Episode 3070 CWSA - The Scott Adams School 01/12/26
Transitioning to the Scott Adams School hosted by Owen Gregorian, Shelly Adams, and special guests.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, Erica, Owen Gregorian, Joel Pollak, DNC Khizr Khan, Anti-Trump Scott's Cancellation, Charlottesville Hoax, Fine People Hoax, Marcella, MIkebert, Iran Protests, Cuba's Future, Sergio, US Sonic Weapons, CA Billionaires Wealth Tax, The California Post, Fraud Filter, Scott Adams~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
I will probably be kind of quiet because I'm pretty close to my end date.
But we're going to experience the, I guess, the chaos of trying to get us all on the same page.
And who decides who would go first?
I think we should do the sip first.
Shall I do the sip?
No, Erica's going to go to the sip.
I have the honors today, and it's an honor.
Good morning, everybody.
I'm Erica, and let's get together for the simultaneous sip.
Okay.
Okay.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tanker, chalice, or stein, a canteen jugger flask, a festival 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, is called a simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Yo, yo.
Lime.
Oh.
Excellent job.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Erica.
This is Owen Gregorian.
I'm still in the background, but you'll hear me from time to time.
I'll talk more later.
So we have Joel Pollock on.
So I think we're going to turn the stream over to him at this point to lead us in the discussion for a while.
And Joel, before you start, I just want to thank Greg Gutfeld and Dr. Drew yesterday for coming on.
That was pretty special for Scott.
So we just wanted to do that.
Go ahead, Joel.
Well, it's very, very special to be here with so many thousands of Scott Adams fans and followers and admirers, and soon to be millions, of course, because so many people watch these videos after they're live.
And I've been following Scott since the Periscope days about 10 years ago.
And actually, of course, like many people long before then, reading Dilbert and Dilbert books, and then that incredible series of books that Scott wrote on business, especially how to fail at almost everything and still win, which is, I'm paraphrasing the title, but it's always how I think about it, how to almost fail and then come back and succeed.
It's an incredible book.
And it was one I gave to my brother when he was in business school because I thought these are the most incredible lessons for anybody starting a business career.
My brother by then had been a successful restaurant entrepreneur, but was really moving into the business world.
And I just recommended that book to everybody who I came across who I thought might make use of it.
And then, of course, there was the summer of 2015 and the launch of the 2016 campaign.
And I started following Scott's observations and predictions.
Being a political journalist, they were very interesting to me.
Not a lot of people thought that Trump could win, but Scott predicted that Trump would win.
And in the summer of 2016, when it looked like things were starting to fall apart for the Trump campaign, that's when I was able to get in touch with Scott and to interview him about what he thought might happen in the closing days of the campaign down the home stretch.
And Scott, I actually went back and looked at when you and I first were in touch with one another, and it was August 2016.
And the Kaiser Khan controversy had just happened.
I don't know if people remember that, but Kaiser Khan was this father of a gold star, or was a gold star father, father of a soldier, American soldier who had died in Iraq, who happened to be Muslim.
And he held up a constitution at the Democratic National Convention.
And he challenged Donald Trump and said that Donald Trump's criticisms of radical Islam had made Muslims feel unwelcome and Donald Trump's immigration policies made people feel unwelcome and he was violating the constitution and so forth.
And I was on the convention floor when that happened.
I was covering the Democratic Convention.
And I remember looking up at the podium and thinking, that's really going to leave a mark.
It was an incredible attack on Trump.
And knowing that Scott understood the way the campaign had unfolded so far, I thought I would ask him how it would go forward from there.
And Scott very cleverly analyzed what was happening and noted that Trump had initially stayed away from confronting Kaiser Khan or responding to Kaiser Khan until he was really pushed to do so by George Stephanopoulos.
And then Trump got into it and people reacted predictably by attacking Trump for attacking back.
But as Scott pointed out, Trump doesn't really attack ordinary people unless they enter the political fray.
And that's the first political crisis, I guess, where I sought Scott's insights directly.
And I wrote about what he had said.
And then all of a sudden, a few weeks later, my former boss, Steve Bannon, became the CEO of the Trump campaign.
And Scott and I started writing about that to each other.
And then we just stayed in touch.
And I followed everything he was writing and everything he was talking about with regard to the campaign.
And he had these just incredible insights into everything happening.
And Scott, I reached out to you, I think at some point after the campaign, when I had written my book about the election called How Trump Won.
And I must admit that I did not anticipate that Trump would win.
I thought he could win, but I didn't think he would.
And when I started the manuscript for that book, it was still during the campaign.
And it was going to be a book about how Trump had lost.
So, of course, he won.
And I worked with my co-author at the time.
And we put out How Trump Won.
It was the first book that came out after the election, so it did rather well.
It was bought by Walmart and it was bought by some other outlets and did fairly well.
And then you and I met for lunch in Pleasanton and we had a great time.
And then we just began a friendship that unfolded over the next several years.
And I won't revisit every episode, but I want to just talk about one day in particular that I think was very important both to you and to me.
And that was the day that you were canceled when the Washington Post dropped your comic strip.
And I had been due to visit you on that day with a friend.
And we were talking about whether we should still keep this arrangement because that is my friend and I were talking.
And it seemed like a very awkward day to fly up and speak to you because you were going through this incredibly difficult moment of being canceled, not just from the Washington Post, but being dropped by your publisher and you couldn't get the Dilbert calendar published.
And everybody was turning on you and it was over the most ridiculous nonsense.
It was really all just a pretext to distance themselves from someone who was seen as being pro-Trump because at that time everybody who was pro-Trump basically was being canceled in public life.
And we said, no, we're going up.
We're going to go visit Scott.
We're going to go hang out with him on this incredibly difficult day.
It's more important now than ever to go up and visit Scott.
So we went to your house and there you were.
And you said, you know, I've been canceled.
