Episode 1595 Scott Adams: Talking About a Deal With Russia, and Evaluating a Rogue Doctor's Credibility
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 27 minutes
Words per Minute
147.0336
Summary
Join Scott Adams as he talks about a catfishing scam, Cher's photo being used by catfishers, and why people don't recognize Cher because they don't know who she is because she's wearing a mask.
Transcript
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the best thing that ever happened to you.
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Yep, it's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and it's going to be lit today, off the hook.
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It'll be provocative, entertaining, possibly change your life.
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And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind,
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filling with your favorite liquid, and I know you like coffee, some of you.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day,
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the thing that makes everything better, including the pandemic.
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It's called The Simultaneous Sip, and it happens an hour ago.
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It's like a battery that just got fully charged.
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Well, while I was waiting to go live here today, I was getting catfished.
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Got some messages from a nice woman named Christina Basham.
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And this nice woman named Christina Basham, who doesn't seem to know who I am, is interested in maybe a relationship.
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I look at her picture, and she's very beautiful, very beautiful.
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And so I texted back, and I said, you think I will believe you are my wife?
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And the catfisher said, yes, baby, I missed you.
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And I said, I am standing next to my wife right now.
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And I said, I'm married to Christina Basham, who is with me now.
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I want to find out where this catfisher is based.
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And since I got an O-L-O-L, obviously he knows, whoever it is, knows that I know it's a scam.
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But anyway, if you didn't know it, my wife's photo from social media is widely used on social media by catfishers.
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And, you know, about once every two weeks ago or so, we get these disturbed messages from people who say, but I've been sending you money for years.
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No, you've been sending money to a photograph with somebody else.
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She was walking out of a movie theater and saw this beautiful young couple and asked if she could take their picture just because they were such a good-looking young couple.
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So she takes her picture, posted on social media, and it became a big viral sensation.
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She said, when we were coming out of a movie, I saw a beautiful couple.
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I had my mask on, so they didn't know who I was.
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It could be that they didn't recognize her, this 20-something beautiful young couple.
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It could be they didn't recognize Cher because she had her mask on.
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The other possibility is that they're a young couple who have never heard of Cher.
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How many people in their 20s even would recognize Cher?
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And, you know, I feel I can speak to this phenomenon because there aren't too many people, you know, in high school who could name Dilbert as a comic strip either.
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But I like her little blind spot that the reason they didn't recognize her is because she had a mask on.
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You've never heard of the Dilbert comic strip, youngster?
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Their hearts are fluttering because there's some news that is, oh, it's just like candy for their hearts.
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And it is that the lawsuit brought by Dominion, the election voting company, they're bringing a lawsuit alleging that Fox News personalities, including Tucker Carlson, Janine Perero, Sean Hannity, and their on-air guests, spread lies about fraud in the 2020 election that hurt Dominion's business.
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It's one of several lawsuits that they're doing against right-wing or right-leaning entities, I guess.
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One is that the opinion people brought experts on and talked in a way that suggested there was a problem and hurt their business.
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The other is that the news people, or at least producers or people in the decision-making chain, were probably aware of information they did not report that would have been more complementary to Dominion.
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One is that the opinion people said things that they feel are untrue.
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And, number two, that there may have been extra information that Fox News, collectively or individually, was aware of that would have been important to give you context to the story that was left out.
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So, does anybody want to make a prediction how this lawsuit goes?
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I'm feeling pretty confident about this prediction.
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I mean, the total amount I know about the law could be put in a thimble within a thimble.
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Now, I don't know that it will be dismissed or thrown out.
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But we have seen that the Rachel Maddow defense is that it's just an opinion.
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The defense that opinion people giving opinions can't be wrong in a libelous way has already passed muster.
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Beyond that, Facebook's lawsuit, they're claiming that even their fact-checkers are opinions.
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So, not only are opinions opinions, but fact-checkers are just opinions.
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So, in that world, where those two things seem to be somewhat established-ish, is there any way that opinion people are going to, you know, somehow be found guilty?
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Now, I don't know what the standard is for this.
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So, that means they don't need a full majority, do they?
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They just need to, or the standard is lower than a criminal case.
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So, I suppose anything can happen, but I would say the precedent has largely been set that opinions are opinions and facts are opinions.
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Now, what if it's true, suppose they can come up with an email or a set of emails, just hypothetically,
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that would suggest that Fox News was aware of more information than they reported,
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and that information could have been good for Dominion's side of things.
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Do you think that the courts will set a standard, as a precedent, that if you leave out some relevant facts to your reporting, you can be sued?
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The entire news landscape is the left leaving out stuff, you know, that would be good for the right,
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and the right leaving out stuff that would be good for the left.
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If you create that standard, it will destroy the entire news industry.
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Do you think that if Trump has sued CNN for the fine people hoax, you wouldn't find any internal communication saying that they knew that they'd clipped off part of the video to turn it into a hoax?
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Yeah, you might even find a digital communication from me to somebody at CNN telling them that very thing.
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I mean, I don't know how precedent works exactly in this domain,
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but I don't see how you could possibly have a standard that if you left something out, you're guilty, you know, just for that.
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Even if you totally knew you were doing it and why you did it.
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We just, it would destroy the entire news industry.
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There would be nothing left, which would be funny.
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Apparently, there is some point in this process in which Dominion would get access to Fox News' communications,
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which I assume would include from outside people.
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Outside people who are communicating with Fox News hosts,
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Because I do have a history that I have communicated with, you know,
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Do any of you use encrypted apps so you can stay out of trouble?
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How many of you use some kind of an encrypted app for communicating?
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If you're using an encrypted app because you think it's safe,
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They are the least safe thing you could ever do.
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Here are the ways your encrypted communications can be corrupted.
