Some idiot in a van crashed into a voter registration tent in a Florida shopping mall, and no one knows if he was aiming at them. Or was he aiming at a neo-Nazi? And why do extremists have a hard time identifying themselves?
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00:00:54.160So, ah, sublime, let's talk about the news, and stuff, stuff in the news.
00:01:08.240Well, there's a big story about some idiot in a white van who crashed into a voter, a GOP voter registration tent in a shopping center in Florida.
00:01:25.180Now, as luck would have it, he did not kill anybody, but apparently he wasn't that far away from killing anybody.
00:01:31.520This is one of those stories that you sort of had to be there to know, you know, if you were there, could you know in advance, I mean, or could you know by observing, that he did or did not intend to hurt people?
00:01:46.060So, one report is that he got pretty close to somebody, but I don't know if that person was jumping out of the way and was barely missed, or if, you know, he aimed his truck at the objects and not the people.
00:02:00.180So, we'll find out, but I'm not sure it makes it that much better if he was aiming at their tent.
00:02:07.500Apparently, the guy gets out that he's making all kinds of, he took a video of it and gave them the finger, so it was clearly political.
00:02:14.480But then we see his mugshot, and you look at the mugshot, and you say to yourself,
00:02:22.580okay, I'm tired of pretending that I don't see the correlation.
00:07:07.920Now, you have to accept that in the political realm, the word hoax is being used very broadly for something that's not quite right, something that's not true.
00:07:17.240It doesn't necessarily mean that there's a prankster behind it who's running a practical joke on you.
00:07:23.720You know, we've sort of morphed the word hoax from the original meaning to just mean there's something not right, doesn't add up.
00:07:30.220You know, somebody's trying to get rich off it in general, that sort of thing.
00:07:35.220And if you were to look at it that way, there is, objectively speaking, let's just say the Paris Accords.
00:07:42.360Because if you just looked at that, that looks like a hoax, again, in the general sense, not of a prankster playing a trick, but of something that didn't add up.
00:07:53.680It didn't make sense to be a part of it, wasn't helping anything.
00:07:57.320It was costing us money, but it wasn't helping anything, except, you know, the argument is in some leadership way it would make a difference, but not really.
00:08:05.680So Trump's opinion of climate change is, first of all, not what it's being presented, because there's a really big difference between saying the science is a hoax, which he didn't say, I don't know what he thinks, I'm just telling you what he said, versus saying climate change, a lot of it is a hoax.
00:08:28.200Because the whole topic is not just the science, it's the prediction models that are a little less dependable, probably, than the science.
00:08:38.340There's the economic models that are even less dependable, and then there's the politics.
00:08:43.800If you look at the politics and the models and stuff, saying that a lot of that looks like a hoax, that's pretty reasonable.
00:08:51.780There's no departure from science whatsoever to say that, because it's not even a comment about science.
00:08:58.200So Bloomberg shows that with the intention of showing that Trump is anti-science.
00:09:07.580And then it says, and here's the ridiculous part, and one of the things that politicians have to do is create content that matches and paces the people they're trying to reach.
00:09:23.460So I'm not going to say that this is necessarily Mike Bloomberg's personal private opinion, but it's something that he approved to put in an ad.
00:09:33.180And it says in the ad, after mocking Trump for his opinion, it said, Mike Bloomberg knows his science.
00:14:44.140I've been watching him for a long time, since before the election, after the election, including last night, his comments about the impeachment, his comments about the debates.
00:14:55.660I just can't find any Trump derangement syndrome at all.
00:15:00.740But how in the world could he live and operate in that world and be immune when everyone around him, obviously, is deeply infected with TDS?
00:15:20.720I probably shouldn't say this in public.
00:15:23.680So I apologize to you, Van Jones, in advance, if you would wish I had not.
00:15:30.740But I'm just going to put this out here.
00:15:33.060And the only people who are going to really understand this is people who have had a similar situation.