It should be the worst day of my life, but I actually feel fine.
It's actually been a happy day.
And I felt that what you did there in showing the world how to survive this experience of cancellation, which is meant not just to damage you reputationally and professionally, but it's really meant to depress you.
It's meant to isolate you.
It's meant to punish you.
And you show people how to survive that and how to build a life outside of the usual channels.
And it made you stronger than ever.
And I feel that what you're doing now is very much in that vein.
You're dealing with this incredibly difficult cancer journey.
And in the process of doing so, you're showing us something not just about how to live, which is what you've shown us through your books throughout your career, but also you're showing us how to face mortality and how to understand it.
And you're still getting up every day and you're on these live streams and you're keeping your daily date with all the people who love you.
And I feel like you're reframing mortality in a way for many of us.
And we're understanding what it means.
We're understanding that it's something we have to prepare for.
But we're also, I think, learning about how to live joyfully, even though this is the way we all have to go.
So I think about that day a lot.
And I think it has a lot to do with where we are now, just that you have the strength to face these challenges and to face them happily.
That the worst day of your life ended up being okay.
And we were there to see it.
So I just want to thank you for your friendship over the years and for the privilege of being able to exchange ideas with you over time.
I'll open it up and/or ask you to respond and open up to others, but I want to just make two more observations.
One is that I think the thing we worked on most publicly together was the dismantling of the fine people hoax, the so-called tentpole hoax, as you called it, of the Democratic Party or really of the anti-Trump world.
That if you believed, if you really believed that Trump praised neo-Nazis, then it became very hard to like Trump.
But if you understood that he never did that and he actually condemned them, then you could suddenly understand that it was okay to like Trump's policies, even if you didn't necessarily like everything about him or everything he did.
And probably the best moment I've ever had in media came about as a result of your inspiration on this topic.
I was at the Iowa State Fair in 2019 in August of that year, and I had an opportunity to ask Joe Biden directly about the Fine People hoax, which he had circulated.
He had started his campaign by accusing Trump of praising the neo-Nazis.
And at that time, Joe Biden was just candidate Biden.
He didn't have Secret Service.
He didn't have a lot of security.
So you could really just go up to him.
And I went up to him at the Iowa State Fair and I asked him this question on video.
Are you aware that you're misrepresenting Trump's words or something to that effect?
And he just exploded with anger and he insisted that Trump had said it.
And he just went into his whole routine about the veins bulging and whatever it was.
And it was the most extraordinary exchange.
And it was reported on everywhere in the media.
Politico reported it.
I can't remember who else.
Every mainstream media reporter had been there.
It was the Iowa State Fair.
It was the coming out party for all the presidential candidates.
And so they all reported that this guy, who then they later found out, was a Breitbart reporter.
I was with Reitbart for 15 years.
Now I'm with the California Post.
But they found out that this guy had challenged Trump and they wrote a story about it.
And not one of them, not one, links to the actual transcript of what Trump said so that the readers of these different publications could verify whether I was telling the truth or Biden was telling the truth.
But that was a milestone, I think, in debunking that hoax.
And you really did that.
I think, and as many others have said, that enabled people to vote for Trump or at least consider Trump with a clear mind and not consider whether voting for Trump was a reflection of your own prejudice or something like that.
It wasn't a statement about you as a person.
It was just a statement about the policies and the candidates.
And that's how it should be.
And finally, just to close this opening remark, I guess, I would just say that you entrusted me with writing your biography.
And I'm deeply, deeply grateful for that.
It's a huge responsibility because so many people out there love you so much.
And I know that people will be reading the biography very closely and people will want to see what they know about you reflected in the text.
And so they'll be holding me to a very high standard when I write because they want whatever is written about you to reflect the man that they know and that they love.
And you've also allowed me into your life in a new way to speak to you about things very close to your heart in the process of getting started on the biography.
And that's always a huge statement of trust and it's a huge responsibility.
And I've done it once before.
I wrote a biography of my mother-in-law who was a very prominent black feminist who became a Trump supporter.
And she was very courageous in allowing me to see parts of her life that perhaps had been very private until that point.
And it just takes a huge amount of faith in a writer to entrust them with writing your biography.
So I'm very grateful for that.
And I hope that I can do justice to the incredible, extraordinary life that you've lived.
And it's just, it's been great.
I've started already this week.
I sent you and Shelly the very beginning of what I've been working on.
And the working title right now is Scott Adams, A Life of Purpose and Persuasion.
So that is the title of the biography.
I must say, it took a little bit of convincing to get me not to call it Scott Adams, The Revenge of Dale.
But I'm convinced that The Life of Purpose and Persuasion is probably a better title.
All right.
Our philosophy hearing what Marcella has to say about the temple hoax.
And how that affected you?
You did not hear that, did you?
No, I did.
Okay.
I just couldn't.
For some reason, this button doesn't work all the time.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yeah.
What was the question?
The question was: when did the fine people hoax occur to you that it was a hoax?
And how much does that affect you?
I always knew it was a hoax because I was watching it live when he gave the speech.
You know, I've been a Trump supporter since before for many years, probably my entire life.
But I had to defend it.
I'm Hispanic, so It's harder for me in California to talk about Trump.
I lost so many friends, probably most of them.
I have a lot of liberal friends and I have Islamic friends.
And when that fine people hoax came out, I was listening to it on Fox, I believe, and then CNN started spinning it.
And it reminded me of Benghazi, where CNN and all the news spinned Benghazi to be a protester, to be a video YouTuber having done a video of a protest in Egypt or something like that, and then somehow leading to Libya and Benghazi.
And it just reminded me of that and how easy it is for propaganda to spread.
And so basically after that happened, everybody pointed out, oh, he's racist.
Oh, he's this.
He likes the neo-Nazis, you know, because they're fine people.
So I think everybody on camera right now and everybody that is listening got affected by the fact that it was hard to overcome the narrative that they were giving.
