Episode 1112 Scott Adams: Why Everyone is an Ignorant Hypocrite Except for You and Me. And I'm Not so Sure About Me.
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Words per Minute
144.8005
Summary
Scott Adams is back with the dopamine to the day, where he talks about the dumbest story of the day: Nancy Pelosi wearing a mask to a hairdresser. And how did Fox News get a copy of security footage of it?
Transcript
00:00:16.180
I'm waiting, I'm waiting, that's right, that's right.
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And it's happening with Coffee with Scott Adams and the Simultaneous Sip.
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Have you noticed that 2020 has been generally quite crappy?
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I don't like to overgeneralize, but I think you'd agree with me.
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Today's the day when there will be slightly more things going right than going wrong.
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And watch how the number of things going right continues to increase
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while the number of things going wrong continues to diminish.
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And any other old hackneyed expression you'd like to put on that.
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You need a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or a stein,
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a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
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Fill it with your favorite liquid I like, coffee.
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the thing that makes everything better, including 2020.
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It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
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What could be more important in a time of multiple crises?
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What could be more important than Nancy Pelosi's hair?
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Nancy Pelosi went to a hairdresser, didn't wear her mask,
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went inside where people are not supposed to be,
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claimed that her explanation is that she was set up.
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If you can't sell your Democrat story to Don Lemon,
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How did Fox News get a copy of a security camera
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It's like, so even Tucker Carlson had the proprietor on,
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the woman who owned the shop that Nancy Pelosi was at.
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so whose idea was it to give the security camera footage to Fox News?
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I couldn't care less about Nancy Pelosi wearing or not wearing her mask.
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it's okay to be indoors if it's just one person,
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is that you don't want multiple people indoors.
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are the same person who would have worked on them
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And this will be a test to see if I've taught you anything.
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So keep one part of your brain alert for a trick.
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But they're up against an army that hits their target every single time.
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Literally every bullet they fire will hit the other army people in a deadly place.
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Let's say, just to keep it fun, exactly the same amount of ammo.
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I'll know in a moment when I see your responses.
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It looks like you're still talking about the hairdressing stuff.
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If you didn't get that, I've taught you nothing.
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Because imagine, if you will, the army that shoots perfectly has five people in it.
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The army they're up against, who are not as good at shooting, but they're about 80% accurate,
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The 1,000 shooters who are 80% accurate would destroy the five people who are perfectly accurate
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The entire battle would last less than a second.
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Now, that's obvious to you once I explain it, isn't it?
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But when I first set this up, you said to yourself, probably, if I set it up correctly,
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well, obviously, the people who are better at shooting, if all the weapons are the same,
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Because this is the same mental trick that is preventing us, I think, from having inexpensive
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We have these accurate tests that will get the right answer really, really well.
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But they're slow, and they require a health care professional, and you need some kind of
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That means that as accurate as you are, you can't do much.
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In other words, your volume is always going to be really low because of the limitations
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The one that's not legal yet, the FDA doesn't allow it, are these little saliva test strips,
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You can build them in the laboratory to know that it's possible.
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So we're not too worried that you could make them in volume.
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It's just nobody's doing it because it's not legal.
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But let's say those test strips were, I think it's more than 80%, but let's say they're
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You can do it at home with a health care professional, and you can do it all day long.
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You could test every person coming into the building, every person coming into a sporting
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event, every person everywhere several times a day because you get an instant result, cost
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There's no competition between which of them is the better method.
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They're not even close, but your brain first says, why would I ever want an inaccurate test
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And that's why I gave you the analogy of the two armies.
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Now, of course, I teach you quite famously that analogies are not persuasive.
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Analogies are good for introducing a new concept.
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If the concept itself makes sense, then I guess in some sense you'd say, oh, I just learned
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That's just if you knew more, you might make better decisions.
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So I use the analogy just to reorient your brain to thinking of two armies, the bigger
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army, which is a zillion test strips that everybody's testing, testing, testing all day
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long, versus these very pinpoint, very accurate tests that you can't do very many of them no
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So, I still don't know why we're not doing more of these test strips.
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I think it's because somebody doesn't understand that the big army always beats the small army,
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There might be some excuse or explanation that I don't know.
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Let me give you an update on my funniest liberal friend, who I debate just to see what kind
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He told me yesterday he doesn't watch my periscopes, so I can speak with complete abandon.
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Now, what's interesting about my liberal friend is not that he's dumb.
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What makes it interesting is he's really smart, not even just ordinary smart.
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I'm talking about way above average smart, but disagrees with me completely on Trump-related
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I try to get him to admit just one thing at a time, because he likes to do the laundry
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And the one thing I'm trying to get him to admit is that Russian collusion was shown to
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And what about all those people who did get charged and went to jail?
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And what about the fact that the Russia troll farms tried to interfere?