00:15:38.060I predict that at some time in his life, maybe not recently, but at some time maybe in his younger life, Van Jones experienced some hallucinogens.
00:15:48.880Now, when I said that, all of you who have never taken a hallucinogenic drug don't know what I mean.
00:16:00.180Everybody who has knows exactly what I just said.
00:16:17.100Now, I mean this totally as a compliment.
00:16:20.340As you know, I'd like to see some kinds of hallucinogens legal because they're greatly implicated in helping people with various mental health problems, solving addictions, all kinds of good stuff.
00:16:32.060But one of their benefits is that you only have to do it once, and you can start seeing the filters of life.
00:16:40.580The filters of life are the people who get caught in a little mental prison, and then they can only see the world through one filter.
00:16:49.000And they think that their one filter is reality.
00:16:54.740If you have one experience with hallucinogens, you experience living a world through a different filter, even temporarily.
00:17:02.440And when you're done, you always remember it.
00:17:06.500Now, you don't see the world the same way as you saw it when you were doing the hallucinogen.
00:17:10.840But what you come away from is the understanding that you could have a completely wrong or different view of the world, and you can still operate.
00:17:21.940You can still eat and procreate and go to work and everything else.
00:17:27.480So if you had never had that experience, and you were surrounded with people who said, you know, the world is this one way.
00:17:34.840This President Trump is an existential threat.
00:17:41.280Well, if your entire experience of life was that there's just this one reality and the smart people can see it and the dumb people can't, you would buy into the majority view.
00:17:53.560It's the most natural thing you would do.
00:17:55.440You would go with the people around you.
00:17:57.200It's like, oh, everybody's seeing the world the same way.
00:18:05.420But time and time again, Van Jones, surrounded by TDS, I mean, just, he's like right in the middle of this boiling cauldron of insanity, and he's not affected.
00:18:42.800But if you see the world through two different filters at two different times, and you come to realize the subjectivity of your experience, it's easier to see past other false filters and know that they're more of a lifestyle choice.
00:18:58.440They could be a mental prison, et cetera.
00:19:01.160Here's what, here's how Van Jones described this in his own words, roughly speaking.
00:19:20.820Now, listen to how much this sounds like two movies playing on one screen, but it's a slightly different version.
00:19:27.200And his examples of fantasy football that the Democrats are playing, according to him, are that, remember when Trump first got elected, there was all that talk that they would throw out the Electoral College results?
00:22:50.060It's a special kind of existential threat that disguises itself for the first four years as a continuous flow of good news, meaning that the country is in good shape.
00:23:02.680And so, the people who believe that Trump is an existential threat, I would say to them, I can kind of see what you meant three or four years ago.
00:23:15.300Remember, by election day, we'll have four continuous years of a Trump administration.
00:23:21.780If he's an existential threat, wouldn't we see some signs of that?
00:23:27.840You know, it's one thing to say, this is a big unknown.
00:23:32.380You know, the election of President Trump.
00:23:34.600On day one, when he's sworn in, it's a pretty big unknown.
00:23:38.780So, you would expect, in the face of unknown, unknowns, that people would have different opinions.
00:23:45.440Because they're just saying, you know, they're predicting with their biases or their preferences or their fantasies, whatever.
00:23:51.700So, fairly reasonable, fairly reasonable to be afraid of President Trump on his first day of office.
00:23:58.980I disagreed, I had a different opinion, and I had a strong, different opinion.
00:24:04.600But I don't think it was crazy to be afraid of the unknown.
00:24:09.200Because he did talk, you know, he did talk in a way that people hadn't seen, people found it scary.
00:29:29.380There's no better example than this one, that Warren and Bernie Sanders want to radically change the economy
00:29:37.420at a time when the economy is doing better than it has ever done.
00:29:41.360If you were good at risk management, would you ever take something that's operating better than it has ever worked and change it completely?
00:29:51.760You could argue completely, but let's say a big change.
