Episode 1839 Scott Adams - Sam Harris & ExCIA Chief General Hayden Make Public Confession About Trump

good morning everybody and welcome to another highlight of civilization it's called coffee with scott adams and um i don't want to get you too excited but today double whiteboard that's right not just one double-sided i know it's almost too much to handle but we'll we'll do it together together we will handle this awesomeness and i think we can climb this mountain but first we need some fortifications and all you need for that is a copper mug or a glass of tanker chelsea in a canteen jugger flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure it's the dopamine of the day it's the thing that makes everything better it's called the simultaneous sip and it's happening now go ah sublime oh so good all right we're going to do a little test a little intelligence test here let's see if the locals people can beat the people on youtube platform who are watching now all right it's a question for all of you it's going to be based on erasmus and poll and people were asked if they agreed with this statement this was something that trump had said at one point he said quote there is a group of politicized thugs at the top of the fbi or using the fbi as joe biden's personal gestapo what percentage of people strongly disagreed with trump strongly disagreed whoa you're pretty good pretty good yeah the answer is uh uh 26 who strongly disagreed 26 strongly disagree that joe biden is using the fbi as his personal gestapo i don't have an opinion i'm just saying that's what the numbers are but at the other end actually if you added together the ones who strongly agree and the ones who agree um you get a much bigger number all right uh let's see who doesn't agree a majority see a majority now agree 53 with that statement oh actually that i'm sorry that wasn't uh trump's quote that was roger stone's quote so roger stone is the one who quoted it i i said it was trump it was stone but 53 percent of voters now agree that the fbi is run by a uh joe biden's personal gestapo now that means that means that there are a lot of independents or at least a smattering of democrats who are now in the are now on the side of thinking that the fbi is joe biden's personal gestapo i don't know anyway this the cdc who came under a great deal of criticism for their handling of the pandemic how do you think the cdc is going to respond to all the criticism so they're going to take action now they're responding to the fact that they i guess they confess they didn't do as good a job as they'd like to do what do you think they're going to do about it what what would dilbert's boss do about it what would they do about it like literally in a dilbert comic what would they do about it they would reorganize so it appeared that they had done something that's exactly what my comic would do now do you remember uh the the rule that elon musk has for tesla don't do something that could show up in a dilbert comic i've never done a comic about tesla just think about that i've never done a comic about anything that happened at tesla so apparently they take that seriously but the cdc as soon as they're being criticized they decide that their response is to reorganize i'm thinking to myself that is exactly my comic that's exactly my comic there's i wouldn't even add anything that's the joke right there so good job there cdc and making it worse all right so yesterday um based on a smart suggestion i decided to grab the domain hoax quiz.com so now i i own that domain hoaxquiz.com and it seems to me that what we need is some kind of a competitor to snopes and the other fact checkers and so you know i started with my list of you know the the top 10 hoaxes which is now up to 14 people have added to it so we've got 14 what i would consider confirmed hoaxes one of them's not quite confirmed but looks like it will be but here's my problem here is my problem i'm not willing to put the hoax quiz up unless i can do conservative hoaxes too you okay with that if i say uh seth rich being murdered by hillary clinton as a hoax you're gonna be okay with that will it because if i don't do it there's no point in doing it at all is there if i don't have conservative hoaxes on there there's no point in doing it at all it'd be a complete waste of time but if i put both of them on there then what position does that put me in it put it puts me above the news now could i pull that off probably not probably not it would be pretty tough but imagine you could create a place where people could go look and find out if the news is promoting a hoax and let's say you actually were convinced that it showed hoaxes on both sides you showed the conservative ones as well as the the left-leaning ones would that make you more uh likely to find it credible before you answer know for sure that i'm going to tell tell you things that you believe are true or hoaxes i can't help it i can't help it because we all have different opinions right so there are going to be things on that list that you think are real that i think are a hoax so you have to be okay with that can you handle it see the trouble is this is not the sort of thing you can do right okay can we agree on that you can do maybe good enough and good enough would be some kind of a maybe a guardrail on the fake news so the fake news doesn't get too far out of control but i wouldn't be it wouldn't be possible for me to be right every time no matter how how i judge it or who i bring in to help me judge it it's not really possible that i'd be right all the time should i do it anyway knowing that i would be wrong on some notable probably some big examples too i don't know what that would be but should i do it if i know i'm going to be wrong yeah see already i'm getting pushback on the seth rich here's what i'd say about seth rich there are rumors there are rumors that this happened but there's no evidence of it or no proof of it something like that i'd probably say there's no proof of it now would you be okay with that see i don't know if i could call that a hoax i could just say we don't know one way or the other so i feel like i need another category i wanted to do hoax or no hoax and keep it simple i didn't want to do the slightly true slightly not true thing but you probably get forced into it don't you because there's gonna be too many gray areas all right well i have the domain and i'll maybe uh pack at that a little bit and see if see if it gains some energy to pull me by the way this here's a little uh tip a tip on how to get motivated does anybody have trouble getting motivated to do something they know they need to do here's a tip i start lots of things that i know would be interesting or good to do and i take the first step and then sometimes i'll take the next small step but i i'm looking for the project to start pulling me right so the energy i have on day one i don't know if that's the same energy i would have if i started going on the project because sometimes you get excited then it gets boring and then you know so you've got to find a project where if you seed it you just just give it a nudge it takes on its own energy and then starts pulling you i don't know if this one will pull me i know i had enough energy to register the domain and i know i have enough energy to think about how it would be and i put on a question on on the locals platform if anybody wanted to help but i don't know if i'll yet have enough energy for it to like pull me to completion so i've got a number of projects right now that are in that state i've done something a little bit but i'm seeing which ones are going to start pulling me right now my book i'm writing i was pushing that until just recently like it was just work but more recently it got to the point where the is shaping up nicely and so as it starts to shape up it brings its own energy it's like oh wow this would be good to finish this book because it looks like it's going to be pretty good so now it's starting to pull me and i wake up this morning and think i hope i have time to write that to spend some time writing because i can't wait to can't wait to fill it down a little bit all right well uh alex jones is uh off the trump train as people are saying he's gonna i guess he wants desantis to be president he would prefer him now i don't know what alex jones will do if uh desantis doesn't run what if the only republican choice is trump will alex jones be back i don't know yeah we'll talk about sam harrison so geraldo rivera made a bold statement on twitter now i know a lot of you are sort of anti-geraldo rivera but i am so pro-geraldo i'm just totally pro-geraldo which is different from agreeing with him can can we make that distinction i love the fact that he puts himself out there i love the fact that he doesn't appear to be afraid of anything he doesn't seem to be physically afraid of anything he doesn't seem to be embarrassment wise and afraid of anything yeah he took off his shirt at age 70 or whatever it was he's my role model yeah yeah geraldo is absolutely my role model and again it has nothing to do with whether i agree or disagree with any opinions but his i guess his approach to life is one i think you should all emulate yeah if you could be as you know as let's say unafraid as he is your life would look a lot better it really would so let's try to separate whether we hate his opinion on any particular topic because i disagree with him on this particular one i'm going to talk about but i just love the fact i just love the fact that he expresses himself with no remorse here's what he said in a tweet her elder did he said whatever your politics we should all recognize liz cheney's selfless courage in standing up to the trump tidal wave wyoming republicans are going to enter a congressional career today i guess this was yesterday but nothing will wash away the role she played standing up for democracy and the constitution now i like the fact that he knew he would get absolutely crapped on today for that opinion and he still put it out there still put it out there i love that he shows his work right he gives his reasons shows his work that's all i ask of anybody if we could learn to appreciate somebody who acts the way he does even when we disagree now we would be so far ahead so far ahead all right but here's what i think about liz cheney i would i would buy into the um the selfless courage part this is geraldo's characterization um i would buy into it being a selfless act for the country under the following condition that the way she had acted had presented some kind of balance that she was open for example to let's say open to an argument on both sides and acted in a way that her rhetoric showed an openness to know to find out what happened as opposed to a captain ahab mission to kill a white whale or an orange whale in this case at what point did liz cheney say we don't know the motivation of the protesters but a harvard study just said that the vast majority of of them believed that they were saving the republic not overthrowing it now if trump was the primary persuader of the group and the group had been persuaded that they're trying to save the republic isn't that completely different than the way she has presented it so far now independent of what evidence specific evidence gets presented if you don't start with the context being right you're not an honest player so i don't know what was happening in liz cheney's head i try to be consistent about saying i don't know what people are thinking but we can say for sure that her actions did not display any balance who would disagree did her actions show that she was open to an argument and discovery or did it look like she had an opinion she was trying to just prove no matter what so you know i get her oldest point that it takes a lot of courage to go across the go against the uh mainstream and she had to know she had paid for it she had to know there would be a price right so i would get i would uh accept the fact that it's um courage so i would accept courage but i'm not so sure about selfless because i feel as though her actions strongly suggested that it was a personal it looked personal now again we can't we don't know what she's thinking but if you act in a way that doesn't have balance in a situation that just screams for balance you know you should have balance in that situation more than any situation especially if you're a republican looking at a republican if you can't have balance in that situation one has to assume that there's something else going on and and i do all right um i would like to revisit this idea um so edward edward loose tweeted this i don't know who he is but he's just somebody on twitter he twittered uh i guess he's a reporter of some kind i've covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career uh have never come across a political force more nihilistic dangerous and contemptible than today's republicans nothing close really nihilistic would be people who don't want to follow the rules don't want to follow the rules would republicans be a group that doesn't want to follow the laws and the constitution of the united states there's someone who actually is smart enough to write sentences and use twitter who believes that the most central thing about republicans that they're rule followers constitution bible the law of the land there's nothing that defines republicans more than wanting to follow the rules and making sure other people do as well nothing defines them more periods that's that's almost baked into the definition of conservative right conservative let's do it the way we've been doing it follow the rules all right but anyway this is this one person's view that that the republicans are opposite of what it looks to me and they're dangerous and contemptible okay now clearly some republicans are dangerous as some of every group are right but here is the shocking part uh general michael hayden ex-cia director uh agreed with this tweet and he said i agree and i was the cia director so the guy who was the cia director believes that republicans today are more nihilistic dangerous and contemptible than anything else around the world such as al qaeda taliban just to pick a couple of examples now i'm not going to disagree with his characterization because that's not the point the point is that we finally got a direct confession it's a direct confession in his opinion the republicans are as bad as this and that would be a complete a complete explanation of why the cia and the fbi apparently colluded for the russia collusion hoax and probably they're colluding again he says it directly that he believed that the threat of the republicans was greater than external threats so if you would be willing to you know assassinate al-qaeda what would you be willing to do to a greater threat than al-qaeda he doesn't say but i appreciate the transparency he's saying he's basically saying that there would be nothing if you read between the lines it suggests that there's nothing you wouldn't do now let me say let me say there's nothing wrong with that and a little bit i'm going to agree with sam harris and it's going to make your head just blow