thought that his management failed him for reasons he doesn't know.
And what happened was, he says, that as he was walking through the crowd, somebody put a MAGA hat on his head.
And he quickly realized that that was the safest thing he could do, to walk through the crowd.
He must have still had his uniform on, but once he had the MAGA hat on, and he's black, right?
So if you see a black guy in a Capitol uniform with a MAGA hat in the middle of the protest, I'm guessing that makes you completely safe.
Would you agree?
Like, that hat would be like a force field.
So he puts on this hat in the middle of this dangerous chaos, very unpredictable, dangerous chaos, and violence was happening.
He puts on the hat to keep himself safe.
Clearly not a supporter.
Clearly not a supporter.
Just thinking fast and being smart.
I can't describe that any way other than smart.
That's the only description.
He got fired for it.
He got fired.
Because there's a picture taken of him in the hat.
And then he wasn't interviewed by the January 6th people.
I think, oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah, I'm getting the story a little bit wrong.
Somebody's correcting me here.
He was put on some kind of leave indefinitely, and then he quit during the leave, which lost his pension or something like that.
Suspended.
Suspended.
Put on leave.
Something like that.
Yeah.
So basically he got a penalty for doing a smart thing.
And I don't know if there's a counter-argument.
I just feel like everybody turned into a turd at the same day.
Like the press, you know, everybody talking about it practically.
We all turned bad one way or another.
But it's like everything was bad from top to bottom.
Like it was this moment of You know, just extraordinary disgusting ugliness that swept over everybody for a little while.
It was like a mass hysteria that took too many people in.
I'd just like to forget the whole thing.
Yeah, I guess we can't forget it.
We have to figure out what happened.
But the faster we get past that, the better.
All right.
Of all the many terrible things, this one bothered me the most because he got punished for doing something smart.
Like, let's just...
That hurts my head so hard.
As the creator of the Dilbert comic, that's right in my feels.
I hate that.
All right, and then I guess there's video now, Tucker asked, that the narrative about Brian Sicknick by some people, and I don't know who had it right and who had it wrong in the media, was wrong.
I feel as if the media was a little more accurate that he was not killed by the protesters.
But I feel that the politicians kept conflating his death as if the protesters did it.
Does that feel right to you?
New York Times tells a fake story.
So on Twitter there was a community notes put up on a tweet that said the Washington Post and I think somebody else, Reuters maybe, reported it correctly.
Which would mean some of the media got it right.
But I haven't confirmed that.
My best guess is that the media, some got it right, some got it wrong, and as long as some of the media got it wrong, that gave the politicians cover to intentionally get it wrong.
I think that's what happened.
Now, what do you think of that?
Now, I don't mind so much that the media got a story wrong, because you have to live in a world where stories are wrong sometimes.
Case in point.
I don't know, this is just hideous.
Hideous behavior by Congress.
They should be in jail.
The January 6th people who perpetrated this hoax.
I'm going to call it a hoax because they left out They did not provide the exculpatory or potentially exculpatory.
I think with the QAnon Shaman, the video is highly exculpatory.
Highly.
I don't know how much it is for the other people, but at least a little bit probably.
So yeah, this is just disgusting.
Alright, so I'm revising my opinion about the The cartel violence on a car of four Americans who went into Mexico.
Some cartel shot him up, killed two, tragically.
My first thing was that they knew they were Americans.
So in the initial reporting, I felt like they knew they were Americans and they took them hostage.
That didn't happen.
It looks like they were mistaken for a Haitian gang.
Looks like they were black, so they mistook them.
They might have avoided Maybe avoided a checkpoint after they went through or something.
So there's something that didn't look right and the cartel guards who apparently there's two checkpoints.
You get across the border legally and then as soon as you're over the cartel checks you a second time.
Did you know that?
Did you know that the cartel has its own its own guard post at the border?
Yeah.
If you didn't know that.
So This is the sort of thing that might spark a war, but my take was if they would brazenly kidnap Americans, you just have to turn up the heat to 100.