But I'll open it up to everybody else.
Can I talk about it just a little bit?
Because there's a piece of it that everybody forgets, which is that on the Saturday when the riot happened, Trump got in trouble initially for saying that he condemned violence on all sides.
So he wasn't talking about fine people on both sides.
He said he condemns violence on both sides.
And the media went nuts because according to the mainstream media, there was only one side that was violent.
But if you'd actually been watching the videos and the live streams, there was violence on both sides.
There were the neo-Nazis who were horrible and one of them ran a car into Heather Hayer was her name, killed her.
But there were also these Antifa thugs who came with their bats and their crowbars and their shields and their pepper spray.
There really was violence on all sides.
So I don't think Trump thought he was saying anything controversial because he was merely stating the truth, but you weren't allowed to acknowledge that there was violence on the left.
You could only condemn the violence on the right.
And so then he had to make another statement from the White House two days later where he had to explicitly condemn the KKK and the white supremacists.
And he did that.
And it was only the next day that he had this Trump Tower press conference where the media pestered him about this.
And so to me, it was like unbelievable.
I mean, and I must say, Scott was the person who really first put this in the right context to make a persuasive argument, which is that the whole thing was about the statues and not about who was violent to whom.
But the exasperation for me was that I had watched this unfold over three or four days.
And I knew exactly what Trump was talking about, that there had been nonviolent protesters, but there had also been violent protesters on left and right.
And the media just refused to see the left's violence.
They could be standing there and they wouldn't see it.
What I didn't understand, and it was thanks to you, Scott, that how important the fine people hoax became when, you know, there's a lot of propaganda against Trump.
You know, everybody spins everything he says.
But it was you that pointed out that that was the critical infrastructure of their entire apparatus.
And that's what I didn't get.
I didn't get that.
I needed to be a genius like you to actually see that in real life.
I thought it would go away, you know, just like everything else.
Just like, oh, when Trump talked about McCain and he said, oh, he's, you know, there were so many other things that Trump would always say, right?
But it always went away.
But that was, you were key in making an argument that this is what they would use.
And then Biden came along years later and he used that as his campaign tactic.
And that was genius that you were able to see it.
Not only was it a hoax, but that it was the, how did I say, thank you.
The tentpole.
The tentpole.
But I, as a regular viewer, didn't see that.
I mean, I knew it was a lie, but I didn't have that idea until you came along many years before Biden came along and did it.
But you called it out immediately.
And I think that it was, I'll open it up to everybody else, but it was the main thing that the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs made as their way of ending their TDS, you know, being pro-Trump again.
You were key.
Sorry.
All right.
Thank you, Marcel.
And I believe Mike Burt has been waiting a long time.
Here for the, just here for the party.
The Find People Oaks was certainly eye-opening for sure.
And it started to open up all the other things that the nuanced media scams that we've been subjected to.
And I've been watching it from Canada in the Trudeau government way before Biden came in.
So I kind of saw it coming from a pilot way.
It's one of those things where you see it once, you keep on seeing it, you can't unsee it now.
And it was fun, kind of like pulling back the Overton window over and over and over and over again.
And we kind of got to a place where we're more comfortable and we can, we're all better for knowing what the scams are now.
So we can't be fooled again.
They're going to find new ways to try to pull them back to some sort of weird.
There's always going to be a psyop.
And now we're, I'm just, I'm not surprised at all by anything anymore.
And because watching you for 10 years and we're all going to be better for it.
We're moving in a positive direction now.
And we're directionally correct.
We're not accurate where we're going, but at least we're going in the right direction.
So thank you for that.
What was our plan?
Owen, would you like to talk about anything?
Sure.
Well, the Find People hoax was certainly an interesting episode.
I think to me, it was, you know, the setup of it is, you also have to think about the context being that Antifa had been, you know, having these counter protests and they would show up wherever the proud boys were and they would have all these conflicts in places like Seattle and Portland.
And then whenever there would be something that looked like it was a right-leaning rally sort of thing, then Antifa would show up and cause trouble.
And I think they have been trained and still to this day, I think, are operating this way where they try to cause violence to happen.
And I think they're trained specifically to say, we're not going to kill anybody, because that would turn everybody against us, but we're going to cause some violence and provoke people as much as possible to try and get them to overreact and try and get them to maybe fire back at us or do something.
That is something we can film so that we can then make a big deal out of that in the media and only show them the edited clip of the reaction and not all the provocation that led up to it.
And I think that had a number of effects.
Part of it was that they kind of desensitized people to that sort of scenario, that they made it seem like, okay, yeah, it's just another Antifa Proud Boys thing.
These guys like to go at it with each other.
So, you know, who cares?
But I think, you know, the ones that rise above that and become this sticky story that becomes a huge story and the media won't let it go are the ones where they're successful in getting someone to do something.
And I think that's what happened with this person that hit this person with the car and killed them, which turned it into more of like a George Floyd-like thing.
I mean, I think it was before George Floyd, right?
But it was that sort of thing all of a sudden because somebody died.
And so now it was a huge story.
You know, I would connect it to the ice shooting that's going on now in the news, that it's going over and over again in the news cycle.
And it probably never would have had any stickiness to it unless someone died.
And then can I jump in with just a couple of historical notes that might illuminate why it happened that way?
So first of all, when CNN first reported what happened, it reported what actually happened, that Trump had said he condemned the neo-Nazis.
So the early CNN reports were actually accurate.
But what happened in the week after Charlottesville was Steve Bannon left the White House.
And the story was that he had been planning on leaving anyway, but it was spun in the media as he was sort of blamed for Trump's remarks on Charlottesville.
So I think more than the murder, what they really hung a hook on was that this had somehow had an effect on the administration.
And I do think that Steve Bannon was going to leave anyway, whether it was then or around then.
But I think that then became the story was that there was something to how the administration had handled Charlottesville that was associated with him.
