Episode 1841 Scott Adams - All The News Today Is About Men Acting Badly. Do Women Make News Anymore?
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: ----------- - Things that can be said but not heard - Vitamin D and COVID - Sam Harris clarifications - Jake Tapper plugged Jared Kushner's new book? - President Trump, most persuasive person - Our fentanyl future ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
Good morning everybody, and welcome to another highlight of civilization. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and aren't you lucky to have stumbled upon it? Or possibly through your own intelligence, hard work, and good looks, you found it on your own. That's called doing your own research. And if…
View segment →to take this experience — and it is an experience — up to a new level, a level heretofore never known by any human being in the history of the world, all you need is a copper mug or a glass or a tankard, Chelsea's diamond canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid…
View segment →ell, I saw a comment on Locals just now. There's somebody doing this who uses a cup and a saucer. Oh, a mug's not good enough for you? You got your cup and your saucer? All right, all right, all right. Well, someday maybe the rest of us will come up to your level. Saucers. Just imagine that someday,…
View segment →a correlation. People who have bad health have bad vitamin D, right? So I would love to have somebody explain to people, as it happens, "Well we don't know if the data is right but the way you're thinking about the data is definitely wrong." You get that? There are two unknowns here. One is, is the…
View segment →being professionally courteous and maybe thinks that the audience would be interested in the book, it's not an endorsement of the person. It's not an endorsement of all that person has done. It's more like I wrote a book, you wrote a book, your book is interesting, maybe other people would like it t…
View segment →behalf of the people who don't exist. Have you ever met anybody who was offended by words? I never have. If you talk to anybody individually they'll say oh no it doesn't bother me. It's just something some jerk said. Why would I care about what some jerk said? But I'm pretty sure other people are g…
View segment →s have proven it but they're all leaning in that direction. So if that turned out to be true or even just a correlation that was important I'd say I got that one early and correctly. But it's definitely not confirmed that boosting your levels would help you with COVID. It might be later. I predicte…
View segment →would that count as declassification? And the lawyer said — what did the lawyer say? What do you think? Did the lawyers say that that's true as long as he signals by his actions? The answer is yes. The people who identified as lawyers said yes, he just has to signal it by his actions and it's declas…
View segment →it but then it's war. So we can go into their country and just take them out. Now I wouldn't drop a missile on them. I wouldn't fire a missile into China. You have to do it on the ground but it wouldn't be hard. How hard would it be to kill a fentanyl kingpin? Just by giving him an injection of fent…
View segment →hich is clearly a military weapon, clearly is a military weapon, that we're letting the Chinese use on our youth and we're just like oh okay yeah here you go. So TikTok has to be banned. I think Trump might be willing to do it but he didn't get it done. I don't know what the limitation is there. An…
View segment →at's all just their decisions. All right there we go. Hello from Nigeria. Yeah we have to demand our freedom of association. There are exceptions. Really? Well there would be maybe exceptions for what kind of time you spend with them but not for a selfie. I don't have any exceptions for that. All…
View segment →Good morning everybody, and welcome to another highlight of civilization. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and aren't you lucky to have stumbled upon it? Or possibly through your own intelligence, hard work, and good looks, you found it on your own. That's called doing your own research.
And if you'd like to take this experience — and it is an experience — up to a new level, a level heretofore never known by any human being in the history of the world, all you need is a copper mug or a glass or a tankard, Chelsea's diamond canteen, jug or 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 hit of the day. It's the thing that makes everything better and everybody better looking. It's called the simultaneous sip. It's going to happen now. Go.
Well, I saw a comment on Locals just now. There's somebody doing this who uses a cup and a saucer. Oh, a mug's not good enough for you? You got your cup and your saucer? All right, all right, all right. Well, someday maybe the rest of us will come up to your level. Saucers. Just imagine that someday, someday I will have a saucer.
Well, let's talk about the news. I would like to publicly congratulate Brian Stelter. As you know, he's leaving his position at CNN on Reliable Sources. I guess the ratings were not that good. But I would like to congratulate Brian Stelter for being the only person to ever leave CNN for a non-penis-related reason. So that feels like a step in the right direction.
Do you remember a story? It wasn't that long ago about this. There was a CEO named Dan Price, and he had decided that the lowest-paid person in his company would get a minimum of seventy thousand dollars. And so when he made that change, people said, "My God, you are amazing. You're amazing." And so for a long time he was hailed as a hero. But there seems to be a string of sexual assault charges against him.