Not 100, but you got to turn it up to laser quality.
But apparently they did not.
However, there do seem to be lots of actual other American kidnapping cases.
They're probably cartel cases too.
So I wouldn't make my case for attacking Mexico based on this event, as tragic as it was.
But it does make everybody's brains think in a more aggressive fashion, I think.
So Lindsey Graham's getting serious about this now.
The Congress seems to be changing.
But I was watching The Five yesterday, and they had a graphic about how many cities in the US the cartels have already set up shop.
Don't ever look at that graphic if you have a choice.
It will mess up your brain.
I don't know the real size of the problem, because it could be, you know, five people in a city count as MS-13 or something.
I don't know what it takes to count as having a foothold.
But it's a lot of cities.
It looked like a hundred cities.
It's taken like the bottom two-thirds of the country, basically.
And... Yeah, but I don't know if they're influencing the police departments yet.
Presumably, if they grow, they would.
You know, there's some rumor that they're taking over from other gangs.
I don't know the extent of that.
But it's... I think the country's getting pretty serious about doing something about it for a change.
However, I do take counsel from Geraldo Rivera, Who sounds like he's anti-using military in Mexico.
And here's the argument against it.
Wars never work and they never end.
So that would be the argument against it.
It's just another way for the military-industrial complex to make money.
It'll never end and it'll never work.
Now, that's not terrible.
That's not a terrible opinion.
I actually found myself persuaded because there's such a long history of wars not working.
For America, anyway.
And so I think you have to take that seriously.
However, as Greg Gottfeld pointed out on the same show, they're killing 100,000 a year now.
How much worse could it be?
Would it be worse?
I don't know.
It might be worse in a different way, because you'd expect some pushback.
But I don't know.
My instinct is that if you do nothing, the 100,000 gets bigger.
And it's already, you know, completely out of any reasonable range of tolerance.
I mean, it's so far away from anything you would tolerate.
But, let's consider the alternative.
Full legalization.
Would that just make the cartels own a legal business?
And that's the only change?
They would just figure a way to make it legal and then they'd still be a business?
Or would it only work if the government provided the drugs for free?
Or at the same price, let's say?
Could you drive the cartels out of business by taking away their source?
The trouble is we only have ideas that can't work.
So here are the three ideas that can't work.
Do nothing.
That can't work.
Go to war.
It might work, but the odds are not as good as you'd like.
Or legalize it, which would probably in the short run cause way more deaths, but it would put the cartels out of business after we've addicted more people.
I don't know.
You know, does the supply and demand actually cause more people to be addicted if it's easier and safer to get?
Or is it just that the people who want to be addicted already have access and it wouldn't make any difference at all?
So, it feels like every path doesn't work.
Doesn't it?
It just feels like all of them don't work.
But doing nothing seems like the dumbest.
You know, if the war makes it worse, I suppose we can stop doing it, but we never do.
So, I don't know.
I'd be tempted to annex Mexico.
I mean, I suppose you could try getting permission to use special forces and stuff, but I don't know.
Would that make any difference?
We'll see.
I think military is inevitable at this point.
Here's what the world needs.
The world needs what I call a Zoom government, or a government in a box, for situations in which a government would be temporarily without a government, usually because of a war or revolution or something.
So, wouldn't it be good, and I'll just use the Swiss as my universal neutral country.
Imagine you had a Swiss entity that was organized as already a government.
And they would go in and they would act as a government for a six-month period for any country that temporarily didn't have one.
They would be, let's say, under UN supervision, something like that.
You know, just so there's a little bit of credibility.
But the deal is, they have to leave in six months.
They have to.
There's just no option.
Gotta leave in six months.
Even if they haven't fixed anything.
Right?
Even if they haven't fixed anything.
Because if you can't get something going in six months, probably you never will.
So, I think we need something like that.
I saw a bunch of people yelling, no, what's the argument against it?
You could make it an international group.
Just people who are just safe, competent, maybe they're older, it'd be good if they're older so they don't want to stay there forever.
