Episode 1633 Scott Adams: Let's Follow the Science and Wag the Dog Because We Are Mostly Idiots
Episode Stats
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Summary
A police officer is shot and killed in New York City, and it's being treated as a random act of randomness. But is it really random at all? And why does this happen? And what does it have to do with race?
Transcript
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Welcome to the best thing that's ever going to happen to you.
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And some people call it Coffee with Scott Adams.
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Other people simply call it Coffee with Scott Adams.
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I don't know. Maybe everything's coming together.
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Would you ever settle for simply being brilliant and unusually sexy?
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Maybe some other audience, CNN's audience, for example.
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And watch what happens when you take a cup or mug or a glass.
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A tank or a gel is a side of the canteen, drink a flask, a vessel of any kind,
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You've probably heard of the rash of poltergeist.
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We had one poltergeist who was apparently operating an SUV.
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So the governor of New York just announced, she said,
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last night a shot from an illegal gun took the life of a police officer.
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But we don't want to ignore the fact that a bullet and a gun apparently colluded with each other.
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In which case, if I'm reading between the lines correctly,
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the bullet decided sort of on its own to fly out of the gun.
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And the free will of the bullet caused it to fly out of the gun
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and apparently into the body of a person who tragically died.
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So I feel like they buried the lead on this story, if you know what I mean.
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But I don't think you can ignore that bullets and guns are colluding.
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how fair is the economy to black and Hispanic voters?
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How many of you, what percentage would you guess before I tell you,
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think that it's somewhat or more than somewhat unfair for black and Hispanics?
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What percent said it's unfair for black and Hispanics?
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So 48% thought things were not fair in terms of the economy specifically.
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Why was there no similar question for white people?
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Because if you ask anybody, hey, is whatever group you belong to being discriminated against,
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All of you left-handed Elbonians, let me ask you.
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Do you think the economy is stacked against you?
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Yeah, I think that economy is stacked against the left-handed Elbonians, of which I am one.
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So I'm always wary of this kind of question because I don't think we're in a point where
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you can leave out white people from their own question.
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I think this needs to be, how many white people think that they are disadvantaged?
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It might not be 48%, but it would be a lot higher than you think.
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There's a new documentary called A Coup in Plain Sight, which is a January 6th kind of thing,
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trying to turn the, or at least hard in the narrative, not turn it, but hard in the narrative,
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We have all the evidence now that there were, the Trump administration was trying to put
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together some counterfeit documents to get fake electors seated to steal the election.
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Let me tell you one way to know a fake narrative.
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They assume people's intentions, and they assume them the dumb way.
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Now, it is true that you do have to kind of make assumptions about other people's intentions
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just to operate in life, but we're not very good at it, right?
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And if you make an assumption about somebody's intentions that are, let's say, obvious,
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For example, what is your intention for having a job?
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Well, I can't read your mind, but it probably has something to do with making money.
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So if you're reading somebody's mind, and it's the most obvious explanation, you're unreasonably
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strong territory, even though you could be wrong.
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But what happens if you read somebody's mind, and you choose the least likely explanation?
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The narrative for the January 6th is that the Trump administration intended to overthrow a
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Because there's no documentation to that effect.
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But could it have been their internal thinking that the election was fair, but they wanted to
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We live in a world where it just seems like everything's possible these days.
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Now compare the possibility of that to the other option.
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The other option is that they thought it was actually a fraudulent election, and they thought
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Is it more likely that people who lose an election, they thought they would win?
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Remember, I don't think there's any question that Trump thought he would win, right?
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It looked like it was heading in that direction.
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And there's no question that he's the kind of person who never believes he lost.
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Because those are just normal assumptions about people, right?
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But isn't it more reasonable to assume that he actually thought he lost and something needs
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Completely ordinary that somebody would suspect something wrong happened because it looked like
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If it looked like it, I don't know, probably 70 million people thought that something looked
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70 million people probably thought, you know, I might accept the outcome, but I'm not sure
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Now, they might be right or they might be wrong.
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I'm not giving you an opinion of what happened.
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I'm telling you that half the country thought there was a problem or something like that.
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So if the president was in the 30%, and you would expect he would be, to think there was
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some problem with the election, that is in every way the opposite of their narrative.