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To which I say, none of that is Russian collusion.
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You understand that none of that is Russian collusion.
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And as smart as he is, he's conflated all of those things into being something that he's
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willing to argue is in the same category of Russian collusion.
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But he won't say that directly, because it would be crazy to say it directly.
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So this is clear cognitive dissonance, because he existed for, I don't know, two years or
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whatever, thinking that Russian collusion, because he told me, was real.
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Once it was proven not to be real or proven that there's no evidence to suggest it's real, he
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So he's decided to just redefine it as a whole bunch of other things that are not Russia collusion
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and just call it that and literally just give it a different name.
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That is the most classic cognitive dissonance you'll ever see.
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He accused me in the same conversation of having cognitive dissonance.
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He said, I know you have cognitive dissonance, I'm paraphrasing, because 100% of the time you
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And since we know that couldn't be possibly, you know, legitimate, that Trump is just always
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right, and everything he does is good, that can't be true.
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So therefore, we have proven that you, Scott, have cognitive dissonance.
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To which I said, the very email I sent before this had a long explanation of me viciously criticizing
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the president on this very question of the test strips.
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So without prompting, I had just viciously criticized President Trump for this one topic within
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And immediately after watching that, my friend accuses me of never being able to criticize
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Very, very noticeably, I made a big point of it.
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Without even being asked, no prompting whatsoever.
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And I noted that I've done it many times before.
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I asked my friend, and I'll ask you the same question.
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So my liberal friend says there are many examples of Trump failing in terms of the coronavirus
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And I'm not claiming that there are no examples.
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My claim from the start, before anybody had any track record of managing this crisis, I said,
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at the very first start, everybody's going to be guessing.
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And so if you're looking back later and say, oh, these people got it wrong, you're just being
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It was because everybody guessed differently, and somebody was going to get a better result.
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There's a belief that if we had been better at testing early on, we could have, in other
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words, if the president had done something differently in terms of testing, we could have tested our
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My understanding is that there were no experts who thought we could test our way to safety.
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In other words, my claim, and I want to fact check on this, is that Fauci and Birx,
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you know, the two experts that we looked at the most, I believe that neither of them thought
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that we had the testing facilities or could get them quickly enough that we could ever just
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I was going to block you, but I think you're just joking.
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And why is it that I don't, somebody says I'm being correct.
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So my understanding is if you had a little island country and you've got a, you know,
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a dozen people with it, you could pretty, pretty well do some contact tracing in that situation.
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But I don't think, I don't think that our experts ever told Trump that with the testing,
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we did have what was possible at the time, again, the limitation is we just didn't have
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enough testing of the right type, which isn't exactly Trump's fault, is it?
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How could you be ready to test something that didn't exist yet?
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And I would point out that if we didn't have the ability to rapidly ramp up new kinds of
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tests, that we also didn't have that during the Obama administration.
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Well, Obama didn't have an ability to rapidly ramp up for a test for a coronavirus that didn't
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Trump also didn't have the ability to quickly ramp up to test for a coronavirus that didn't
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So that, I think he's just uninformed, but maybe I'm the one.
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Um, he didn't have enough PPE and ventilators, right?
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But wouldn't it be true that we didn't have any in the warehouse from Obama either?
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Was there any other country that had stockpiled enough PPE and ventilators?
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think every single country in the world didn't, didn't prepare
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in the way that we ultimately wish we had of with, you know, the PPE, et cetera.
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So I don't think he was any different than any other leader, was he?
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Some say he should have used the War Powers Act sooner.
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Because there's no evidence that shows that that would have therefore done what?
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Nobody imagines that the War Power Act could have created enough testing fast enough.
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There's the argument that Trump disbanded some, whatever it was, some epidemiology group
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I think that it's true that they were disbanded, but I think it's fake news that it made any
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difference, because my understanding is those functions just were distributed to existing
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What about the, you know, you should have shut down more aggressively?
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Well, that ignores the fact that the economy is the other part of the equation.
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Nobody really knows what was the right amount to shut down, do they?
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I don't think anybody knows that, because you would have to wait for the economy to play
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out over years to find out if more people died from the shutdown and the economic disruption
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Let's talk about Black Lives Matter and all that.
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Jack Posobiec on Twitter yesterday was tweeting that, and actually showed, the Minnesota Police
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Training Manual specifically shows using your knee on a suspect's head exactly the way Chauvin,
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was it, put his knee on George Floyd's neck and or head.
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In other words, the Minnesota Police Training has an actual photo of how to do it,
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and he's doing it exactly the way the George Floyd thing went down.
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And so I tell you again, there's just no way they're going to get convicted or murder
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with the fentanyl in George Floyd and the fact that they asked him if he, I mean, consider this.
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They asked him two or three times if he was on anything.