They just take over for a while, keep the lights on, and then you phase them out willingly.
If they're well paid, it would be not too big of a risk that they would try to stay.
And I don't think that a foreign power could control the military very easily, right?
So I wouldn't worry about the government in a box coming in and then taking over the country, because they wouldn't have the loyalty of the military.
The military, at best, would say, all right, we've got a problem here.
See if you can work it out in the next six months and then turn it back over to us.
Economic collapse?
Well, it would be better than no government at all.
Let's check in on the Biden competency for handling this Mexico fentanyl problem and MS-13.
To check competency, we'll check in with Jean-Pierre.
See what she said, spokesperson.
She said that fentanyl is currently at historic lows, historic levels under the Biden presidency.
So the Biden administration, according to the spokesperson, can't tell the difference between how much they catch and how much is getting in.
They actually can't tell the difference between measuring how much you catch and knowing how much actually got in that you didn't catch.
As if they can't tell the difference.
And that's who's in charge of the Now, if you say to me, Scott, Scott, that's the spokesperson.
That's just the spokesperson.
She sometimes has a gaffe.
She's been saying this for a long time.
It wasn't just yesterday.
Am I right?
She's been saying the same thing for a long time.
They act as though they're not just lying that they can't tell the difference.
That they actually can't tell the difference.
Like actually.
That's what it looks like.
I mean, you could say, yeah, it's just spin, but it doesn't look like it.
It looks like they can't tell the difference.
All right.
No, no, I don't want to read her mind.
Maybe she can't tell the difference.
That would be even worse.
Has anybody seen this new beauty filter on TikTok?
Where all you do is turn on the filter and in real time, you look like a beautiful version of yourself.
It's scary.
Oh, and there's a pedo one where a man could be a beautiful woman and stuff like that, right?
So basically you can turn into anything and you can't tell anymore.
What's different about it is you can't tell.
You actually can't tell.
And there's like good news and bad news.
The good news is I'm going to look a lot younger in about a year.
Because it seems to me that Zoom and all of these services, at the very least, they would have a make-up option.
Am I right?
So there's somebody like me who doesn't want to put make-up on to do a live stream.
I would just hit a button and it would just give me a look as if I had TV make-up on.
And you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
There wouldn't be any pixels floating or anything.
It would just look exactly like me, but better.
And I could make myself younger.
I can remove wrinkles.
Anything I want, apparently.
So, what's that going to do to podcasting when you're looking at somebody who's a perfect reproduction, but the better version?
I guess you could argue that's what movies and TV have always been, right?
If you see the real movie star, they don't quite look like they look in the movies.
Although, I heard one exception.
I heard one exception to that.
So when Angelina Jolie was in her, let's say, movie-making prime, I don't want to say her prime, I'll say her movie career prime.
Did you see how cleverly I danced around that?
Don Lemon.
Take a lesson, Don Lemon.
So when she was in her movie-making prime, I was photographed by somebody who had just photographed her, not too long ago.
So, and I asked him about that.
Apparently she, I think she showed up alone.
Like at sort of the height of her fame.
She showed up to a photo shoot alone.
Didn't need anybody.
And he said that she was the most like stunning person in person he'd ever seen.
So, apparently her movie charisma perfectly translated into a one-on-one private situation.
He couldn't stop talking about what it was like to be in the same room.
And he was a celebrity photographer, so he'd done all the actresses and models and stuff.
But she was the one he said, yeah, it's the same in the room.
That was interesting.
Here's a thing that I just figured out today.
And maybe some of you already knew this.
Forever I've been asking you, what's the deal with everybody hating Soros?
Right?
And everybody gets mad at me.
But people wouldn't explain why.
Now, of course, there's the vague, you know, Jewish thing.
So I think, oh, it's anti-Semitic, right?
It's just an anti-Semitic trope.
But I couldn't get any more Knowledge or information about where it comes from, why him specifically, what's his business.
And I finally went down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole to figure out what's going on.
How many of you knew the following thing?