up i agree with general hayden that if in this one narrow sense i agree if you if you really believed that this group was as dangerous as as he apparently says he does then you would break some rules to stop him because you would murder hitler wouldn't you i would i would break a rule to murder hitler right so he's basically saying you know that the the republicans are worse than al qaeda worsen external threats so he doesn't say that he would break a rule to stop them but i think that's perfectly implied if you're the director of the cia and there's something that's like a mortal threat to your country i feel like it's implied that you might bend a rule to stop it and if you wouldn't what's wrong with you would you want anybody who wouldn't bend the rule in that case i wouldn't want to be around somebody who wouldn't bend the rules in that case um but here's the problem the fake news is what's our main problem and we're being distracted i'm going to go to the white board and i'm going to tie it all together you ready for this tying it all together here's how i see the world i see the fake news creates extremism and then the fbi encourages the extremists and then not in every case but in some notable cases such as russia collusion and uh you know there may be something with the contraband laptop so basically every time we see the people in charge who should be protecting us doing sketchy stuff it makes the extremism worse does it not so between the fake news and the fact that we don't trust the people who are supposed to be protecting us this creates a feedback loop that creates more fake news more money etc so this is the answer to the question why don't they ask the would you kill hitler question the question that the media won't ask because they make money by not asking it is if you believe the fake news if you believe what the news is saying why wouldn't you murder about republicans if you believe the news right so the news can't ask the question because they're the problems so everybody who thinks that the extremists on the left are the problem have been duped by the fake news everyone who believes that the extremists on the right are the problem have been duped by the fake news so general hayden and we'll talk about sam harris later both duped by the fake news now i don't think that either of them seem to quite grok how strong the news is its persuasive ability in other words its ability to make you believe something that absolutely couldn't be true the news is good at that i believe i i believe yesterday alone i believed two hoaxes until until i got corrected that's just yesterday i fell for two yesterday that's just one day and i fell for two hoaxes now they were on social media they weren't in the regular news but it's so easy to fall for a hoax right any if you ever see me mocking somebody from falling for a hoax you should correct me because you shouldn't mock the person for falling for a hoax you should be mad at the hoaxer because the reason that hoaxes are a thing is that they work right it's not always the fault of the person who believed it we can get better at not believing stuff but it's not really the fault of the person who believed it it's more the person who created the hoax so we have this system in which the people who are causing the problem are telling us that it's other people and we're believing them and the tell for that is that they won't ask the only question that matters the only question that matters hey democrat if you believe what you're saying about republicans would you break all the rules including an election rule to stop them from power and let me say clearly that i would i would if i believed the fake news about trump i would break a law to stop him wouldn't you if you believed it now the difference between me and general hayden and sam harris we'll talk about in a moment is that i don't i don't believe what they believe but if i did i wouldn't act the way they act i would act pretty aggressively so they have this weird dichotomy where their actions and their words are not aligned or at least they're not willing to admit it although i think sam harris came pretty close we'll talk about that in a minute all right uh i had something on the other side of this let's tie it all together oh so let's talk about sam harris and then i'll give you my test for cognitive dissonance uh we'll work up to it so here's a jeff giza tweet he asked me on twitter this question how would you rank the following forces based on their impact on today's political discord all right so which of these things do you think is causing the most political division media distrust social media algorithms foreign intel operations perverse political incentives specific corrupt political actors politicization of fed of the fed federal bureaucracy and economic shifts now all of those have an impact but the but the main one is left off the list the one that's left off the list is not it's not media mistrust our problem is not media mistrust our problem is the media it's not that i don't trust them it's that they're not trustable it's not my fault did i do something wrong by not trusting people who lie to me how's that my fault i feel like i'm doing it right but not trusting people who have a track record of lying to you feels like that's right that's right in the sweet spot right there so it's interesting how blind we can be to what's happening because and i'm i i don't mean to make fun of uh you know jeff because he's a smart observer in fact you should follow him he's a good follower on twitter it's just that no matter who you are it's so easy to lose sight that the media is actually just manipulating and hypnotizing us for their own benefit not yours and it's just so easy to lose sight of it somehow it's the public is you know we're extremists and we're not following the news and we're not doing their own research it is not our problem it might be our problem to fix but it's not we didn't cause it we're just being people all right so in my opinion um the fake news is what makes us fight and if you fix the fake news extremism would disappear it would disappear have you ever have you seen lately what the left thinks about me personally have you seen any of my social traffic lately think about the things that people have said about me almost or maybe 100 of it is based on incorrect information so there are really bad bad feelings about me but i think zero of them actually know my opinion they've heard it from somebody else or from somebody else so basically we're all suffering under insanely bad information and it's causing us to hate each other where does this bad information come from well in my case a lot of it is on social media but do you think the people on social media would be coming after me every day if they did not believe fake news let me explain if they knew what my actual opinions were they wouldn't have much problem with them or at least they'd you know disagree with an assumption but they wouldn't think i was you know hitler myself and i think that that's largely true of of all of us i believe that if you put me in a room with the leftist lefty and the rightist righty you know extremists on both sides that i could find out what information we differed on and probably bring them together the leftist left and the right is right i believe if if nobody else were in the room and i was allowed to give them accurate information i actually think i could get them on the same page no matter how left and no matter how right now the now the exception would be if they're just being crazy right if they have an interest and they're not in deep cognitive distance if they have an interest i could do it now what happens if somebody's in cognitive dissonance how do they know and how do you know well i'm going to give you an example so sam harris was on the uh triggered nomitry triggered nometry podcast which is a big big very good podcast and he said directly that trump was such a menace and especially the trump university was such an example of something that was far worse that anything biden is accused of not only not only worse than what biden may have done for sure but even worse than what biden is accused of you know accused of maybe some bad dealings with uh ukraine for example and and in sam harris's view the media suppressing the hunter laptop story to get biden elected was legitimate and he agrees that the news faking the news to keep trump out of office literally faking the news it was justified because trump is such a risk what do you think of that here's the problem did you just say to yourself damn that sam harris that that freaking sam harris that guy's there's something wrong with that guy right okay i'm gonna disagree with all of you do you know what's wrong with sam harris nothing nothing he's a victim of the news he's a victim of the news he actually believes the news or he believes some subset of the news that got him to this point so if you think the problem is with sam harris again you're being diverted the problem is the news if the news told him the truth i'm pretty sure his opinion would be different all right so i do i i give him an a plus for intellectual honesty and he's saying basically i'm okay with breaking the rules if you're stopping a you know mortal threat i totally agree with that i would break a rule all day long to stop somebody from getting killed right now of course you know you got this slippery slope if everybody's if everybody is breaking the rules blah blah blah but i don't think that counts if you're talking about killing hitler nobody thinks that killing hitler is a slippery slope do they well if you can kill hitler next thing you know you're going to be murdering toddlers no no special case i think we can handle special cases without worrying about uh the slippery slope every single time so the real problem is is um is sam harris experiencing cognitive dissonance or am i and in this case i'll be a proxy for many of you in the audience am i and you experiencing cognitive dissonance about trump and and you see maybe like the hitler that some are afraid of or is sam harris and people who would agree with him suffering here's your test to find out all right here's your test can you argue the other side that's it can you argue the other side if you can take the other person's perspective and and argue it in a full-throated balanced way then you probably do not have cognitive dissonance if you can't do it and you change the subject or you start going off on the person you probably do right so if i said to you okay and i'll just use sam as my my experiment i'll say all right sam you've made a claim that the trump university thing is worse than anything biden has done or is even accused of doing i'm going to take your point of view and i'm going to argue it right here's my argument trump did something with trump university which shows that he cannot be trusted and somebody who is who would do something so blatant should never be president and therefore that gives us cause to doubt anything else he ever does because that example gives us a clear pattern of his personality and his priorities did i do it did i take his point of view and argue it in a way that shows i understand the argument now i'm not saying you need to agree with the argument that's not the point i'm not trying to convince you i'm just saying can i take that argument and argue it did i succeed right now i had a problem with the trump university too but remember what trump promised us do you remember his promise i'm no angel i'm gonna do for you what i've been doing for myself which is you know maybe break some rules and make stuff work that's what he said and when i when i supported him i thought wow he's going to be expensive he's going to break a whole bunch of stuff but he might do some some things that can't be done otherwise so i've always characterized trump as being someone who can't do easy things such as staying out of trouble but he can do some impossible things such as the abraham accords and you know shaking hands with kim jong-un until that problem basically went away right so there's some things he can do that just other people couldn't do and that's what i was buying i thought that's what i was buying and i thought it'd be expensive because i thought there would be some division in the country and i thought it'd be expensive so i got what i thought i was buying an imperfect person who had a set of skills that were right for the times in some very specific ways now do you think that sam harris could take my argument and and argue it back to me i don't know but that would be the test if he could take my argument and present it in in a full throat then i would say to him okay all right well that looks like you've looked at all the facts and maybe our priorities are different but you know i see where you're coming from but his current argument that the trump university thing is worse than maybe colluding with ukraine or you know being victim of potentially blackmail of ukraine or something like that that's i mean on its surface it looks like cognitive dissonance to to this audience i'm sure but i don't think you can be sure the cognitive dissonance is not on your end can you how do you know it's not on your end by definition you don't know i would i would propose this test and see if you can do it see if you can make an argument that agrees with sam harris right even though you don't believe it see if you can make the argument if he can if you can then maybe you're looking at it objectively if you can't there's no chance you're being objective no chance right now of course there are some people whose arguments are just so crazy you can't you can't even make an argument on their on their side but i don't think that's the case with sam i think sam shows you his work and i can reproduce it yeah the character of this person is such it's been demonstrated by these past things which we have some confirmation of why would you trust such a person in such an important job it's a very easy argument to make all right so there's a good test for you see if you can argue the other side um and all this stuff about his big fake enemies now here's i think this is sort of related to this so i asked i did a little twitter poll and i said that i predicted that republicans would be hunted if biden got elected i predicted that in 2020 and i asked people if they thought that that prediction had been realized and 80 percent of the people who answered who are probably mostly right-leaning said that indeed it appears to them republicans are being hunted in a variety of different ways from january 6 on now phil bump who i believe writes for washington post right he wanted to mock me and there were there were two tweets and with two separate but related predictions one was that you'd be hunted but the related tweet in the same thread said that there's a good chance you would be dead in a year if biden got elected now the trouble is with a prediction like that there's a good chance what do you interpret as a good chance of being dead go if i what is the minimum percentage of the chance that you would say fits a good chance some would say 51.