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So to make an assumption that feeds the narrative, they have to make the least likely assumption
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The least likely assumption is that people working for Trump thought they were doing an actual
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Everything that they wrote down, they probably thought would be found eventually.
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Like, and remember, these are not, we're not talking about Che Guevara here, right?
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You know, if you had like revolutionaries, you know, if Colin Kaepernick was there in the
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government, you'd say, oh, possibly a revolutionary, you know, he might take it a little further.
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You know, he would be on the other side, of course.
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But just using him as an example of an extremist, well, he's not an extremist.
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Not an extremist at all, but just somebody who would be more, let's say, counter-culturally
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But the people who are allegedly in charge of this coup in plain sight are just nerds
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Like the least likely person who would risk their entire life and freedom to like forge
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a document that somebody's going to find out for sure, or probably.
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That's a good, I feel like they were all trying to be on the team and support the team and do
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But I would suspect the most likely explanation is they actually thought something was wrong.
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And they were trying to find some way to fix it and couldn't.
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They would pass their own internal standards for what's legal and safe enough, I guess.
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But apparently Olympic sponsors are sort of in hiding.
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What we normally expect about this time when it's getting close to the Olympics, you expect
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the big sponsors to start bragging about their sponsorship.
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When the Olympics were upcoming, all the sponsors would say, proud sponsor of the 2022 Olympics.
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Well, it turns out that Visa, Coca-Cola, and others are just going silent on it.
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But just maybe not mentioning it, how would you like to be in charge of advertising and
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And your CEO calls you in and says, I understand we put $80 million into advertising for the
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And so far, what you're doing is staying really silent.
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Because we don't want to associate with the Olympics.
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We put $80 million into the Olympics to associate with the Olympics.
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But what you're telling me now is that we've spent the $80 million, but our best play is
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to try to get as much distance as we can from the Olympics.
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So, and apparently there are a bunch of Omicron breakouts with people who were going to work
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So China's having a pretty big Omicron problem.
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But the athletes themselves who are in, quote, the bubble, I guess they create an impenetrable
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And once you're on the inside, nobody else can get in.
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But the, that's, if you've got three dozen people with Omicron in the general vicinity
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of the Olympics, how in the world are they going to keep the Omicron from sweeping through
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I can't imagine that this isn't anything but a disaster.
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Why are we not talking about the Olympics as what it is, a gigantic health crisis and a
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And yes, 72 positive cases of COVID among the people who are going to work on the Olympics.
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And so even CNN is on the skeptical side of why are we still, or at least it looks like
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they're transitioning to, hey, why aren't we an endemic already out of the pandemic?
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And they asked Fauci, CNN said, I think it was Anderson Cooper, why should people with
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natural immunity still be forced to take the vaccine?
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And Fauci said, quote, I don't have a really firm answer to you on that.
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But he went on to say that we don't know if the natural immunity will be enduring the
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So we don't know if the natural immunity will last.
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So we don't know if it's as good as the vaccinations that definitely don't last.
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We're not confident about the natural immunity because we don't know how long it will last.
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And that's the important thing to compare to the vaccinations that we know don't last.
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Now, I get that we would like to have more information, but couldn't we wait for that?
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But, you know, if it turns out that six months from now, the natural immunity wasn't what we hoped it would be, couldn't we just change our minds?
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And by the way, if it's six months from now, we're probably, you know, away from the problem pretty far anyway.
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So, um, I think Fauci is, um, he's on pretty, pretty thin ice there.
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Now, I was going to come up with a name for this effect, but it goes like this.
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In the old days, the scientists would manage the science, and then there would be a whole different group of people who would manage public reactions, you know, public relations.
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So that would be politicians and PR people and stuff like that.
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During the pandemic, the scientists started managing public opinion.
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When the scientists abandoned science to become public relations people and basically to manipulate us into a certain thing,
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what happened to the guardians of science when they became PR people?
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You had to do your own, I don't want to use the F word, unnecessarily.
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They made the public become scientists because the scientists turned into PR people and brainwashers.
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Now, of course, you know, there's no universal statement that's true for all things and all people.
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Am I wrong that the scientists became PR people and then the public had to become scientists?
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The scientists, which is not a good look, right?
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When the public became the scientists, how did we do?
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I think, you know, I think the public had tons of wrong ideas, tons of wrong ideas.
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But weirdly, I think it would have ended up not that far away from where science took us, right?