That when, not everybody, right?
Most of my generalizations are not everybody.
But when people on the right, not all the people on the right, Some of the people on the right.
When they talk about Marxism, they're really talking about Jewish people trying to take over the world.
Do I have that right?
But nobody's willing to say that out loud.
That's the conspiracy theory, right?
That from some document, I'm not going to name, from like 1920, there was a fake document that said that Marxism was really a cover for some kind of Jewish takeover of the world.
Now, is that why you're trying to not tell me?
Because you don't want to say that out loud?
By the way, there's no evidence of that.
It would be crazy.
Now let me tell you, if there's anybody on here, there are a few yeses.
Most of you are saying no.
But there are some yeses.
So just look at the other comments.
There are some yeses.
That means that some people were aware of this.
I just heard this theory yesterday, actually.
And finally pieced it together.
So, I was always confused why people would use the word Marxist.
Do you know why?
Because I don't think it's a persuasive word.
And I kept wondering, why does everybody say, you know, she's a Marxist, they're a Marxist, BLM is a Marxist.
I never understood it.
Because if you're calling somebody a Marxist, when I hear that I go, is it a different economic theory?
Like, why are you using that word?
So I just wondered how much of an anti-Semitic variable is built into that when people use that word.
Because I don't think I'd ever use that word.
There's something going on.
So here's my take on conspiracy theories.
Here's how to tell what is not a conspiracy theory.
When too many people are allegedly involved.
That's never a conspiracy theory.
Never.
Never.
This is never a conspiracy theory.
So this whole worldwide Marxist, it's really a Jewish plan to take over the world, imagines that there's plotters everywhere and nobody's talking about it, but they're all connected.
That's never a thing.
That is never a thing.
I guarantee you that's not a thing.
But if you told me that 50 Intel people who knew each other signed a document and conspired to lie about Hunter's laptop, I'd say, 50's a lot.
But if they were all Intel people who knew each other, I could see that.
So that's not too many people, given that they're Intel people who know each other.
But as soon as you say worldwide, like that, There's nothing like that.
Nobody can maintain a worldwide, you know, hundred year plan.
Now, that doesn't mean that there's nobody who ever said it, you know, a hundred years ago.
It doesn't mean there aren't people who, you know, actually have that belief.
But, there's somebody who has every belief.
So, I feel like the whole, we don't like Marxism thing, Even if it's the exact correct word, it's not persuasive.
And it has this tinge of the anti-Semitism on it that doesn't seem persuasive.
Like, why would you use a word that's already slimed by anti-Semitism?
You wouldn't want to use that word.
It's not persuasive.
So, I don't know what the alternative is, because Marxism covers like a description of a larger thing, but not Marxism.
Let me speculate a few things.
If you changed it to systems over goals, it gets closer.
Like marriage, having a traditional family is a system, isn't it?
Whereas Marxism might have a goal of everybody being treated equally.
Free markets are a system.
Whereas Marxism, you know, of course both have systems, but Marxism is goal-oriented, like to get to a place where, I don't know, the government controls everybody, if you have that point of view, or get to a place where everybody's equal, or something like that.
So instead of Marxism versus, I don't know, free markets or capitalism, I would go with something like systems that work and systems that don't.
And the ones that don't are always the same reason.
The systems that don't are either focused backwards, you know, my big point of the week, they're either backwards looking at victimization, or they don't take into account incentives.
So, you know, you could almost say systems with incentives versus systems without.
You could say people who have systems that are well designed versus systems that are designed to fail.
Maybe that's the way to go.
We favor systems that are designed to work and have always worked.
They're based on human incentives and everybody getting a fair access.
Fair access.
That's a system that works.
A system that doesn't work is removing incentives.
Maybe there's another way to say that.
But here's my big persuasion thing.
As long as Republicans and conservatives are using the word Marxist, they are, on a scale of 1 to 10, their persuasion is a 1.
That's my opinion.
A scale of 1 to 10, saying Marxists, they're all Marxists, on a 1 to 10, that's just a 1.