some would say 10 some say 50 25 50 50.

now remember this is a good chance of being dead if you talk about the chances of being dead any percentage seems like too much doesn't it so in this context i was thinking more like five or ten percent chance of being dead you know two percent something like that and what did biden do as soon as he got elected it took a little longer than a year but the next thing you know we're talking about nuclear war with russia that was all biden biden actually got us into a serious conversation about nuclear war with a nuclear superpower now i don't think it was that close but it was close enough to talk about it so when i say there was a good chance i was thinking five percent you know it would be ridiculous to think that you are most likely going to be dead in the year what is what is it about anybody on the left who would believe that i thought that would anybody interpret it as i thought there was a greater than 50 chance that you individually would be dead in a year because of who got elected who would believe that i would actually predict that but it's provocative enough to say that there's a good chance five percent yeah so yeah so open borders fentanyl deaths yeah correct but i was thinking uh in terms of civil war as well so phil decides to be my personal critic and uh he's he's got an argument he wants you to see but um to me it looks like uh cognitive distance that's what it looks like and here's my uh here's my guide for identifying an npc now i've been using the npc thing as sort of a metaphor from uh is that the right word is it a metaphor for uh the simulation that some people are just scenery and i don't mean that literally i mean it could be true literally but i don't mean it literally what i mean is that there are certain number of people who will only say the most obvious thing that you say in a situation for example if i were to tweet i believe that let's say i believe that uh we'll never make it to venus or something whatever it is some sciency thing what is the most obvious thing that somebody would tweet the most obvious thing would be oh the dilbert guy disagrees with science that'd be the most obvious thing right so that would be an npc kind of approach the other thing is a personal attack if somebody just says there's something wrong with you i mean that these are both personal attacks but it doesn't have to be a comic reference so if somebody says to rob reiter let's say rob reiner doesn't tweet what is the most obvious thing that somebody's going to say if they disagree with his point of view they're going to say oh i guess that's why they called it meathead when he played that character years ago it's the most obvious thing you would say how many people say the most obvious thing every time he tweets a lot every time he tweets people go into the comments and say well i guess that's why they call them me head that it now the people who tweet that are you unaware that it's the most obvious thing to say because i don't know the answer that or are you just trying to be first with the most obvious thing i don't really know what's going through their minds the other is if i say i have a technical problem as i did today what's the most obvious thing to say if i specifically me if i have a technical problem what's the most obvious thing to say well reboot yeah boomer yeah oh boomer boomer right now sometimes that might actually be the the full explanation but it's also just the most obvious thing to say the other thing is people will imagine that you're thinking something dumb or wrong so if somebody says you know this policy is bad somebody's going to say well what you really mean the most obvious thing is to doubt that they're thinking what they're saying or how about the hypocrisy one if i say you republicans did a bad thing somebody will always come into the comments and say some completely unrelated thing well the other time the other team did that too it's the most obvious thing now sometimes it's worth saying oh your team did it too so you know there's value in that but it's also the most obvious thing you're gonna say so don't always say the most obvious thing it makes you look like an npc even if you're not so i've been just tagging everybody who says the most obvious thing with the npc you know hashtag npc and let me tell you it changes the conversation immediately when you tell somebody can you try to avoid saying the most obvious thing they don't know what to say because they they can't get beyond it most people don't know how to get beyond the most obvious thing so they it just shuts them down yeah now if you're doing a tv show to entertain people in politics then you always do the hypocrisy thing the both sides the what about ism because that's part of the entertainment but if you're making an honest argument and you think that what somebody did somewhere else at a different time in a different situation is relevant to this discussion you know then you're just being political right so i think that we are we've all become fake enemies do you think that i couldn't get along with the leftist lefty if they didn't know or if they'd never seen my social media easily easily not not any problem at all i mean i live in california northern california i'm surrounded by the lefties of the lefties and i have no problem with it at all now i'm not sure i get invited to as many places so they might have a problem with me but one-on-one i never have any difficulty do you do you ever have any any difficulty one-on-one with any american citizen ah i don't see and and the the news has convinced us that we're at each other's uh necks the number of people i've seen suggest that we're close to an actual um you know a violent civil war just blows my mind we could not be further from that do you know how we're not at the cusp of the civil war do you want me to prove it to you just walk outside say say hi to the first person you see do they want to kill you or they want to want to say hi there's no anger out there at all about each other not on an individual basis like we all have this generic anger about the other group but we don't have individual anger and we don't have a reason for it we are so far from being divided in reality we're only divided mentally because the news has made us divided why does the news divide us for money they divide us for money and we go along with it because we're entertained by it largely uh you have to turn the hunger up i don't know what that means oh you have to turn the hunger up to see the revolution so you're saying so if things went wrong it would turn violent now do you know what happened if the united states got hungrier we'd uh band together to feed each other that's what we do do you know republicans would do if the democrat for some reason only democrats were starving they would immediately form some kind of help to feed them and i hope it works the other way i'm a little less confident about it but i think it works the other way now when it comes right down to it we're going to take care of each other we always have always will that's just the way it works and and this whole division thing is entirely manufactured by the fake news and we're buying into it don't buy into it you you do not have to dislike anybody it's just not required you can just break free all right let's see if i uh forgot anything i was going to talk about oh yeah this declassification center i believe i have the best question on this topic and i've not seen it addressed and the best question on the topic of declassifying the mar-a-lago documents is can a president declassify things by his actions meaning it's obvious that he meant it to be declassified and i think the answer is yes now i'm not the constitutional expert but um this is what i read today that i didn't realize that both the george w bush and obama had both signed executive orders which are still in force and they and it gave the presidents whoever the president is sweeping authority to declassify secrets and here's the important part do not have to follow the mandatory classification declassification procedures that all other government officials do and i'm sorry i took this off a website i meant to give it credit if somebody knows where i took that from you probably read it too could you give credit to wherever this came from i think there was a good addition to the conversation but it was on a right-leaning website somewhere anyway um in my opinion if a president who has full sweeping authority to declassify says take these boxes and put them in my residence he's declassified them who disagrees with me if the president who doesn't have to follow any procedure says take these top secret things and move them to this non-top secret facility they're declassified now you could say you don't like that you can say you don't like it but how in the world are you going to get a court of 12 people to think that's not the case do you think