And when he left, maybe it was convenient for people in the administration who wanted to change the narrative or thought they were going to change the narrative.
But I think that gave the hook.
And it's a lesson from public life, which is that whenever you react to events or are seen as reacting, it makes you look weak and it gives kind of weight to charges that might be false, which is why sometimes when you're in a crisis, the best thing may sometimes be just to wait and not do anything.
Just wait.
Because the moment you do something, then people put a pin in it and they say, okay, so something has actually happened.
It's important to acknowledge.
And then, of course, I think people did accept the framing that Biden later put on it, which is that Trump simply approved of these people.
And he always used the same lines, you know, veins bulging.
What was it?
Coming out of the, coming out of the bushes or whatever it was, coming out of the grass.
He had this refrain he would use every time Biden did.
It was like he had memorized it.
And anyway, Scott's brilliance was so apparent, but what he really got to at the time was this was about a statue.
This was a protest about a statue.
And Scott did the work that nobody else did, which was he actually went looking for people who had been there to protest in favor of keeping the statue.
I think it was General Robert E. Lee.
And Scott, you actually said, okay, if you actually went there to protest against the removal of the statue, I want to talk to you.
And we know those people existed because the New York Times, again, this is before Charlottesville became the hoax.
The New York Times reported on people who were there who came from out of town in many cases, but people who were there to protest in favor of keeping the statue.
So we knew those people existed.
Scott, you spoke to them.
They didn't want to come out publicly, right?
But you would relay what they had told you.
And so you were able to confirm that some of the people saw it as a free speech issue and a historical issue, and they weren't there because they were neo-Nazis.
So it's not like everybody who was there was violent or neo-Nazi or white supremacists.
Some people just were historical preservationists or free speech people or whatever they were, or maybe just people who wanted to see the show, whatever reason brought them there, they weren't there to cause trouble.
And so Trump was correct factually to say there were fine people on both sides, so to speak.
There were people who were nonviolent on both sides.
And that was your central insight was to say, hey, wait a minute, this is really just about a statue.
It's a protest about a statue.
You did the journalistic work that none of them ended up doing.
You actually talked to people, which is incredible because you're in the world of media, but you're not really a journalist by profession, and yet you're doing everybody's job for them, including mine.
Can I say something too?
Yes, go ahead.
Okay, so this, for anyone listening who's like, why are they beating this story, you know, to death?
It's so much bigger than people realize because, like Marcella, I was listening live that day too.
I remember exactly where I was.
I was walking down my hallway.
I could hear it on the news and I heard his reply that there, you know, there were fine people on both sides.
And I said out loud, I was like, well, that's a really good measured response.
And that's fair.
And, you know, I liked it and everything was great.
And then I just remember, like, I don't not trying to pick on Jake Tapper only, but I just remember Jake Tapper and that tapper face he has.
And then you just start seeing like all the media lying about what he's saying and Scott picking up on it and giving it so much traction.
And Joel, I mean, he'd always say, you know, I'm, you know, that he's trying to show that this is a hoax.
He'd always mention Joel.
And every time he'd say it, I was out there with the screenshot of the transcript posting it everywhere because that was the thing that just kicked off the media lying to our faces so boldly.
And so many of us could see it in real time, but we had no way to like scream to the masses, like, you're lying, you're lying, you're lying, because they were all in coordination.
And then, you know, I remember Scott even saying, you know, so Ivanka is Jewish.
Trump has Jewish grandchildren.
Like, do you really think he's calling Nazis fine people?
Like, if you want to boil it down to the little microcosm of his own family, it made so much sense.
It's like, of course, he's not calling Americans, you know, Nazis fine people.
He's the president of the United States.
He's all of our president.
So then it was like every hoax, like, you know, being with Shinzo Abe and feeding the koi fish.
And they're like, he dumped all the, you know, food.
And you're like, no.
And then Scott taught us to say, really?
Like, do you really think that's what happened?
And so what I want to say is, I'm so like, I have a very good gut instinct and I already don't trust anything I hear.
But Scott really like drove it home for us to just say, like, does that really make sense?
Like, ask yourself really twice.
And then think about the person that's giving you the information and what their agenda is.
Because thank God we have people like Joel and Scott and like all these independent voices because the people that are supposed to be giving us our news, they don't care.
They're like in a, they're like in a Hollywood bubble of news people.
So, my thing is, I just want to drive home that, you know, you should question everything and you should find people that are reasonable, like Joel, like Scott.
I mean, I can, I'll list a hundred people on my timeline that I think are reasonable in some way.
But thank God for you guys, Joel, because I remember when you brought that up to Biden, too.
I was screaming like, Yes.
Oh, sorry, Scott.
Don't forget Steve Cortez.
Steve Cortez, 100%.
So the three horsemen.
Yes, 100%.
He did an incredible job making a video about it.
Yes.
So every time I came up, there was something incredible.
So whenever we said it in writing, that was primarily Joel.
Whenever it was in the podcast, it was usually me.
And whenever it had to be repeated.
Yeah, so the people could watch a video.
That was usually Steve.
So we watched the head for three sides.
And then we were just in time.
The other thing about Steve is that at the time, Steve worked for CNN or he had a gig at CNN.
He was a contributor.
And then once he came out on CNN and said that this thing didn't happen, they started limiting his appearances and he eventually left CNN.
But it was important to have somebody inside the media bubble say inside that bubble, this never happened.
And the other thing, Scott, and I'm reminded by Erica, the other thing that you pointed out with this episode was that just because you saw something on video doesn't mean it actually happened.
You know, people would say, but I saw him say it.
I saw him say that these people are fine people.
And you said, yeah, we all saw him say it.
But did you forward the video a minute later where he condemned the neo-Nazis totally and explained what he had meant earlier?
And so that became important, I think, for you in a way to teach people about the dangers of video.