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The actual practical difference of our different beliefs, many of which were fake.
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Even if we had pursued our fake understanding of the world, we would have been about the same place, probably.
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So it's hard to know because there's no way to compare that.
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Maybe we need what I would call untouchable doctors.
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Do you remember the movie The Untouchables, what that was about?
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The problem was that you couldn't use local, back in, you know, early history of the United States,
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you couldn't use local law enforcement to stop the big organized gangs because the organized gangs had too much money.
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So they would bribe enough police officers that the regular police couldn't do anything.
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So the government had to send in a special group of people who just didn't have any local connections.
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And it wasn't until you had unbribable law enforcement that they could make a dent.
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Now we have this situation where we don't trust our doctors because we imagine,
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I don't know how true this is, but we all imagine that big pharma can influence at least the hospitals,
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and then the hospitals can influence the doctors because the doctors want to keep their hospital privileges, etc.
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Don't we need doctors who are not beholden to anyone for whatever reason?
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They have a benefit that they can achieve even if they're wrong.
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So you don't want people to be able to benefit by being wrong.
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And the rogues definitely benefit by being wrong because they get the attention, etc.
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Then nobody will remember they were wrong and they'll be famous long after.
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So even if they're wrong, their business model still works to be a rogue.
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What you need is some people who are rogues before the problem.
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You need some people who already were outside the control of the system before you even had a question to give them.
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You don't want them signing up to be rogues on their own.
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You want to have an established group of untouchables.
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A Wharton professor asked people in the Wharton class,
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what did they think was the average income of Americans?
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But I don't think average is good because the billionaires skew it.
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So the income at which there are as many people above that line as there are below.
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What would you imagine is the median income in America for one person, one job?
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I'm seeing guesses on locals from in the 40s and 50s, 35 area.
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Yeah, you're all, actually you're all in the right area.
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So if you guess, you know, 30s to 50s, you're in the right area at least.
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25% of the students believe that the average income, not median, but average,
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A quarter of the class in this elite institution, a quarter of them,
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believe that the average income was over 100,000 per year in America.
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But most of you got the right answer, so you're better than the Wharton kids on that.
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So CNN is complaining about the rally yesterday.
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So there's a rally against the mandates in D.C.
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And CNN's take on it is that there were too many references to Nazism.
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And Robert Kennedy Jr. apparently compared the vaccine policies in the U.S.
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to a totalitarian state and made an Anne Frank.
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Now, many of you have not taken what's called media training, which I have,
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which is how not to do things like this in public.
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I can't give you the whole media training course right now,
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but I'm going to simplify it to just one pro tip that you can bank on.
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One thing that I think you can generally consider
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that would always be a good idea in terms of public speaking.
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Comparing things to the Holocaust is ridiculous enough.
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But the moment you throw Anne in the mix, you've gone too far.
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Do you know what is the correct way to make an Anne Frank reference
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when you're not, not, talking about the Holocaust itself?
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How about the right time to invoke Anne Frank is fucking never?
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How about that time you think you found an exception
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and this is the one time that maybe Anne Frank is...
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How about if the story is about somebody named Anne Frank, coincidentally?
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And what if this person, who is also coincidentally named Anne Frank,
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was also hiding in an attic against the vaccine mandates?
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What if there was somebody literally named Anne Frank
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hiding literally in her attic in the United States
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because she was afraid of the vaccine mandate police?
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You do not make an Anne Frank reference no matter what.
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But it's ironic that CNN would be the one complaining about it
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because they're the ones who use Holocaust references just continually.
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you know, I think maybe we're on the cusp of our mandates being lifted.
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in its attempt to make their students the stupidest students in the whole world,
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have decided that cloth masks are not good enough
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and every student will have to wear non-cloth masks that have a nose wire,
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you know, that little thing that you form fitted around your nose,
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including participating in athletic activities.
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what group of people would have been behind this?
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So do you think that the scientists were following the science
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and that the school district is following the scientists
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or is it possible that this has more to do with narrative and PR
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Well, I would say the scientists in this case, unfortunately,
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take all the furniture out of the teacher's lounge
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You don't even have to leave it and make a statement.
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But if we just went into every L.A. school district
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I thought yesterday that would be the solution.
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did joint military, what do you call it, tests?
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I don't know, he quit or got fired or whatever,
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Because it looks like they're going to sweep 2024