you can get 12 jurors who are going to say oh no that's that's not declassification yes the president can declassify any way he wants he doesn't have to use any specific words doesn't have to write anything down doesn't have to do a document doesn't need to tell anybody doesn't need to tell anybody doesn't need to tell anybody there are no requirements on the president that's it so if you put me on the jury i'm just going to say i don't know i mean you can't prove that he didn't declassify him and by his actions it sure looks like he did and i would say that's that's the end of that case if you can't even know if they're if they're classified or not why are we even talking about it now keep in mind when we talk about it in the news you know we're just people talking about it we can act like you know we have some certainty that we don't have oh definitely declassified or oh definitely wasn't but what if you're a jury the jury would have to be you know beyond a reasonable doubt certain that these had not been declassified how in the world would any jury be sure of that if the if the attorney says you know he didn't need to follow any rules and by his actions it's obvious he meant them to be declassified would you agree that if somebody takes something out of a top secret place and intentionally puts it in a low security place that they have changed the you know the de facto decline classification you don't need to get all 12 to agree to that but there's no way you don't get nine of them to agree am i wrong how in the world do you not get at least some of those 12 to say you know that is enough of a gray area that i'm not going to convict somebody on that let's say i'm looking at this comment or set anywhere about document if he writes it anywhere about or sets of documents they become immediately declassified yeah so i don't know if he said something that would also qualify but maybe he did i mean suppose trump has said and this is not in evidence but suppose he had said to the gsa people who were packing up the boxes suppose they said hey this is top secret stuff you know we have to handle it differently and suppose trump just said oh no just put it in the boxes and send it to mar-a-lago that's declassification right in my opinion it would be so i think he's gonna be fine on that i don't think there's any any legal risk at all on that all right um so even newt gingrich pointed out that liz cheney said quote i will do whatever it takes to keep donald trump out of the oval office and news says is it any wonder most of us think the january 6 committee is a stalinist show trial she is so bitterly anti-trump how could she be trusted now again newt is doing a little mind reading you know he's looking into her mind and seeing that she's bitterly anti-trump but i feel like that's an evidence the anti-trump part is clearly an evidence and the bitter part it looks better to me i mean i can't read her mind but if anybody ever looked bitter that's that's about as bitter looking as you could ever look all right so pretty sure i covered everything i want to cover um oh one other thing so uh i submitted a comic to my syndication company this week and it was uh rejected for content and i had to rewrite it and i believe the rewrite has been accepted so i completely changed the joke but if you belong to the locals platform and you're a subscriber sometime later today you will see the comic that the rest of the world will not see because it's too dangerous apparently so you'll see the original version that's not yet published uh will you it's um see i think the date is september 25th when it would come out and you'll get to see the one that my editor said nope nope nope nope what was the topic the topic was dilbers company created a robot that looked too much like an attractive woman and it went from there so i had to rewrite that but it wasn't sexual it was not sexual yeah well what a what it was supposed to be what it was supposed to be is a comment on the fact that we will have robots that are more attractive than humans really soon really soon and that that's going to be a civilization threatening the situation because once you like your robot better than people and why wouldn't you because keep in mind your robot will eventually look more like an attractive human than the person you're with right if you pick a human you'd be really lucky if you got like a super beautiful one or super handsome but the robot's going to be super beautiful or super handsome if they make it that way and it's very soon going to look exactly like a you know an actual human so very soon and what happens if ai gets into the robot so it can have a conversation with you just like ai can't now and the ai will be interested in what you're interested in and it will show interest in you and caring about you that's better than humans we're right at the edge right at the edge and we'll definitely go past it where the robot will just be better company and more more rewarding to spend time with yeah we're very close to that but anyway that was my point but the risk was that women would uh women might take it differently now i don't think my editor was wrong by the way so i want to be clear i think my editor got this one right you know the job of the editor is not just to uh you know make sure that the editor stays out of trouble but to keep me out of trouble so part of their job is to keep me employed keep me from getting cancelled and my editor's opinion which i trust in this situation was that this would get me canceled so you'll get to see it on locals all right oh talk about self-hypnosis that makes you more horny for your own mate i did it and she responded interesting well we'll not talk about that today but that's a topic we'll revisit all right um the golden age of walking on eggshells no i think we are at the golden age i really think we are it never looks like it when you enter it it is going to look like it in retrospect all right uh a micro lesson for kids leaving for their freshman year at college lesson for who the parents are the kids not sure what what you want on that uh reparations yeah i do i i do have a reparations comic coming i think that's gonna get uh i think my reparations comic is going to get get stopped too now i did tell you that i don't plan to retire i plan to get cancelled did i tell you that because i thought about do i really want to just like fade away so i think i'm going to make dilbert more and more dangerous until i get canceled that's the way i want to go out i want to go out and cancel all right that's all for now i will talk to you tomorrow youtube and spa

good morning everybody

and welcome

to another highlight of civilization

it's called coffee with scott adams and

um i don't want to

get you too excited

but

today

double whiteboard

that's right not just one

double-sided

i know

it's almost too much to handle

but we'll we'll do it together

together we will handle this awesomeness

and i think we can

climb this mountain

but first we need some fortifications

and all you need for that is a copper

mug or a glass of tanker chelsea in a

canteen jugger flask a vessel of any

kind

fill it with your favorite liquid

i like coffee

and join me now

for the unparalleled pleasure

it's the dopamine of the day

it's the thing that makes everything

better it's called the simultaneous sip

and it's happening now go

ah

sublime

oh so

good all right we're going to do a

little test a little intelligence test

here let's see if the

locals people can beat the people on

youtube platform who are watching now

all right it's a question for all of you

it's going to be based on erasmus and

poll

and

people were asked if they agreed with

this statement

this was something that trump had said

at one point he said quote

there is a group of politicized thugs

at the top of the fbi or using the fbi

as joe biden's personal gestapo

what percentage of people

strongly disagreed

with trump

strongly disagreed

whoa

you're pretty good

pretty good yeah the answer is uh

uh

26 who strongly disagreed

26 strongly disagree that joe biden is

using the fbi

as his personal gestapo

i don't have an opinion i'm just saying

that's what the numbers are but at the

other end

actually if you added together the ones

who strongly agree

and the ones who agree

um

you get a much bigger number all right

uh let's see who doesn't agree a

majority

see

a majority now agree

53

with that statement

oh actually that i'm sorry that wasn't

uh trump's quote that was roger stone's

quote

so roger stone is the one who quoted it

i i said it was trump it was stone

but 53 percent of voters now agree that

the

fbi is run by a uh joe biden's personal

gestapo

now that means that means that there are

a lot of independents

or at least a smattering of democrats

who are now in the

are now on the side of thinking that the

fbi

is joe biden's personal gestapo

[Laughter]