Of course, we need video.
It's very helpful.
But not everything that you saw on video actually happened.
And this is even before AI comes into the picture.
That we sometimes convince ourselves of things that we think we've seen.
But if you haven't seen the full context, you haven't actually seen anything.
Just like the Sandman thing with the young guy.
Was that his name?
Salmon?
And I remember I watched that too.
And I saw how the, I don't know what he was, the Native American guy.
I don't really remember.
Sorry, guys.
But how he got in that kid's face.
And then I saw the media like trashing this kid.
And I'm like, that's not even what happened.
But God, they just run with it because he's a white kid wearing the Make America Great Again hat.
So we must condemn.
And it's just really like a sickness.
And it's become like very cultish and like pick your side, get on a team and don't change or you'll lose all the friends around you and whatever.
But you know what?
Maybe they're worth losing.
And if you can't have your own opinion and stand for what you believe, like really, like, I don't know how you sleep at night.
So like no one's going to influence me out of like what I morally feel like is the right thing.
I don't need to have like a team and I don't need to like bend myself into a million pieces to just try to conform to get along.
It's more important to save this country that we all stand in our truth and be unafraid.
And Scott does that and he does it in such a nice way.
And I'm a little more fiery.
So you guys on my locals crew love you guys.
So, I'm a little more fiery and a little more Italian, and I get feisty.
But Scott has taught us how to be like calm and measured.
And, you know, there's probably what a hundred hoaxes we could list now thanks to us putting together these lists and talking about it.
But, like, Scott has also said, you know, if you want to talk to somebody, ask them, like, what's the thing you can't stand the most about Trump?
Like, you hate everything about him.
Give me the one thing, like your top one pick, and tell me what it is.
And then when you can actually debunk it, because it is going to be a hoax, then you know, maybe you'll open their eyes.
Like, well, if that one thing didn't happen, then did all of these other things happen?
But I will say most of the time, they can't even give you one thing because they don't even know what they're mad at.
But I, I, and also, the other thing I wanted to say about the fine people hoax, Charlottesville, is that you know, we had the drinking bleach hoax and everything else, but the fine people hoax, like we said, went into Biden's campaign.
They brought it up in one of Trump's impeachment trials again.
And then Obama just said it like right before the election.
Like, he's still talking, and you know, people are just like, oh, yeah, you know, we'll just keep talking about it.
It's very dangerous to let these hoaxes spread.
And we have to really be mappy and combat them.
That's it.
There's two other things I would add to this.
One is, you know, when you question like, why was the media harping on this so much?
And the way I think about that is that I think it goes all the way back to Watergate.
You know, if you remember, or anybody's old enough to remember Watergate, where they took down Nixon, the media did that by having this drip, drip, drip.
Every day there was a new story.
They kept ratcheting it.
You know, walls are closing in sort of thing.
And they learned through that experience that if they do it the right way, the media could take down a president because that's what happened with Nixon.
And I think since then, there's been lots of revelations that that was a psyop and a lot of what you think happened was very different than what actually happened.
And, but at the time, I think the media that changed the whole media landscape because I think up until that point, you know, if presidents had affairs or if they had some controversial secret things, usually the media would just not talk about it and they would be mainly supportive of the president.
But this experience with Nixon taught them, hey, we have a lot more power than this.
If we talk about things in a certain way, we can actually take down a sitting president.
And I really saw this fine people hoax and a lot of the hoaxes as the same sort of psyop as Watergate, where the media was saying, if we keep talking about this and if we put our bias on it and our spin on it and we keep ratcheting it and we keep talking about how the walls are closing in and this is going to happen and you know, maybe Trump's cabinet's going to have to resign or Trump will have to resign or we can impeach him over this, then they think they get high on this power.
And I think that's how the media has been operating throughout Trump's presidency.
But I think the fine people hoax was a huge example of that.
And I also think it's an example where Scott had a lot of influence and Joel and Steve Cortez.
You know, you had Scott coming out saying we need to, you know, call out these hoaxes.
And you were recommending that the Trump administration call out the hoaxes.
And you said there should be a website where we do this.
And then American Debunk came out with a website just like you asked it to to say, here's a consolidated place where you can go see what actually happened and why this is a hoax and explain it all and pull together all the different clips and things.
And so it happened independently at that point.
And then later on, the White House adopted that.
They came out with their own website.
And now I think this term, Trump actually is having like a hoax website and he's changing plaques to reflect what he thinks reality is.
And he's calling out all the lies and all the distortions in the media.
So I think you had a direct impact on that, Scott.
I don't think that would have happened without you having your hoax list and talking about this being so important and really putting things in the right context to explain it to people.
I'm loving the sound of coffee in the background.
Do you hear that?
Well, not everybody, I guess.
So, Owen, what are some new things that are happening in the T-bunk category?
Well, there's right now the same sort of thing is happening with this ICE agent shooting.
CNN is coming out and trying to say you shouldn't even consider the ICE agent, you shouldn't presume them innocent.
Jake Tapper is doing his tapper face and trying to argue that, you know, again, you shouldn't even presume an innocent.
And I think they're trying to convince the DA in Minnesota to charge him.
So that's a current hoax, I would say, because I think we've all seen the video.
And unfortunately for them, there's lots of video clips from lots of angles.
And you can see that the car was going right for the guy for the one for the ICE agent.
So I don't think that's going to be successful, but it could turn into another Daniel Penny.
You know, they're going to arrest him and charge him, and the punishment will be the process.
But my hope is it wouldn't turn into another George Floyd where they actually lynched the guy like they did in Minneapolis.
So I suppose that's a possibility.
But I'm hoping that it won't go that far.
What's happening in the Iran situation?
Well, Trump has been making a lot of news.
And as far as Iran goes, he was asked recently by some CNN reporter who apparently tried to pretend that she wasn't from CNN about what they were considering in terms of military options and whether he thought they were taking him seriously.