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If he had said yes any one of those times, they would have been alerted to treat him as
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more of a medical problem and less as a resisting arrest.
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So maybe George Floyd could have said, yes, I have something in me, and that might be a factor.
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Cheryl Ackeson, you all know, a writer on political stuff, and she noticed some friend of hers was
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automatically unfollowed from her account, and I saw her tweet on that, and I tweeted to ask other
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people if they had had the same experience on her account.
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Yes, of course, lots and lots of people thought they had been following her, but now they're
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Now, what are we supposed to do with the fact that it's so blatantly obvious that the social
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media algorithm, or at least who is following who, is clearly being manipulated?
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You can have massive confirmation, because you've seen it on my account.
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Now, I still don't know if it's happening to any liberals, but I haven't heard of any.
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So, we certainly have election interference in the context of Twitter, but no action.
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Shouldn't there be something happening, such as Twitter being regulated, or some kind of
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Like, I don't understand, and this is an honest question, I don't understand why, I don't understand
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why literally Twitter hasn't been taken over by the FBI at this point.
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They should actually be on the floor of Twitter trying to figure out why this is happening.
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Is there some law that says that there's no reason that there's any law broken?
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Given the context of election interference, I would think that the FBI would be all over
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Twitter, but I don't understand what's going on there.
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Speaking of I don't understand, that was the main line that Joe Biden used when he made the
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He kept saying, I don't understand why this president, I just don't understand.
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And let me tell you, if you're being blamed, or at least accused of having some kind of mental
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slowdown, you don't want to get in public and repeat the phrase, I don't understand over
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It's bad enough when I do it, but most people are not accusing me of dementia.
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How do you tell somebody that their strategy for success is completely wrong?
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In other words, they've developed a strategy that guarantees failure, but they think it's
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What I'm talking about here is Black Lives Matter.
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Let me, I made a list of all the things that they're doing wrong strategically that no one
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So this is specifically a list that I believe something close to a hundred percent of people
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who understand management, leadership, success, and anybody who has any expertise and how
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to get stuff done, I believe would agree with me that these are strategy mistakes.
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The biggest strategic mistake you could make if you're the seller is to keep talking because
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anything you say at that point can't make you the sale because you already have the sale,
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And that's what happened with the George Floyd thing.
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The moment the country saw the video of George Floyd, the sale had been made.
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Every white person, every black person, every Republican, every Democrat, complete sale.
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Now, wouldn't you say that the George Floyd initial reactions, which could have been one
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of the best things that ever happened in this country, it was a gift in a sense, a tragedy,
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of course, but it was a gift to the country, almost like George Floyd died for our sins kind
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There was almost a Jesus-like, I know, that's offensive, but just follow the analogy.
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His death could have been, in sort of an analogous way, that Jesus' death could have been a positive.
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His death, as tragic as it was, could have been a positive because we all were on the same side,
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So that's the first mistake, selling past the close.
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What expert would say, let's scour the earth and find the least capable leaders and we'll put
00:27:00.140
I'm pretty sure that's what's happening with Black Lives Matter because of all the other
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Nobody would make that mistake if they knew how to do anything.
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Seeing the world as a zero-sum situation, meaning I can't win unless you lose, versus an abundance
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Hey, look, we can both have as much as we want if we all do the same.
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If we all do the right stuff, we all get benefits.
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I don't know that there's any successful anything that has ever started with the zero-sum, I
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And that's what you're seeing with Black Lives Matter.
00:28:04.120
How about the idea of making your heroes the people who are literally criminals?
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Now, you can have, I think you can hold both thoughts simultaneously.
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You can certainly hold the thought that somebody should not be shot by the police because of
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some past criminal behavior, if it wasn't part of the actual incident.
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You don't get a shot today for something you did, you know, a year ago.
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But, is it a good strategy to hold up your criminals as your heroes?
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Martin Luther King was the example of doing it right.
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Holding up as your hero somebody who had the right set of values.
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Holding up the people who have been killed by police, they have records.
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Nobody has ever made a good outcome out of making heroes out of the people who they should not.
00:29:10.280
Now, the weird thing about this is the whole controversy about, let's say, confederate statues.
00:29:17.140
The whole point of that is you don't want to hold up as role models people who have a sketchy past.
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And there's nothing could be sketchier than being a past slave owner.
00:29:27.880
So, if you know the concept of getting rid of confederate statues because it sends a bad message as a role model,
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why are we making role models out of slave owners?
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But how about extending that to your own population?
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How about bringing that forward into current times?
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How about making heroes out of Thomas Sowell or anybody who's got a positive view of abundance or strategy?
00:30:00.380
How about always voting for the same political party?
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Always voting for the same party reliably is guaranteed to take away your political power.
00:30:17.280
They're trying even harder to make that strategy that never works, can't work, has never worked for anybody.