i don't know

anyway

this

the cdc

who came under a great deal of criticism

for their handling of the pandemic

how do you think the cdc

is going to respond

to all the

criticism so they're going to take

action now they're responding to the

fact that they i guess they confess they

didn't do as good a job as they'd like

to do what do you think they're going to

do about it

what what would dilbert's boss do about

it

what would they do about it

like literally in a dilbert comic what

would they do about it

they would reorganize

so it appeared that they had done

something

that's exactly what my comic would do

now

do you remember uh

the the rule that elon musk has for

tesla

don't do something that could show up in

a dilbert comic

i've never done a comic about tesla

just think about that i've never done a

comic about anything that happened at

tesla

so apparently they take that

seriously but the cdc

as soon as they're being criticized they

decide that their response is to

reorganize

i'm thinking to myself

that is exactly my comic

that's exactly my comic there's i

wouldn't even add anything

that's the joke right there

so good job there cdc and making it

worse

all right so yesterday um

based on a

smart suggestion

i decided to

grab the domain hoax quiz.com

so now i i own that domain

hoaxquiz.com

and it seems to me that what we need is

some kind of a competitor

to snopes and the other fact checkers

and so you know i started with my list

of you know the the top 10 hoaxes which

is now up to 14 people have added to it

so we've got 14

what i would consider confirmed hoaxes

one of them's not quite confirmed but

looks like it will be

but here's my problem

here is my problem

i'm not willing to put the hoax quiz up

unless i can do conservative hoaxes too

you okay with that

if i say uh seth rich

being murdered by hillary clinton as a

hoax

you're gonna be okay with that

will it

because if i don't do it there's no

point in doing it at all

is there if i don't have conservative

hoaxes on there there's no point in

doing it at all it'd be a complete waste

of time

but if i put both of them on there

then what position does that put me in

it put it puts me above the news

now

could i pull that off

probably not

probably not

it would be pretty tough

but imagine you could create a place

where people could go look

and find out if the news is

promoting a hoax and let's say you

actually were convinced that it showed

hoaxes on both sides

you showed the conservative ones as well

as the

the left-leaning ones

would that make you

more uh

likely to find it credible

before you answer

know for sure that i'm going to tell

tell you things that you believe are

true or hoaxes

i can't help it

i can't help it because we all have

different opinions right so there are

going to be things on that list that you

think are real that i think are a hoax

so you have to be okay with that

can you handle it

see the trouble is this is not the sort

of thing you can do right

okay can we agree on that you can do

maybe good enough

and good enough would be some kind of a

maybe a guardrail on the fake news so

the fake news doesn't get too far out of

control but i wouldn't be it wouldn't be

possible for me to be right every time

no matter how how i judge it or who i

bring in to help me judge it it's not

really possible that i'd be right all

the time

should i do it anyway

knowing that i would be wrong on some

notable

probably some big examples too i don't

know what that would be

but should i do it if i know i'm going

to be wrong

yeah see already i'm getting pushback on

the seth rich here's what i'd say about

seth rich

there are rumors

there are rumors that this happened but

there's no evidence of it or no proof of

it

something like that i'd probably say

there's no proof of it

now

would you be okay with that

see i don't know if i could call that a

hoax

i could just say we don't know one way

or the other

so i feel like i need another category i

wanted to do hoax or no hoax and keep it

simple

i didn't want to do the slightly true

slightly not true thing but you probably

get forced into it don't you

because there's gonna be too many gray

areas

all right well i have the domain and

i'll maybe uh

pack at that a little bit and see if see

if it gains some energy to pull me by

the way this here's a little uh

tip

a tip on how to get motivated

does anybody have trouble getting

motivated to do something they know they

need to do

here's a tip

i start lots of things that i know would

be interesting or good to do

and i take the first step

and then sometimes i'll take the next

small step

but

i i'm looking for the project to start

pulling me

right so the energy i have on day one

i don't know if that's the same energy i

would have if i started going on the

project because sometimes you get

excited then it gets boring and then you

know

so you've got to find a project where if

you seed it you just just give it a

nudge

it takes on its own energy and then

starts pulling you

i don't know if this one will pull me

i know i had enough energy to register

the domain

and i know i have enough energy to think

about how it would be and i put on a

question on on the locals platform if

anybody wanted to help

but i don't know if i'll yet have enough

energy for it to like pull me to

completion

so i've got a number of projects right

now that are in that state i've done

something

a little bit

but i'm seeing which ones are going to

start pulling me right

now my book i'm writing

i was pushing that until just recently

like it was just work

but more recently it got to the point

where the

is shaping up nicely

and so as it starts to shape up it

brings its own energy it's like oh wow

this would be good to finish this book

because it looks like it's going to be

pretty good so now it's starting to pull

me and i wake up this morning and think

i hope i have time to write that to

spend some time writing because i can't

wait to

can't wait to fill it down a little bit

all right

well uh alex jones is uh off the trump

train as people are saying he's gonna i

guess he wants desantis to be president

he would prefer him

now i don't know what alex jones will do

if

uh desantis doesn't run

what if the only republican choice is

trump will alex jones be back

i don't know

yeah we'll talk about sam harrison

so geraldo rivera made a bold statement

on twitter

now i know a lot of you are

sort of anti-geraldo rivera

but i am so pro-geraldo

i'm just totally pro-geraldo which is

different from agreeing with him

can can we make that distinction

i love the fact that he puts himself out

there

i love the fact that he doesn't appear

to be afraid of anything he doesn't seem

to be physically afraid of anything he

doesn't seem to be embarrassment wise

and afraid of anything

yeah he took off his shirt at age 70 or

whatever it was he's my role model

yeah yeah geraldo is absolutely my role

model

and again it has nothing to do with

whether i agree or disagree with any

opinions

but his

i guess his approach to life

is one i think you should all emulate

yeah if you could be as you know

as

let's say unafraid as he is your life

would look a lot better it really would

so

let's try to separate whether we hate

his opinion on any particular topic

because i disagree with him on this

particular one i'm going to talk about

but i just love the fact i just love the

fact that he expresses himself with no

remorse

here's what he said in a tweet her elder

did he said whatever your politics

we should all recognize liz cheney's

selfless courage in standing up to the

trump tidal wave

wyoming republicans are going to enter a

congressional career today i guess this

was yesterday but nothing will wash away

the role she played standing up for

democracy and the constitution

now

i like

the fact that he knew he would get

absolutely crapped on today

for that opinion and he still put it out

there

still put it out there

i love that

he shows his work

right he gives his reasons

shows his work that's all i ask of

anybody

if we could learn to appreciate

somebody who acts the way he does

even when we disagree

now we would be so far ahead so far

ahead

all right but here's what i think about

liz cheney

i would i would buy into the um the

selfless

courage part this is geraldo's

characterization

um

i would buy into it being a selfless act

for the country under the following

condition

that the way she had acted had presented

some kind of balance

that she was open for example to

let's say open to an argument on both

sides

and acted in a way that her rhetoric

showed an openness to know to find out

what happened

as opposed to

a

captain ahab mission to kill a white

whale or an orange whale in this case

at what point did liz cheney say we

don't know the motivation of the

protesters

but a harvard study just said that the

vast majority of of them believed that

they were saving the republic

not overthrowing it

now if trump was the primary persuader

of the group

and the group had been persuaded that

they're trying to save the republic

isn't that completely different

than the way she has

presented it so far

now independent of what evidence

specific evidence gets

presented

if you don't start with the context

being right

you're not an honest player

so i don't know what was happening in

liz cheney's head i try to be consistent

about saying i don't know what people

are thinking

but we can say for sure

that her actions

did not display any balance

who would disagree

did her actions

show that she was open to an argument

and discovery or did it look like she

had an opinion she was trying to just

prove no matter what

so

you know i get her oldest point

that it takes a lot of courage to go

across the go against the uh mainstream

and she had to know she had paid for it

she had to know there would be a price

right

so i would get i would uh accept the

fact that it's um courage

so i would accept courage but i'm not so

sure about selfless because i feel as

though her actions strongly suggested

that it was a personal it looked

personal

now again we can't we don't know what

she's thinking

but if you act in a way that doesn't

have balance in a situation that just

screams for balance

you know you should have balance in that

situation more than any situation

especially if you're a republican

looking at a republican if you can't

have balance in that situation

one has to assume that there's something

else going on

and and i do

[Applause]