And so he basically called out that reporter for being fake news and kind of made fun of her and mocked her for asking a stupid question and pretending not to work for CNN because initially she described herself as just a White House pool reporter.
And then when he pressed her, she finally admitted she worked for CNN.
And he, you know, didn't answer her question, basically said it's stupid.
Why would I talk about what we're considering and what we're going to do?
But I do think there is a big question with Iran because it does seem like from what the statements of the Trump administration have made that they are considering military strikes in Iran.
And I don't know whether that's a good idea or a bad idea.
Maybe we can ask the group here what they think about that.
The other new thing, I don't know if Joel wants to chime in or Owen or anybody else, but from what I hear is that the Ayatollah wants to negotiate with Trump.
So I don't know if that's going to happen, but I assume he would because he's not, they're not, they know that Trump can do something to them.
So they'd rather negotiate something with him.
Well, I can, go ahead.
You go ahead, please.
Well, I think that the best outcome would be one where the Iranian people change their own government or change their own regime without outside intervention.
So I think Trump is trying to avoid making a decision and avoid intervening if he can.
Probably there are people who are telling him this is an incredibly unique opportunity to remove a major enemy on the world stage.
And so there's an argument for doing something, but I think there's a way to thread the needle.
I suggested this a year ago, and I don't think anybody really picks it up, but you could do a deal with the Iranian regime, where as part of the deal, they would have to commit to certain human rights norms.
And we did this with the Soviet Union in the late 70s, where to get preferential access to Western grain, basically, because the Soviet Union wasn't feeding itself anymore, they had to submit reports on their progress on human rights.
And that became a point of leverage that the internal opponents of the Soviet regime were able to use to put pressure on that regime and eventually get the Soviet Union to open up.
And once the Soviet Union was open, it wasn't 10 years before it collapsed of its own accord.
So there's a way to structure a deal that includes human rights in such a way that the Iranian regime finds itself in a narrower and narrower corner and eventually doesn't really have the ability to resist the desire of its own population to be free.
And I think that's preferable.
If you can do that, it's preferable to a kind of foreign intervention.
Because what happens is when you have outside powers intervening, then the regime, remember, has some support in Iran.
I mean, it might be a minority.
It might be people living in outlying rural areas or very religious people or whatever, but they do have some supporters.
And if you have the Americans intervening, those people will always have an argument that the new democratic government is not legitimate because it only came about as the result of American influence.
And so I think if you want this to be stable and long-lasting, it needs to be something that has legitimacy within Iran.
And that makes a kind of internal change preferable.
Now, maybe we're in a world where there are no real internal changes, where the kind of intervention that we say we're avoiding, we are actually engaging in in some level, whether it's intelligence or whether we're fomenting some of the activism on the ground.
I mean, we won't know, at least not now.
It's probably likely we're doing something.
I mean, if our government even just turns on Starlink or something like that, I mean, I guess Starlink is a private company, but if we make internet access available, then we are intervening in a way.
But military intervention is really a different kind of intervention that I think gives supporters of the regime a way to organize opposition to any free system that tries to grow up in its place.
So I think it's preferable if we can figure out how to create change that unfolds of its own accord, really, without us having to come in militarily.
That's my own view.
I mean, I know there are other arguments, but that's how I see it.
What?
What's the latest Venezuela?
There's still a lot of media spin going on with that.
I don't know that they've really resolved anything.
I mean, my view on that is it's going to take a while to work all that out.
I think there's stories about kind of the impacts coming out of it.
So there was a story I posted today just about how Trump's action with Maduro has shaken up the whole geopolitics, especially around oil, that it may have shifted the mix of oil to be to non-OPEC countries.
And so it may just shift the whole power dynamic within the oil industry as far as who determines how much oil is produced.
And that may just shake up the whole world stage from that perspective.
And it also talked about how it's depriving Russia and China of a lot of that Venezuelan oil.
And then there's also a lot of speculation now about what's going to happen in Cuba because a lot of the oil was going to Cuba from Venezuela, and apparently that's been completely cut off.
And Trump came out with a statement.
I think it was a truth social post or something about Cuba.
Let me see if I can find it real quick.
So I scroll through my feed.
But he was, here it is.
It says, Cuba lived for many years on large amounts of oil and money from Venezuela.
In return, Cuba provided security services for the last two Venezuelan dictators, but not anymore.
Most of those Cubans are dead from last week's USA attack, and Venezuela doesn't need protection anymore from the thugs and extortionists who held them hostage for so many years.
Venezuela now has the United States of America, the most powerful military in the world by far, to protect them and protect them we will.
There will be no more oil or money going to Cuba.
Zero.
I strongly suggest they make a deal before it is too late.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, President DJT.
Hi.
Can I jump in?
One second.
On that story, it was Owen.
Trump underquoted the Cuban security.
That was an interesting thing, you know, when he said that the Cuban guards were there to take care of him.
You know, it's like interesting.
Don't you think that there was like some kind of a double meaning there?
Like he's saying that the Cubans were actually maybe holding Maduro hostage or something.
Could be.
I don't know.
Certainly, he was calling them weak from that perspective and ineffective.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's an interesting situation.
And another interesting aspect of this is there was a video clip of somebody that was apparently one of those security people in Venezuela.
And he claims that they just couldn't do anything against the American forces.
And a lot of them were just instantly shot in the head.
And it seemed like bullets were just flying from everywhere, but they were all accurate.
And he also claimed that they used some kind of sonic weapon.
And all of a sudden, everybody was bleeding from their noses and couldn't do anything.
And so there's a claim out there that there is a sonic weapon, that the Americans have it, and that they used it in this raid.
And Catherine Levitt, the press secretary, reposted that.
So that shows that they are behind, you know, they're at least, you know, they're at least pushing that narrative as being true.
But I don't know what you think, Scott, of whether that means there are sonic weapons.