00:30:24.300
They're doubling down on a strategy they know can't work because it takes away their own power if you always vote for the same side.
00:30:32.520
How about the idea of never taking personal responsibility?
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Yes, the police should be better trained, have more options.
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We should look into every possibility for better police service to the community to keep us safer, etc.
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It's 100% agreed that anything can be done better, especially that.
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But, does that take away your responsibility to teach your kids how not to resist arrest?
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If you can't even have the conversation about, you know, maybe we should resist arrest a little bit, you know, a little bit better.
00:31:13.520
If you can't even discuss it, you have a failing strategy.
00:31:18.460
Because nobody ever succeeded by saying all the problems were with somebody else.
00:31:24.020
It's just not a strategy that's ever worked for anybody ever in the long run.
00:31:37.680
Well, if you don't know exactly what to do to make something better, you say,
00:31:41.640
Hey, if we can't agree what to do, can we at least agree to test some things and see if those work?
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If you're not suggesting, let's do some trials and some tests, you don't have a strategy that can work.
00:31:56.220
You don't even pretend you're doing something useful if you're not talking about how to create a small test.
00:32:02.940
It's the only way you can improve if people don't automatically agree on what's the right thing to do.
00:32:11.300
How about turning it into a racial problem instead of just figuring out how you can fix it?
00:32:16.220
How could it ever work to turn it into a hate problem instead of a what-do-you-do-about-it problem?
00:32:22.420
Because, again, they're selling past the close.
00:32:27.980
If you're talking about how it's racist or not racist, you're already in the wrong conversation.
00:32:33.340
Because all the people you're calling racist have already said,
00:32:37.000
I think we agree with you that we could do this better.
00:32:47.700
How about focusing on your smallest problem instead of your biggest problem?
00:32:55.420
Let's make a list of all our priorities, and we'll spend all of our time on the lowest one.
00:33:09.600
It seems like there's definitely a disproportionate thing.
00:33:24.420
which is obviously the school system is not serving a lot of communities,
00:33:33.800
If you have more crime, you have more police action.
00:33:37.120
Just everything falls apart from that one thing,
00:33:40.420
and that's, of course, caused by the teachers' unions
00:33:50.140
So nobody ever made working on your smallest problem successful.
00:33:58.120
Whoever, you know, is there a long history of minor violence working?
00:34:03.800
There's a long history of major violence working.
00:34:16.220
But what case has violence worked in individual cases?
00:34:20.760
Like where I'll just shoot this guy or I'll kill this person.
00:34:26.280
That just feels like the worst strategy in the world.
00:34:37.880
that people will do things for you for nothing,
00:34:43.540
It's very similar to the idea of abundance versus a zero-sum world,
00:34:57.960
They're asking somebody else to give them stuff.
00:35:02.600
But that's the opposite of any strategy anybody's ever made work.
00:35:09.220
I do something for you, and something will come back to me.
00:35:11.620
Forcing you to give me stuff with no end in sight,
00:35:15.840
because I can never get enough to be equal to you,
00:35:22.680
but in the long term, it's a terrible strategy.
00:35:25.580
How about developing systems that ignore human motivation,
00:35:38.700
You can have a little socialism on top of capitalism,
00:35:41.860
but they've never worked in their pure form anywhere,
00:35:51.980
they have leaders, but they don't seem to be present?
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In other words, I couldn't even give you the name
00:36:28.020
Until you have a leader who can solidify demands,
00:36:32.960
How about ignoring free markets and school choice?
00:36:41.240
A lot of the Black Lives Matter stuff comes from believing the news,
00:36:45.780
that there's some kind of epidemic of black people being hunted and shot by police.
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then you believe that's a problem and you orient yourself to fixing that problem.
00:37:01.520
you understood that their business model causes them to make things look worse than they are,
00:37:11.900
it would be a better strategy to look at the data, etc.
00:37:17.880
The obvious outcome of doing literally everything wrong is segregation.
00:37:27.160
When you see these news stories about all the rich people who are moving out of New York City,
00:37:37.280
Maybe you have to be a certain age for this to happen.
00:37:40.940
This isn't exactly about rich people moving to where it's safe.
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This is a lot about rich white people moving away from black people.
00:38:01.200
let's say, politically correct sounding answers.
00:38:04.980
They'd say, well, there's too much crime and it's unsafe, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:38:17.280
let's say, politically allied with the black world.
00:38:25.020
the very people who were probably packing up and leaving New York City
00:38:28.340
would be the greatest advocates for the black community.
00:38:43.060
in the sense that if you can help the black community,
00:38:53.620
now that they're moving out of the city that they love,
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I feel like you've converted them into racists.
00:39:02.460
that they're just getting away from black people.
00:39:23.760
It's not mind-reading if you present it as speculation.