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Number one, the government always had a back door.
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How do you know the government doesn't have a back door?
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It would almost be an abdication of responsibility
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if they didn't have back doors to all the encrypted apps.
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Now, I'm not worried about the encryption being broken at the moment.
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can be captured on your device before it gets encrypted.
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Because anything that you're typing could be captured by a virus.
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A hacker could install something on your phone or device
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that would capture your message before it even got to the encrypted part, right?
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And I imagine they could take a screenshot or something.
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And then it's on the destination phone and it's on the screen.
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and it's definitely corruptible by some government entity.
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They would lie to you because that's their job.
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In this instance, it would be their job to lie to you.
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So if they're doing their job, you wouldn't know.
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And no matter how much trust you put in the encryption,
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It's not the encryption you have to worry about.
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that you would be in serious trouble if it were outed.
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I wouldn't do it under any condition ever once.
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And it doesn't matter if you're running for office or not.
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You've seen my messages in the news, haven't you?
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I'll bet you've seen a private message of mine in the fucking news.
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Now, of course, you have to take all fusion good news with a grain of salt,
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because for 30 years we've had fusion breakthroughs that never reached any conclusion.
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But apparently the industry has been chugging along,
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and they are making incremental breakthroughs all the time.
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But, you know, it seems to be, as Sam Altman told me a few years ago,
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where they just have to figure out how to iterate quickly.
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and I don't know the science behind this, I'll just read this.
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For the first time, a fusion reaction has achieved a record,
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So they're saying that they've, you know, achieved some fusion breakthrough.
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But I think what they really achieved, if you read the article,
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if you read the article, what they really achieved is a way to view it,
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which apparently was something they couldn't do before.
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There's all these, you know, super hot reactions,
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you know, how do you know what's happening in there so you can adjust it?
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and they can know if they're adding more or subtracting more.
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And apparently that just opens up a big, you know,
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So I think this is further evidence that it's an engineering problem.
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Is there some Cernovich news today that I don't know about?
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Anyway, this breakthrough was just down the road from where I am right now,
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at Lawrence Livermore Lab, practically walking distance.
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It feels kind of real to me because it's literally, you know,
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have created maybe the most important technology of all time.
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I heard from a German high school teacher today,
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He said, I taught the user interface for reality.
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But I talked about how to use different filters or frames to view reality
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And Connor says he taught that lesson to his German high school today.
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He said, first, you must accept the frame at least as a filter,
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And then he said he gave examples about religion,
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is that something I was doing here is being taught in high school in Germany
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But it turns out that a lot of things that I do get taught in schools.
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So a lot of the Dilbert material has been packaged up to teach in business schools.
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So there are lots of business school classes there.
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I think there are some psychology-related classes that use Dilbert as a lot of examples.
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and then the systems versus goals, the talent stacking,
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I know my book, God's Debris, is assigned often in college courses.
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So weirdly, I have all these connections to education that I wasn't expecting.
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So the Salvation Army took a real big hit on their donations
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because they had some kind of a guide they put out within the Salvation Army
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that said that white culture has challenges and needs to overcome, among other things.
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including they have to get over their denial of racism
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So how did that work out for the donations to the Salvation Army?
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So who was it who said everything woke turns to shit?
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There will never be a more accurate predictive rule.
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Every time you see it, it's destroying something.
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I've told you about malicious compliance, right?
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The idea that you can destroy something by embracing it
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How would you do that in the case of this wokeness
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and the idea that we should stop denying racism
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and that white people need to stop being colorblind?
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I would go so far as to say we should also put out guides
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and especially white people who also are discriminated against.
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until everybody who is being discriminated for any reason
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Now, if those reasons are things they can't change,
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such as being unattractive, ugly, old, or white.
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And so I think the best way to deal with the fact
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That's a big problem, but it's only one of them.
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when there were easy ways to wake it up even more?
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I've told you before that the solution to all the wokeness is,
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So that if somebody says, hey, I think something's happening
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because I'm black, instead of saying, no, that's not happening,
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You want to embrace it and take it further and say,
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absolutely, you are being discriminated in so many ways,
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If you're arguing that it doesn't exist, that's just a bad argument.
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It certainly exists in the sense of the teachers' unions.
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And surely it exists in other ways throughout society,
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It's true that short people don't get promoted as much.
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It's true that if you have any kind of a difference,
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you're ugly, you're overweight, you're whatever,
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And I think that the best way we should deal with each other
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is to acknowledge, instead of ignoring the color
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or ignoring the difference, we should just go right at it.
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We should be able to have a conversation every minute.
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I wonder if that happened because you're black.
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I wonder if that happened because you're short.
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I wonder if that would have been the same outcome
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yep, I lost two careers for being white and male.
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but there's a whole backstory there in my corporate days.
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My bosses told me directly they couldn't promote me
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Why can't I be on their side if I had the same experience
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in one of the most important elements of society,
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took that lunch from the congressional break room,
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and therefore, President Trump is guilty of insurrection.
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don't have to have any connection to the point.
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is connected to prove that Trump is an insurrectionist.
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I'm going to have to say he's an insurrectionist,
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If you're coming to us from a non-American country,
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where a little elf doll is put on the shelf during Christmas.
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Rasmussen has a poll that says the House of Representatives,
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30% of them said that it's either excellent or good,
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21% of the public said that the Senate was excellent or good.
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because isn't the approval of Congress in general,
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So this is the weird way that people answer poll questions.
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If he asked them to approve of Congress in general,
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So I don't know which number is closer to reality here.
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And then Rasmussen asked about Build Back Better.
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How many people do you think know what's in it?
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I've read a number of articles where things are mentioned.
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Jonathan Giglio wants to share this with the rest of you.
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all the other problems in the world are solved.