It's probably hurting you more than it's helping you.
It's so bad.
But there have to be better ways to do that.
The story about Musk mocking a disabled employee.
Do you believe that happened?
Do you believe that headline?
Musk mocked a disabled employee.
Is your first instinct that that's exactly right and there's no context that needs to be added?
Would it change your mind if you knew that Musk had no idea that the person was disabled, nor did anybody else, because they had the conversation in public on Twitter?
He found out later.
And when he found out later, and he also made some other assumptions about the guy, he apologized in public.
And people were saying, how dare you be so insulting to the disabled guy?
My God.
Here's my standard for behavior.
Do I judge people by making mistakes?
Nope.
I never have, because everybody makes mistakes.
That's a ridiculous standard.
This is a reframe as well.
Judging people by their mistakes, and this is in the book that just got unpublished, making mistakes is what everybody does.
I try as hard as possible not to judge people by their mistakes, but rather to judge them by how they handle their mistake.
Because that's more thought is put into it and more character is exhibited.
So Musk learned what the real facts were and apologized in a completely adequate way, in my opinion.
That's as good as it gets.
Again, he's being criticized for behavior that nobody condones a mistake, it's just It's kind of dickish to condemn it.
It's not so out of range of things that we've all done and thought, oh, I better go fix that.
It's not like he ate a baby or something.
So it was pretty funny.
I like that he defaults to the funniest approach to everything.
No, you.
I feel like part of Elon Musk's operating system is that if there are two things you can do, and they look sort of equally risky in terms of risk and reward, then he'll always take the funny one.
And I think he said something that suggests maybe that's actually in his mind.
All right.
I saw a good theory today that some person who had inside knowledge about Putin Putin has a young mistress who's basically like a wife and has kids or kid.
I think kids.
And so he has a young family.
And he has, you know, great mansions and everything he wants.
And so the argument is he's not crazy.
So the odds of him not launching a nuclear war, which would kill his young family, I saw pictures of him looking at the woman who's apparently confirmed as his mistress.
He looks in love.
Like the way he's looking in the pictures is that look like, I'm not gonna lose this.
And she's not like, I mean, she just looks like somebody who had a genuine connection with him, just based on a few photographs.
So, that's a pretty good argument, and that was the argument that I made, without the details, that it wouldn't be rational for him to start a nuclear war.
It would never be good.
For him, personally.
Alright, the problem with statistics.
Do you know why statistics is even a thing that people have to learn, depending on their career?
Why was statistics even invented?
Well, let me answer that question for you.
It's because our common sense fools us routinely.
Common sense is so opposite of what statistical truth is that we end up getting in... You saw it in the last week without getting into details again.
There was a bunch of argument about whether a poll was accurate or not.
The people who criticized the poll said, oh, it's such a small sample, therefore it cannot tell us anything.
And then I would say, well, it only has an 8% margin of error, even at that small number, assuming that the sample was collected appropriately.
And I would just get stunned silence, because 8% wouldn't have changed any conclusion from it.
That's not obvious.
And what people would say is, how could 130 people represent 100 million people?
And I would sort of have to just hold my tongue, because I wanted to answer sarcastically.
How can a small sample represent a large population?
That's called statistics and polling, and that's exactly the description of it.
And then the confidence interval tells you how confident you should be based on how small your size is.
So really, really basic stuff people don't know about statistics.
This brings me to Charles Barkley disagreeing with a, let's see, ESPN commentator named Kendrick Perkins.
And Kendrick Perkins suggested that there was racial bias in the MVP votes because since 1990, the only people who won MVP without being in the top 10 of scoring, now that sounds a little suspicious on the surface, doesn't it?
That somebody could be the MVP of the entire league ever and not be in the top ten of scoring.
Doesn't that sound suspicious to you?
And the only time it's ever happened is with three white players.
But honestly, you don't think that scoring would be sort of five to one of importance compared to all of the other things?
Because remember, it's fans voting, right?
Or no.
Is it fans voting or Is it the professionals voting?