all right um

i would like to revisit this idea

um

so edward

edward loose tweeted this i don't know

who he is but he's just somebody on

twitter

he twittered uh

i guess he's a reporter of some kind

i've covered extremism and violent

ideologies around the world over my

career

uh have never come across a political

force more nihilistic dangerous and

contemptible than today's republicans

nothing close

really

nihilistic would be people who

don't want to follow the rules

don't want to follow the rules

would republicans be a group that

doesn't want to follow the laws and the

constitution of the united states

there's someone who actually is smart

enough to write sentences and use

twitter

who believes that the most central thing

about republicans that they're rule

followers

constitution

bible the law of the land

there's nothing that defines republicans

more than wanting to follow the rules

and making sure other people do as well

nothing defines them more

periods that's that's almost baked into

the definition of conservative right

conservative let's do it the way we've

been doing it follow the rules

all right

but anyway this is this one person's

view that

that the republicans are opposite of

what it looks to me and they're

dangerous and contemptible

okay

now clearly

some republicans are dangerous as some

of every group are right

but here is the shocking part uh general

michael hayden ex-cia director

uh

agreed with this tweet

and he said i agree and i was the cia

director

so the guy who was the cia director

believes that republicans today

are more nihilistic dangerous and

contemptible

than anything else around the world

such as al qaeda

taliban

just to pick a couple of examples

now

i'm not going to disagree with his

characterization because that's not the

point

the point is that we finally got a

direct confession

it's a direct confession

in his opinion the republicans are

as bad as this

and that would be

a complete

a complete explanation of why the cia

and the fbi apparently colluded for the

russia collusion

hoax

and probably they're colluding again

he says it directly

that he believed that the threat of the

republicans was greater than external

threats

so if you would be willing to you know

assassinate al-qaeda

what would you be willing to do to a

greater threat than al-qaeda

he doesn't say

but i appreciate the transparency he's

saying he's basically

saying that there would be nothing

if you read between the lines

it suggests

that there's nothing you wouldn't do now

let me say

let me say there's nothing wrong with

that

and a little bit i'm going to agree with

sam harris and it's going to make your

head just

blow up

i agree with general hayden that if

in this one narrow sense i agree if you

if you really believed that this group

was as dangerous as as he apparently

says he does

then you would break some rules to stop

him because you would murder hitler

wouldn't you

i would

i would break a rule to murder hitler

right so he's basically saying

you know that the the republicans are

worse than

al qaeda worsen external threats

so he doesn't say that he would break a

rule to stop them but i think that's

perfectly implied

if you're the director of the cia

and there's something that's like a

mortal threat to your country

i feel like it's implied that you might

bend a rule to stop it

and if you wouldn't what's wrong with

you

would you want anybody who wouldn't bend

the rule in that case i wouldn't want to

be around somebody who wouldn't bend the

rules

in that case

um

but

here's the problem

the fake news

is what's

our main problem and we're being

distracted

i'm going to go to the white board and

i'm going to tie it all together you

ready for this

tying it all together

here's how i see the world

i see the fake news

creates extremism

and then the fbi encourages the

extremists

and then

not in every case but in some notable

cases such as russia collusion

and uh

you know there may be something with the

contraband laptop so basically every

time we see the people in charge who

should be protecting us doing sketchy

stuff

it makes the extremism worse

does it not

so between the fake news and the fact

that we don't trust the people who are

supposed to be protecting us

this creates a feedback loop that

creates more fake news more money

etc

so this is the answer to the question

why don't they ask the would you kill

hitler

question

the question that the media won't ask

because they make money by not asking it

is

if you believe the fake news

if you believe what the news is saying

why wouldn't you murder about

republicans

if you believe the news

right

so the news can't ask the question

because they're the problems

so

everybody who thinks that the extremists

on the left are the problem have been

duped by the fake news

everyone who believes that the

extremists on the right are the problem

have been duped by the fake news

so general hayden and we'll talk about

sam harris later both

duped by the fake news now i don't think

that either of them

seem to quite grok

how strong the news is its persuasive

ability in other words its ability to

make you believe something that

absolutely couldn't be true

the news is good at that

i believe i

i believe yesterday alone i believed two

hoaxes until

until i got corrected

that's just yesterday

i fell for two

yesterday

that's just one day and i fell for two

hoaxes

now they were on social media they

weren't in the regular news but it's so

easy to fall for a hoax

right

any if you ever see me

mocking somebody from falling for a hoax

you should correct me

because you shouldn't mock the person

for falling for a hoax

you should be mad at the hoaxer

because the reason that hoaxes are a

thing is that they work

right it's not always the fault of the

person who believed it we can get better

at not believing stuff but it's not

really the fault of the person who

believed it it's more the person who

created the hoax

so we have this system in which the

people who are causing the problem are

telling us that it's other people and

we're believing them

and the tell for that is that they won't

ask the only question

that matters

the only question that matters

hey democrat if you believe what you're

saying about republicans

would you break all the rules including

an election rule

to stop them from power and let me say

clearly that i would

i would

if i believed the fake news about trump

i would

break a law to stop him

wouldn't you

if you believed it

now the difference between me and

general hayden and sam harris we'll talk

about in a moment is that i don't i

don't believe what they believe

but if i did i wouldn't act the way they

act i would act pretty aggressively

so they have this weird dichotomy where

their actions and their words are not

aligned

or at least they're not willing to admit

it

although i think sam harris came pretty

close

we'll talk about that in a minute all

right

uh i had something on the other side of

this

let's tie it all together

oh

so let's talk about

sam harris and then i'll give you my

test for

cognitive dissonance

uh we'll work up to it

so here's a jeff giza tweet he asked me

on twitter this question how would you

rank the following forces

based on their impact on today's

political discord all right so which of

these things do you think is causing the

most

political division

media distrust

social media algorithms

foreign intel operations

perverse political incentives

specific corrupt political actors

politicization of fed of the fed

federal bureaucracy

and economic shifts

now all of those have an impact

but the but the main one is left off the

list

the one that's left off the list is not

it's not media mistrust

our problem is not media mistrust

our problem is the media

it's not that i don't trust them

it's that they're not trustable

it's not my fault

did i do something wrong by not trusting

people who lie to me

how's that my fault

i feel like i'm doing it right

but not trusting people who have a track

record of lying to you feels like that's

right that's right in the sweet spot

right there

so it's interesting how blind we can be

to what's happening because and i'm i i

don't mean to make fun of uh you know

jeff because he's a smart observer

in fact you should follow him he's a

good follower on twitter

it's just that no matter who you are

it's so easy to lose sight that the

media is actually just

manipulating and hypnotizing us for

their own benefit not yours

and it's just so easy to lose sight of

it somehow it's the public is you know

we're extremists and

we're not following the news and we're

not doing their own research it is not

our problem

it might be our problem to fix but it's

not we didn't cause it

we're just being people

all right

so in my opinion um the fake news is

what makes us fight and if you fix the

fake news extremism would disappear

it would disappear

have you ever have you seen lately what

the left

thinks about me personally

have you seen any of my social

traffic lately

think about the things that people have

said about me