You promised us that they weren't real.
I promise you that they were not real.
As you guys are embassies.
So I did not promise that they don't exist.
Okay.
Sort of a seems like an obvious weapon to have.
Well, yeah, and I'm just kidding around with you in terms of promises, but the prediction I remember you saying was that we would never have proof.
And you're correct so far.
I mean, even with this, it's just a story.
We don't really have proof.
Do you think that the United States has a sonic weapon that we use in Cuba?
Well, that we use as well.
how many think we have it i'm gonna vote yes I think we do have some kind of directed energy.
I've heard we also have like a heat weapon that can push people out of a place for crowd control.
So I think it's quite possible that we do have something like that.
By the way, we had a very crude sonic weapon the last time we tried something like this.
And I remember because I watched the news coverage as a kid when the U.S. went into Panama to get rid of Manuel Noriega.
He hid out in the Vatican embassy and there were American helicopters trying to get him out of there.
And they were blasting guns and roses from the helicopters.
They were blasting heavy metal music and guns and roses.
So that was a very crude sonic weapon.
And I actually like guns and roses, but they were blasting Welcome to the Jungle and other songs in an effort to make it so impossible for Noriega to stay at the Vatican embassy that he would give himself up.
I don't have it.
Seems like you'd need a helicopter to transport it to where you need it to be because it would have to be kind of big.
So anyway, we were coming up on the top of the hour.
I want to make sure that anything we wanted to get in got in.
So, Owen, did you have any technology stories that we have not covered?
Well, there's some science stories I could certainly bring in.
A lot of them are more psychology and other science-seased things as opposed to tech.
I haven't found any today that seem to jump out at me.
I've got one, Owen.
I know you'll have an opinion about it too.
It's this billionaire tax in California.
And Chemath has been talking about it and how more and more tech billionaires are now restructuring their assets so that they're not in California.
He said yesterday that a trillion dollars in wealth has left California since they started talking about the wealth tax.
Maybe you have a view on that.
Yeah, I saw that story and I think it's a huge shift.
I mean, we have been seeing this exodus from California for a while and even just a general blue state to red state exodus.
You know, Florida and Texas are getting a lot of people and I think to some extent they're unhappy about it because they're getting people that they're afraid will vote blue cutting to their state.
But I think it is a huge shift, especially financially.
If that is at all true, which I don't doubt that trillions of dollars of wealth are leaving just to avoid the potential of this wealth tax, that that's going to completely change Silicon Valley.
It's going to empty it out.
And I think there are a lot of companies, not just billionaires, but they're bringing their companies with them to relocate to other states because it's been so terrible there.
And I think it also is just part of a broader shift in my mind where the left government just has gone too far.
They've been pushing and pushing and pushing, but in recent years, I think they've gone way too far.
Another example that I would add to that would be the stuff that happened with Elon Musk in Delaware, where they disapproved his pay package.
And all of a sudden, there was a flood of companies saying, I'm not going to be incorporated in Delaware anymore because I thought this was the most friendly place to be incorporated for companies.
And now it's not just because of that going too far.
And since then, Delaware has tried to backtrack and say, no, no, no, we actually approve of Elon's pay package now.
But, you know, they've, they just went too far.
And they, now they're seeing the consequences of it.
And I don't think they're going to be able to recover from that.
And I see California playing out the same way.
You know, they haven't actually passed this wealth tax.
And it is a horrible idea.
And it's a new kind of tax.
Like they're basically saying they're going to tax these wealthy people on assets that are not unrealized gains, right?
Like they're assets that are tied up, whether they're in stock or even farmland or real estate, where it's not necessarily liquid.
You know, if you have a private company, you might own a bunch of stock and in theory, it might be worth a lot, but you can't really sell it very easily if it's a private company.
And so there's a lot of impacts to that that just make it completely unrealistic to have that kind of tack.
But Newsom is pushing it anyway.
And it seems like they're barreling forward with this idea.
And I think they've just gone way too far.
And the billionaires are the ones with the most flexibility.
They don't have to live in California.
They don't even have to live in the United States.
They can go to the Bahamas or Panama or anywhere and put their assets wherever they feel like it.
And they can operate from anywhere in the world now, especially with all the remote work that you can do now.
So I think they, they made a huge mistake in California.
And I don't know how far it's going to go, but I do think it's really starting to shift things.
What do you think?
California never takes it far enough.
That's what we see.
I'm in New Jersey.
So trust me, like I'm like sympathetic, but I don't understand like California.
What the heck is happening?
Joel, how do you stay there?
We've been yelling at Scott for years.
How are you there?
How are you there?
But obviously, you guys love your families, but I don't understand how all of these politicians, I like actually think about California all the time.
And especially with, you know, that disgusting, vile Gavin Newsom thinking he's going to be president.
I get so enraged.
Oh, Marcella, you too.
But it's just, it's just like they're drawing, they already drove Elon out.
And when I heard Shamath talking about that, and I can't remember the number, maybe Joel knows you live there, but they were saying that Californians are still exiting the state like year after year after year, like past the pandemic, more than any other state in the country, but nothing ever changes there.
And it's like Scott says, it's like the too far issue.
Like they always take it too far.
Yeah, it's brutal.
I have something to say on this one.
I am forever saying, if you want to know what's going on in California, look to what's going on in Canada.
Because if Hillary would have won 16, her and Trudeau were lockstep in all their policies.
And then Biden came in four years later and America was all of a sudden four years behind Canada.
And as soon as that happened, I watched it happen in real time.
And then Newsom came along.
I started calling him the American Trudeau because it's true.
And all the policies that are going on in California right now were started to be enacted in Canada about eight years ago.
So if you want to know what the end game is, look north because that's exactly what's going on in the states right now, like especially those Democrat states.
So that's just your warning right now.
It is awful up here.
We're looking at some weird things happening in our politics that I won't get into.