Who votes for the MVP?
Oh, fans and the press?
Who covers it?
So sports writers?
No fans.
I'm getting mixed messages here.
Sports writers.
So we think it's sports writers who do it.
Okay.
So when it seems suspicious to you, that the only three times that they weren't in the top ten of scoring, they were all white guys.
And there's another one that's up for it, I guess, or won it.
And then Barclay says, you can't tell me, because the numbers don't make sense, does he know how many vote...
Does he know how many voters are white, actually?
Or did he pull 80% of that out of his ass?
So I guess Kendrick must have said 80% of the voters on that are white.
My point is if only five white guys have won MVP in the last 30 years, that makes zero sense.
His argument, zero sense.
Because if that was the case, we'd have a lot more white MVPs.
Wouldn't the numbers be way, way worse?
So Barkley's sort of statistical instinct is that if 80% of the voters were white, and racial bias is in it, that That we'd see, like, mostly white winners.
Does that make sense to you?
That makes sense to you?
Neither of these arguments make any damn sense.
Neither side makes any sense, right?
Because neither of them have any data.
Neither of them have any data.
And if they did, would the data tell you anything?
Probably not.
Let me tell you why the data wouldn't tell you anything.
And I'm gonna surprise you, I'm gonna side with Kendrick Perkins.
I'm not gonna side with Barclay.
I like what Barclay's doing.
I think what Barclay's doing is trying to just take race out of it, which I love, which is why Charles Barclay is like Way on the top of my list of people I would want to vote for if he ran for politics.
Like, he would be way at the top of my list.
I just love that he's lived a life where he can sort of laugh about racial stuff, but you never think he takes it seriously.
That's, like, such a good, like, place to start.
So I like his instinct to try to take the energy out of it and stuff like that.
But here's what I think.
If you were the, let's say most of them were white, nobody knows if it's 80%, but if most of the writers who were voting every year, do you think that white people would have the following thought?
And I'm going to speak as one white person who would think the following way, but I'm not going to say that they do.
So I'm not going to say that somehow I That somehow represent white people.
Here's what I would have done if I were in that group.
I'd say to myself, what's good for the game?
And then I would have voted appropriately.
If I were a sports writer, especially white, but maybe also black, I'm not sure why it would especially be different.
But if I were voting, I would vote for what's good for the game.
And sometimes what's good for the game is that a few white people win sometimes.
Because maybe if you only did the top scorers, it would be nothing but black winners, and you have probably way more white audience.
And to me it seems like the writers were somewhat subconsciously, subconsciously, Balancing it out so that it would sort of look like something closer to balanced.
And it might be that maybe it's been since Larry Bird that a white guy should have won.
I don't know if that's true.
But I would have to say it does look a little suspicious to me that the white guys are the ones who win without being in the top ten of scoring.
That's not a bad point, is it?
Is that a bad point?
But I don't think it's exactly the way he's describing it.
I think you could allow for two types of racism.
One type of racism is the bad kind, where people are just voting based on race.
The other kind is also incorporating race, but more trying to find a balance of just what's good for the game.
It'd be good if some white people won once in a while.
Because there are a lot of white fans.
It's the same sort of thinking if the situation were reversed.
Now, that's probably how I would vote, I have to admit.
I probably would vote based on if I thought there was some unfairness or inequity, I might vote in a way that would fix it.
I can imagine that.
I don't know if I would just be like, oh, who had the best stats?
Because it's not really even about the best stats, is it?
Because beyond the stats, some players consistently make their team win when they're on the field.
That's actually the best stat.
The best stat is how they score when that one person is playing.
That's the one I like the best.
All right, so I guess we don't know.
I guess my only point is that without data and without being statisticians, and none of us in the story are statisticians, that I don't think Kendrick Perkins' idea is crazy.
I would just say it might be more of a good purpose to it, or at least good intention, than bad intention.
But probably there's a racial component to that.
A woke agenda might be banned in Iowa.