00:29:59.060I don't think there's anybody who would make a big change to something that's working perfectly.
00:30:04.280Now, the exception to that would be, let's say you're in business and you make a good product and it's better than your competition's product.
00:30:13.860In that case, you know your competition is going to catch up soon.
00:30:18.520So in that case, you actually would make a big change because you anticipate that your competition will match you.
00:30:24.360So you'd better cannibalize your own product and make a big change.
00:30:29.760It's like, oh, yeah, our old one was dominating the market, but we're still going to throw it away.
00:30:35.340Because if we don't, the competition's going to catch us.
00:30:38.640So they throw away their own product, even though it's the best one in the market, to try to make an even better one.
00:30:45.280Now, in business, you have to do that because you can depend on competition pretty much 100% of the time.
00:30:51.300But when you're talking about the American economy, well, we have sort of a general competition with China and other countries,
00:30:59.520but we're beating all of them and probably will continue to because we have a superior system.
00:31:05.320And I think that's a really big difference.
00:37:34.760Now, of course, these are generalities.
00:37:37.000So most people never change their mind, no matter what the evidence is.
00:37:40.900So most Democrats will just vote Democrat and feel the same way they always feel.
00:37:45.000But for the small sliver of persuadables, they suddenly found themselves from, yeah, the government's bad, the big business, to, do you have any complaints about your job?
00:37:57.180Bob, you personally, just you personally, don't talk about other people, not employed, don't tell me that other people are being discriminated against.
00:38:32.740People understand that if the system is giving them low unemployment, they can kind of change jobs.
00:38:40.720It's pretty easy to change jobs in this economy.
00:38:44.980So if you haven't changed jobs, if you haven't done what you need to do, if you haven't taken those courses to get that promotion, it's kind of on you.
00:38:54.740So we have what I would call a Republican-biased situation, which Republicans, by philosophy, are, you have a problem?
00:53:54.420But I'm guessing he didn't have a specific outcome in mind.
00:53:58.020He just knew what the salt salesman knew.
00:54:02.080That if I do this good thing and ask nothing in return, something good might happen.
00:54:07.320But I don't think he necessarily did it for that reason.
00:54:10.420I think he just understands the world at a deeper level.
00:54:14.380And the reason I mention ethnicity is this is the following point.
00:54:17.980I've often thought that one of the biggest forms of, I would call it almost, what's the word, industrial racism or sort of built-in racism.
00:54:36.160Is that if you're born a typical white kid and you've got a successful white family, you're getting all this advice.
00:54:44.280You know, just being born in a family where you've got entrepreneurs and people who are, you know, going to college and stuff.
00:54:51.020You're just going to sort of pick up advice.
00:54:53.600And that's got to be a tremendous advantage over somebody who has some different situation and they don't get the benefit of that, you know, learning things by osmosis.
00:55:04.920And I've often thought that there should be some kind of a class or a lesson.
00:55:10.480It doesn't have to be for, you know, African-Americans specifically, but as a group, they may have less access to people who have already made it.
00:55:20.680And that's part of the sort of intrinsic bias of our society is that there's some people just don't have access to mentors.
00:55:27.400So Dr. Fung-chus, either by being smart or possibly he had some good experiences with family members who were also successful, is on to this secret.
00:55:44.280You know, I would imagine that if he has kids, I don't know if he has, or he has them someday, they're going to have the benefit of his experience.
00:55:52.400And by osmosis, they'll learn what he did and maybe pick up some tricks.
00:55:57.900How could you expand that to, let's say, inner cities, people who really needed it?
00:56:02.940When I wrote my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, I was thinking in those terms.
00:56:09.320But I don't think that book necessarily cracks every community.
00:56:13.740So anyway, big call out to Dr. Fung-chus for being so smart about success in particular.
00:56:23.360So thanks for that, and thanks for the help.
00:56:25.340That's all I have for today, and I will talk to you all tomorrow.