But the Scott Lapnois said, I expect to be gulaged.
And they're talking about in all the Commonwealth countries right now that they're going to start banning things like X.
So expect that kind of being floated around now.
You're going to start seeing it.
But yeah, no, it's just realize that whatever's going on in California is, it's just a rerun for West Canada.
So look north to see what's coming down the pipe.
Well, maybe I could just put a plug in for the California Post, which launches two weeks from today on January 26th.
I am actually speaking to you from Washington, D.C., partly because eventually you do reach a breaking point.
And although I'm still working for the California Post, very tied to California, my neighborhood burnt down a year ago.
And when people used to ask me, why are you still in California?
I said, well, they haven't ruined the mountains yet and they haven't ruined the ocean.
And then a year ago, they ruined the mountains in the ocean.
And in fact, I was in Santa Monica last week and there is still debris washing up on shore from the fire.
There is still burnt wood washing up on shore during high tide.
And it's absolutely incredible how this fire was allowed to rage out of control with no fire engines in the right places.
You know, Newsom says, I sent 110 fire engines to Southern California, but he didn't send them to the place where there had been a fire six days before, which would have been the logical place to put at least one engine.
There were no engines there.
The city didn't do it.
The state had mismanaged the whole process.
There was no water in the reservoir.
The police didn't show up.
So many different failures, but they all reflect a kind of neglect of governing.
And as Scott has pointed out with this Minnesota story, we're starting to see fraud as a problem that holds back our progress in so many ways.
Scott, with your permission, you could even call it the fraud filter.
You know, you've got the persuasion filter, the Dilbert filter.
Once you put on the fraud filter, you start seeing how much is just being stolen.
And Chemeth said something really interesting, which is that California's budget has doubled in the last 10 years.
And I remembered that.
And it actually took him saying it and Steve Hilton saying it.
California is spending twice the amount of money.
It's a staggering amount of money, but it's $320 billion this year, roughly, that is being spent by the state.
And what's the result of doubling spending?
We haven't seen any infrastructure improvements.
The homeless population has risen.
The state has a terrible education system.
So where's the money going?
And once you do what Scott's encouraging us to do, which is to look at Minnesota as a kind of paradigm where so much of the money is being stolen, you know, the penny drops and you say, okay, of course, this is, we knew about individual cases of theft that during COVID, they stole money, I think $20 or $30 billion from California's unemployment department.
But now you look everywhere and you realize the grift is everywhere.
And that's what's happening to our tax dollars.
So eventually you start to see things like fire departments don't show up for fires and there's no water in the reservoir.
Well, why?
How is it that nobody's checking on these things?
And it's because so much of the money is being stolen and there are all these distracting issues like transgenderism in school and whatever else they want you to focus on while you're not looking at what's actually happening to the money.
And I think California can be turned around, but even a place as nice as California will eventually become third world and you'll have the few billionaires who remain.
I think Jensen Huang of NVIDIA has said he's not leaving what even if there's a billionaire tax.
I don't know why he's not leaving, but you'll have a few people who live there and live very comfortably.
And then you'll have a lot of poor people who come there to access whatever wealth is being promised to them from the wealth tax or whatever, and homeless people who enjoy the weather.
And it'll start to look like Venezuela instead of looking like California.
There's no reason.
I mean, you pay a little bit more to live in California.
You know the prices are going to be a little higher.
The taxes are going to be higher.
You put up with it because it's such a wonderful place and the people are so talented and you're meeting smart people who are starting amazing companies.
That still is all true about California.
But at some point, the cost becomes too great.
And I think we've hit that point.
When you look at a place like Pacific Palisades, which has some of the most well-connected and influential people in Hollywood, and that those people are losing their homes.
And you look at the rest of LA and there are home break-ins and murders.
Not just what happened to Rob Reiner, which was a terrible, tragic family circumstance, but the wife of the founder of Motown, or one of the chief executives of Motown, she was murdered a couple of years ago in her home in a home invasion.
I mean, at some point, you say, what are we paying for all these services for?
Like, where's this money going?
And I think Scott's filter, the fraud filter, is going to start to become very, very important in how we understand what's really going on.
Well, how did our experiment today go?
I'll look at the locals' chat.
Let's say, how'd you guys like it today?
There's going to be a delay.
I loved it.
Go ahead.
I feel that it was.
Can I say something?
Yes.
Thank you for the experience of being you because this Rumble Studio, right, we can see all the comments, right?
So that's what you've been doing every day.
I don't know how the heck you did that.
That's incredible.
I mean, because there's a lot of love, but there's also not love too, you know?
And you've been doing this since you published your email address on your comic strips, right?
So you started getting all the feedback from everybody in mass, right?
Can you hear me all?
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I just wanted to point that out that, you know, like you said that we are Scott's debris and God is looking at, he's plotting himself.
So to look at himself, I feel like I'm looking at a little bit of experience of you through this.
So thank you for that.
The locals chat was streaming.
They love this.
They love this.
It's great.
It's great.
It's well organized.
We love it.
We love it.
And we love you.
Just an update on me.
You can tell I'm getting weaker and weaker.
I've been told that the way I'll know how much time I have left is by how tired I am and how much pain I have.
I'm in basically.
So my tiredness and my pain are maxing out.
And I'm in quite bad shape as a bonus.
So today I was at Delaware and I don't know.
Avavan.
Avavan.
They all said the same.
But I was trying to keep going as long as I can.
Yesterday was brutal.
And when I fell asleep, when I would wake up, it would feel like I wasn't going to wake up again.
So I'm hanging out as long as I can for moral support.
And I hope it has some value to you.
I'm way past my dimension exploration.
So I wake up very confused and tired.
But I was.
So we'll finish this and transition to the Scottish school and try to get as much value as we can out of that.
So, Joel, especially, you're keeping the lights on.
Shelly, you're the only thing keeping me alive right now.