almost or maybe 100 of it is based on

incorrect information

so there are really bad bad feelings

about me

but i think zero of them actually know

my opinion

they've heard it from somebody else or

from somebody else so basically we're

all suffering under insanely bad

information

and it's causing us to hate each other

where does this bad information come

from

well in my case a lot of it is on social

media

but

do you think the people on social media

would be

coming after me every day

if they did not believe fake news

let me

explain if they knew what my actual

opinions were

they wouldn't have much problem with

them

or at least they'd you know disagree

with an assumption but they wouldn't

think i was you know hitler myself

and i think that that's largely true of

of all of us

i believe that if you put me in a room

with the

leftist lefty and the rightist righty

you know extremists on both sides

that i could find out what information

we differed on

and probably bring them together

the leftist left and the right is right

i believe if if nobody else were in the

room

and i was allowed to give them accurate

information

i actually think i could get them on the

same page

no matter how left and no matter how

right now the

now the exception would be if they're

just being crazy right

if they have an interest

and they're not in deep cognitive

distance if they have an interest

i could do it

now what happens if somebody's in

cognitive dissonance

how do they know and how do you know

well i'm going to give you an example so

sam harris was on the uh

triggered nomitry triggered nometry

podcast which is a big

big very good podcast

and

he said directly

that trump was such a menace

and especially the trump university was

such an example of something that was

far worse

that anything biden is accused of not

only

not only worse than what biden may have

done for sure

but even worse

than what biden is accused of you know

accused of

maybe some bad dealings with uh ukraine

for example

and

and in sam harris's

view

the media suppressing the hunter laptop

story

to get biden elected was

legitimate

and he agrees that the news faking the

news to keep trump out of office

literally faking the news

it was justified

because trump is such a risk

what do you think of that

here's the problem

did you just say to yourself damn that

sam harris that that freaking sam harris

that guy's there's something wrong with

that guy right

okay i'm gonna disagree with all of you

do you know what's wrong with sam harris

nothing

nothing

he's a victim of the news

he's a victim of the news he actually

believes the news

or he believes some subset of the news

that got him to this point so if you

think the problem is with sam harris

again you're being diverted

the problem is the news

if the news told him the truth

i'm pretty sure his opinion would be

different

all right

so i do

i i give him an a plus for intellectual

honesty

and he's saying basically i'm okay with

breaking the rules

if you're stopping a you know mortal

threat

i totally agree with that

i would break a rule all day long to

stop somebody from getting killed

right now of course you know you got

this slippery slope if everybody's if

everybody is breaking the rules blah

blah blah but i don't think that counts

if you're talking about killing hitler

nobody thinks that killing hitler is a

slippery slope do they

well if you can kill hitler next thing

you know you're going to be murdering

toddlers no no special case

i think we can handle special cases

without worrying about

uh the slippery slope every single time

so the real problem is is um

is sam harris experiencing cognitive

dissonance

or am i

and in this case i'll be a proxy for

many of you in the audience

am i

and you experiencing cognitive

dissonance about trump

and and you see maybe like the hitler

that

some are afraid of or is sam harris and

people who would agree with him

suffering here's your test

to find out

all right here's your

test can you argue the other side

that's it

can you argue the other side if you can

take the other person's perspective and

and argue it in a full-throated balanced

way

then you probably do not have cognitive

dissonance

if you can't do it

and you change the subject or you start

going off on the person

you probably do right

so if i said to you okay

and i'll just use sam as my my

experiment

i'll say all right sam you've made a

claim that the trump university thing is

worse than anything biden has done or is

even accused of doing

i'm going to take your point of view and

i'm going to argue it

right

here's my argument

trump did something with trump

university which shows that he cannot be

trusted

and somebody who is

who would do something so blatant should

never be president

and therefore that gives us cause to

doubt anything else he ever does because

that example gives us a clear pattern of

his

personality and his priorities

did i do it

did i take his point of view and argue

it

in a way that shows i understand the

argument

now i'm not saying you need to agree

with the argument that's not the point

i'm not trying to convince you

i'm just saying can i take that argument

and argue it

did i succeed

right

now i had a problem with the trump

university too

but remember what trump promised us

do you remember his promise

i'm no angel

i'm gonna do for you what i've been

doing for myself

which is you know maybe break some rules

and make stuff work

that's what he said

and when i when i supported him i

thought wow he's going to be expensive

he's going to break a whole bunch of

stuff but he might do some

some things that can't be done otherwise

so i've always characterized trump as

being someone who can't do easy things

such as staying out of trouble

but he can do some impossible things

such as

the abraham accords and you know

shaking hands with kim jong-un until

that problem basically went away

right so there's some things he can do

that just other people couldn't do and

that's what i was buying

i thought that's what i was buying and i

thought it'd be expensive

because i thought there would be some

division in the country and i thought

it'd be expensive so i got what i

thought i was buying

an imperfect person who had a set of

skills

that

were right for the times

in some very specific ways

now do you think that sam harris could

take my argument and

and argue it back to me

i don't know but that would be the test

if he could take my argument and present

it in in a full throat

then i would say to him okay all right

well that looks like you've looked at

all the facts and maybe our priorities

are different but you know i see where

you're coming from

but

his current argument that the trump

university thing is worse than maybe

colluding with ukraine or you know being

victim of potentially blackmail of

ukraine or something like that

that's

i mean on its surface it looks like

cognitive dissonance

to to this audience i'm sure

but i don't think you can be sure the

cognitive dissonance is not on your end

can you how do you know it's not on your

end

by definition you don't know

i would

i would propose this test and see if you

can do it

see if you can make an argument that

agrees with sam harris

right even though you don't believe it

see if you can make the argument if he

can

if you can

then maybe you're looking at it

objectively

if you can't there's no chance you're

being objective no chance

right now of course there are some

people whose arguments are just so crazy

you can't you can't even make an

argument on their on their side

but i don't think that's the case with

sam

i think sam shows you his work

and i can reproduce it

yeah the character of this person is

such it's been demonstrated by these

past things which we have some

confirmation of

why would you trust such a person

in such an important job it's a very

easy argument to make

all right

so

there's a good test for you

see if you can argue the other side

um

and

all this stuff about his big fake

enemies now here's i think this is sort

of related to this

so

i asked

i did a little

twitter poll

and i said that i predicted that

republicans would be hunted if

biden got elected i predicted that in

2020 and i asked people if they thought

that that prediction had been realized

and 80 percent of the people who

answered who are probably mostly

right-leaning

said that indeed it appears to them

republicans are being hunted in a

variety of different ways from january 6

on

now phil bump

who i believe writes for washington post

right

he

wanted to mock me and

there were there were two tweets and

with two

separate but related

predictions

one was that

you'd be hunted

but the related tweet in the same thread

said that there's a good chance you

would be dead

in a year

if biden got elected

now the trouble is with a prediction

like that there's a good chance

what do you interpret as a good chance

of being dead

go

if i

what is the minimum percentage of the

chance that you would say fits a good

chance

some would say 51.

some would say 10

some say 50 25 50 50.