So the House of Representatives is looking at something to ban the DEI bureaucracies in our institutions of higher education.
Do you think that'll pass?
Iowa is solidly Republican, are they?
No, they're not.
Is Iowa in their legislature?
They're not, right?
Yeah.
So does it have a chance?
Wouldn't you need a solid Republican legislature to have a chance with something like that?
So I don't know what the odds are, I guess.
I guess I shouldn't have brought it up.
So here's just the latest update on me, but I'm not going to go into any detail on this now.
So the Chris Cuomo interview I did about my so-called racist rant, TM, trademark, Should I try to get a trademark on racist rant?
No, probably too soon.
But nearly half a million people have viewed it.
And the best criticism that came out of it was from Dan Abrams, who said that I can't have it both ways.
I can't say that my statement was hyperbole, but also out of context.
Yes, I can.
The statement I made was a sentence of hyperbole.
And the reason that I did it was the context that was left out.
It's pretty easy to do both of those at the same time.
Now, consider the fact that that was the best objection.
There were other objections, but the other objections were based on things I didn't even say, or didn't even feel, or was mind-reading right.
The best objection was that you can't have it both ways when obviously you can.
Very easily, obviously, You can have it both ways.
It's just two things.
It's not two opposite things.
It's just two things.
I can have an apple and an avocado at the same time.
Do you know what I can't have?
I can't have an apple and not an apple at the same time.
That would be, you know, if Dan Abrams made that point and said, he says he can have an apple and not an apple at the same time and he just can't do that.
No, Dan, I can have an avocado and an apple.
Same time.
No conflict.
So you tell me your opinion.
I've asked this on the Locals platform.
I'm going to talk to them privately in a minute.
But on YouTube, has the narrative about my little drama shifted in my direction?
Once you realize that all the agitants, you know, the people who just like to make trouble, the click whores and the trolls, once they get bored with it, does it look like things started moving my way or no?
So, I'll ask both of you.
So, people are seeing different things.
So what you should see is that some people see it and some people don't.
Which is what it looks like.
So best case scenario, because it's not possible to persuade everybody.
Not everybody sees everything.
But for the people who have been exposed to the context, everything looks pretty good.
Here's a little media tip if I didn't give you this one.
The reason I'm leaving that one interview up there and I'm turning down others is that as soon as you have more than one, it turns into a court case.
You know what I mean?
So the Cuomo interview hit all the points I needed to hit, so I'm just leaving it there as one consistent thing.
Because the moment I talk to somebody else, Somebody is going to illegitimately say, you said two different things, even if I don't.
More likely, they're going to miss the context, and because they missed the context on one, they're going to say, well, you're lying, because you said this and this one, but you said this and this one, and it won't be true.
Both of them will be completely consistent, but the news only has to tell you they're inconsistent, and you go down.
So I just leave it You know, leave it with one story as long as possible.
And the next thing, the next part of the play is I want to see if there's any, let's say, semi-legitimate news organization who decides to tell the whole story.
Like, as a story.
So, in other words, would I don't know, New York Times or something, say actually there's a way more interesting story here that connects to a larger trend, which is the whole thing I was trying to do, is connect it to a larger trend.
Will anybody tell the whole story of why I did it?
How I felt about it from my perspective, not guessing, you know, no mind reading, and then describe my strategy for handling it, my intention for doing it, and also how I reframed
Once I had your attention, I reframed from all the backwards-looking strategies for success to forward-looking ones, and then also reframed from, you know, looking at the big picture of systemic racism, which you have to work on, rather focusing on individual success, so even if you don't fix systemic racism, you can just slice through it, like a hot poker through butter.
And there's a reason I always repeat that one, because it's visual.
And it's repetition.
So you'll know if I won.
Here's how you'll know if I won.
If you hear anybody in the media refer to strategy as looking backwards strategy, a rear view mirror strategy, or planning for the past.
And then they compare it to looking forward and how can we work together, how can you learn the tools of success, etc.
If you see anybody in the public eye who starts using that frame, that would be probably from me.