now remember

this is a good chance of being dead

if you talk about the chances of being

dead

any percentage seems like too much

doesn't it

so in this context i was thinking more

like five or ten percent chance of being

dead

you know two percent something like that

and

what did biden do as soon as he got

elected

it took a little longer than a year

but the next thing you know we're

talking about nuclear war with russia

that was all biden

biden actually got us into a serious

conversation about nuclear war with a

nuclear superpower

now i don't think it was that close

but it was close enough to talk about it

so when i say there was a good chance i

was thinking five percent

you know it would be ridiculous to think

that you are most likely going to be

dead in the year

what is what is it about

anybody on the left who would believe

that i thought that

would anybody interpret it as i thought

there was a greater than 50 chance that

you individually would be dead in a year

because of who got elected

who would believe that i would actually

predict that

but it's provocative enough to say that

there's a good chance

five percent

yeah

so

yeah so

open borders fentanyl deaths

yeah

correct

but i was thinking uh in terms of civil

war as well

so

phil decides to be my personal critic

and uh he's he's got an argument

he wants you to see

but um

to me it looks like uh cognitive

distance that's what it looks like

and here's my uh here's my guide for

identifying an npc

now i've been using the npc thing as

sort of a metaphor from

uh

is that the right word is it a metaphor

for uh the simulation that some people

are just scenery

and i don't mean that literally i mean

it could be true literally but i don't

mean it literally

what i mean is that there are certain

number of people who will only say the

most obvious thing that you say in a

situation

for example

if i were to tweet

i believe that

let's say

i believe that uh we'll never make it to

venus or something whatever it is some

sciency thing what is the most obvious

thing that somebody would tweet

the most obvious thing would be oh the

dilbert guy

disagrees with science

that'd be the most obvious thing right

so that would be an npc kind of approach

the other thing is a personal attack

if somebody just says there's something

wrong with you

i mean that these are both personal

attacks but it doesn't have to be a

comic reference

so if somebody says to rob reiter let's

say rob reiner doesn't tweet

what is the most obvious thing that

somebody's going to say if they disagree

with his point of view

they're going to say oh

i guess that's why they called it

meathead when he played that character

years ago

it's the most obvious thing you would

say

how many people say the most obvious

thing every time he tweets a lot

every time he tweets

people go into the comments and say

well

i guess that's why they call them me

head

that it

now the people who tweet that

are you unaware that it's the most

obvious thing to say

because i don't know the answer that

or are you just trying to be first

with the most obvious thing

i don't really know what's going through

their minds

the other is

if i say i have a technical problem as i

did today what's the most obvious thing

to say if

i specifically

me

if i have a technical problem what's the

most obvious thing to say well reboot

yeah

boomer

yeah oh boomer boomer right

now

sometimes that might actually be the the

full explanation but it's also just the

most obvious thing to say

the other thing is

people will imagine that you're thinking

something dumb or wrong

so if somebody says

you know this policy is bad somebody's

going to say well what you really mean

the most obvious thing is to doubt

that they're thinking what they're

saying

or how about the hypocrisy one

if i say

you republicans did a bad thing

somebody will always come into the

comments and say some completely

unrelated thing

well the other time the other team did

that too

it's the most obvious thing now

sometimes it's worth saying oh your team

did it too so you know there's value in

that but it's also the most obvious

thing you're gonna say

so don't always say the most obvious

thing

it makes you look like an npc

even if you're not so i've been just

tagging everybody who says the most

obvious thing with the npc

you know hashtag npc

and let me tell you it changes the

conversation immediately

when you tell somebody can you try to

avoid saying the most obvious thing

they don't know what to say

because they they can't get beyond it

most people don't know how to get beyond

the most obvious thing

so they it just shuts them down

yeah now if you're doing a tv show to

entertain people

in politics then you always do the

hypocrisy thing the both sides the what

about ism because that's part of the

entertainment

but

if you're making an honest argument and

you think that what somebody did

somewhere else at a different time in a

different situation is relevant to this

discussion

you know then you're just being

political right

so i think that we are we've all become

fake enemies

do you think that i couldn't get along

with the leftist lefty if they didn't

know

or if they'd never seen my social media

easily

easily

not not any problem at all

i mean i live in california northern

california i'm surrounded by the lefties

of the lefties and i have no problem

with it at all

now i'm not sure i get invited to as

many places

so they might have a problem with me but

one-on-one

i never have any difficulty do you

do you ever have any any difficulty

one-on-one with any american citizen

ah

i don't

see and and the the news has convinced

us that we're at each other's uh necks

the number of people i've seen suggest

that we're close to an actual um

you know a violent civil war

just blows my mind

we could not be further from that

do you know how we're not

at the cusp of the civil war

do you want me to prove it to you

just walk outside

say say hi to the first person you see

do they want to kill you or they want to

want to say hi

there's no anger out there at all about

each other

not on an individual basis like we all

have this generic anger about the other

group

but we don't have individual anger

and we don't have a reason for it

we are so far

from being divided in reality we're only

divided mentally because the news has

made us divided why does the news divide

us

for money

they divide us for money

and we go along with it because we're

entertained by it largely

uh you have to turn the hunger up i

don't know what that means

oh you have to turn the hunger up to see

the revolution so you're saying so if

things went wrong it would turn violent

now do you know what happened if the

united states got hungrier

we'd uh band together to feed each other

that's what we do

do you know republicans would do if the

democrat for some reason

only democrats were starving

they would immediately form

some kind of help to feed them

and i hope it works the other way

i'm a little less confident about it but

i think it works the other way

now when it comes right down to it we're

going to take care of each other we

always have always will that's just the

way it works

and and this whole division thing

is entirely manufactured by the fake

news

and we're buying into it don't buy into

it

you you do not have to dislike anybody

it's just not required

you can just break free

all right let's see if i uh forgot

anything i was going to talk about oh

yeah

this declassification center i believe i

have the best question on this topic

and i've not seen it addressed

and the best question on the topic of

declassifying the mar-a-lago

documents is can a president declassify

things by his actions

meaning it's obvious that he meant it to

be declassified

and i think the answer is yes

now i'm not the constitutional expert

but

um this is what i read today that i

didn't realize that both the george w

bush and obama had both signed executive

orders which are still in force

and they and it gave the presidents

whoever the president is sweeping

authority to declassify secrets

and here's the important part

do not have to follow the mandatory

classification

declassification procedures

that all other government officials do

and i'm sorry i took this off a website

i meant to give it credit

if somebody knows where i took that from

you probably read it too

could you give credit to wherever this

came

from i think there was a good addition

to the conversation but it was on a

right-leaning website somewhere

anyway

um

in my opinion

if a president who has full sweeping

authority to declassify

says

take these boxes and put them in my

residence

he's declassified them

who disagrees with me

if the president who doesn't have to

follow any procedure

says take these top secret things and

move them to this non-top secret

facility

they're declassified

now

you could say you don't like that

you can say you don't like it but how in

the world are you going to get a court

of 12 people to think that's not the

case

do you think you can get 12 jurors

who are going to say oh no that's that's

not declassification

yes the president can declassify any way

he wants

he doesn't have to use any specific

words

doesn't have to

write anything down doesn't have to do a

document doesn't need to tell anybody

doesn't need to tell anybody

doesn't need to tell anybody

there are no requirements on the

president

that's it so if you put me on the jury

i'm just going to say

i don't know

i mean you can't prove that he didn't

declassify him and by his actions it

sure looks like he did

and i would say that's that's the end of

that case

if you can't even know if they're if

they're classified or not why are we

even talking about it

now keep in mind when we talk about it

in the news you know we're just people

talking about it

we can act like

you know we have some certainty that we

don't have oh definitely declassified or

oh definitely wasn't

but what if you're a jury

the jury would have to be you know

beyond a reasonable doubt

certain that these had not been

declassified

how in the world would any jury be sure

of that if the

if the attorney says you know he didn't

need to follow any rules and by his

actions it's obvious he meant them to be

declassified

would you agree that if somebody takes

something out of a top secret place and

intentionally puts it in a low security

place

that they have changed the

you know the de facto decline

classification

you don't need to get all 12 to agree to

that but there's no way you don't get

nine of them to agree

am i wrong

how in the world

do you not get at least some of those 12

to say you know

that is enough of a gray area that i'm

not going to convict somebody on that

let's say i'm looking at this comment

or set

anywhere about document if he writes it

anywhere about or sets of documents they

become immediately declassified

yeah

so i don't know if he said something

that would also qualify but maybe he did

i mean

suppose trump has said and this is not

in evidence but suppose he had said to

the gsa people who were packing up the

boxes

suppose they said hey this is top secret

stuff

you know we have to handle it

differently and suppose trump just said

oh no just

put it in the boxes and send it to

mar-a-lago

that's declassification right in my

opinion it would be

so i think he's gonna be fine on that

i don't think there's any any legal risk

at all on that

all right

um

so even newt gingrich pointed out that

liz cheney said

quote i will do whatever it takes to

keep donald trump out of the oval office

and news says is it any wonder most of

us think the january 6 committee is a

stalinist show trial

she is so bitterly anti-trump how could

she be trusted

now again newt is doing a little

mind reading

you know he's looking into her mind and

seeing that she's bitterly anti-trump

but i feel like that's an evidence

the anti-trump part is clearly an

evidence and the bitter part

it looks better to me

i mean i can't read her mind but if

anybody ever looked bitter

that's that's about as bitter looking as

you could ever look

all right

so pretty sure i covered everything i

want to cover um oh one other thing

so uh i submitted a comic to

my syndication company this week

and it was uh

rejected

for content

and i had to rewrite it

and i believe the rewrite has been

accepted so i completely changed the

joke

but if you belong to the locals platform

and you're a subscriber

sometime later today you will see the

comic that the rest of the world will

not see

because it's too dangerous apparently so

you'll see the original version that's

not yet published

uh will you it's um see i think the date

is september 25th when it would come out

and you'll get to see the one that my

editor said

nope nope nope

nope

what was the topic

the topic was dilbers company

created a robot

that looked

too much like an attractive woman

and

it went from there

so i had to rewrite that

but it wasn't sexual

it was not sexual

yeah

well

what a what it was supposed to be

what it was supposed to be is a comment

on the fact that we will have robots

that are more attractive than humans

really soon

really soon and that that's going to be

a

civilization

threatening the situation

because once you like your robot better

than people

and why wouldn't you

because keep in mind

your robot will eventually look more

like an attractive

human

than the person you're with

right if you pick a human you'd be

really lucky if you got like a super

beautiful one or super handsome

but the robot's going to be super

beautiful or super handsome if they make

it that way and it's very soon going to

look exactly like a you know an actual

human

so very soon

and what happens if ai

gets into the robot so it can have a

conversation with you just like ai can't

now

and the ai will be interested in what

you're interested in and it will show

interest in you and caring about you

that's better than humans

we're right at the edge right at the

edge and we'll definitely go past it

where the robot will just be better

company and more

more rewarding to spend time with

yeah we're very close to that but anyway

that was my point but the risk was that

women would uh

women might take it differently

now i don't think my editor was wrong by

the way

so i want to be clear

i think my editor got this one right

you know the job of the editor is not

just to

uh

you know make sure that the editor stays

out of trouble but to keep me out of

trouble

so part of their job is to keep me

employed

keep me from getting cancelled and my

editor's opinion which i trust in this

situation

was that this would get me canceled

so you'll get to see it on locals

all right

oh talk about self-hypnosis that makes

you more horny for your own mate

i did it and she responded interesting

well we'll not talk about that today but

that's a topic we'll revisit

all right um

the golden age of walking on eggshells

no i think we are at the golden age

i really think we are

it never looks like it when you enter it

it is going to look like it in

retrospect

all right

uh

a micro lesson for kids leaving for

their freshman year at college lesson

for who the parents are the kids

not sure what what you want on that

uh

reparations

yeah i do i i do have a reparations

comic coming i think that's gonna get uh

i think my reparations comic is going to

get

get stopped too

now i did tell you that i don't plan to

retire

i plan to get cancelled did i tell you

that

because i thought about do i really want

to just like

fade away

so i think i'm going to make dilbert

more and more dangerous until i get

canceled that's the way i want to go out

i want to go out and cancel

all right that's all for now

i will talk to you

tomorrow youtube

and spa