Let me see if I can predict that that was going to happen. Famous, young, unusually good-looking CEO. I think he's single. What do you think is going to happen when a young, good-looking, powerful guy gets a lot of attention? I don't know. I feel like some sexual impropriety accusations are going to come out of that situation.
But what I say about him, Dan Price — and I don't mean this to be too cutting or too cruel — but Dan Price, you're no Brian Stelter. You're no Brian Stelter. Because he managed to go through an entire CNN career without any accusations of sexual impropriety. Now that could be either good or bad depending on your point of view, but let's say that it's good that he didn't do it.
I'm going to say this again because no matter how many times I say it, it can't be heard. I love this category of communication, sort of a little hobby of mine: things that can be said but they can't be heard. What would be an example of something you could say but nobody can hear? Lots of things. It's basically everything that doesn't agree with your opinion. I can say it all day long but you're not really going to hear it. It's going to change on the way in.
And here's one of those. The people on the left and the people on the right don't have much of a problem with each other. It's just the news. It's just the news. When I say "just," let's say 95 percent of it is the news telling you that you're mad at the other side and then highlighting the people who get the best zingers in on the other side and highlighting the people who are getting the best zingers from their own side.
When was the last time you had an actual unhealthy experience with just a regular person? And if you did, was the reason that you had an unpleasant experience because you could tell that that person had been hypnotized by the fake news? If you show me somebody who doesn't follow any news whatsoever — and I don't care what their political leaning is, I don't care how left they are — show me some hippie who doesn't own a television and hasn't watched the news in 20 years and I'll show you somebody I can get along with great. No problem at all.
You put me with a bunch of hippies, I love them. I love them. And they would probably like me too. We would have nothing to fight about. Then take the same group of people, roughly speaking, but they've been watching CNN and MSNBC for the last five years. I can't even be in the room with them.
So is there something wrong with the people or is there something wrong with the media? It's obvious. It's obviously the media. But the media is also in control of telling you what the problem is. So the people who are in control of telling you what the problem is are the problem. And that's our problem.
If the people who were causing the most problems would also point to themselves — which by the way sometimes they do, and Megyn Kelly does it all the time and Megyn Kelly is part of the news industry — but it will tell you right away that the news is part of the problem. So you can say it all day long but people don't hear it. What they hear is "my team good, other team bad." That's all they hear.
If you could convince people that the real problem was their believing of fake news, because that's mostly the problem — most of the problem is believing fake news. Here's what we need. We don't need fact checkers. I mean it's helpful. I don't mind having them, you know, as long as there's some on both sides and you can see both arguments. What we need is logic fixers.
Let me give you an example. Today yet again in the news there's a story that vitamin D seems to be highly correlated with good outcomes for people who have COVID. If you've got a low vitamin D level and you go into the hospital with COVID, it's probably grim. But if you had high vitamin D and you get COVID, even if you're hospitalized, it probably won't be that bad.
So what did most of you conclude? Do you remember in, I don't know, it was probably early in — I don't know what month it is, maybe some of you know what month in 2022, in the spring — did I say, "Hey, it looks like all the places that are having a bad time with COVID are coincidentally where they have low vitamin D"? Do you remember me saying that? I said, "Is it my imagination? All the people in all the places seems to be highly correlated with low vitamin D, right?"
But I wanted to believe that. How much do you think I want to believe that the very first thing I said — I think it was March, I said the first in May I did a long thread but I think it was way earlier that I noticed the correlation. If somebody has either a date on that I'd really like to know. But all right, consider my situation. I'm a public figure and I make predictions and assertions about reality. Don't you think I want to be right about that? Like how much do I want to be right that vitamin D was really the magic bullet all along? Right, because that would make me look smart. It would make me look smart. So I want that to be true.
But here's the problem. Every time a new study comes out they show correlation and they don't show causation. They suggest that the argument for causation is getting stronger but it isn't, because it's just more observational studies. It doesn't matter how many you do because the problem is that people who have poor health in general have low vitamin D. So if you notice that all the people with low vitamin D are dying, it's either telling you that vitamin D makes the difference or it's telling you that people in poor health often have low vitamin D. It doesn't mean it's the reason the people are having bad outcomes.
Now we do know that vitamin D is essential for your health. I think we know that. I mean I doubt that's going to change. So certainly vitamin D is helpful. We just don't know if these big numbers are really because of vitamin D or is just a correlation. People who have bad health have bad vitamin D, right?
So I would love to have somebody explain to people, as it happens, "Well we don't know if the data is right but the way you're thinking about the data is definitely wrong." You get that? There are two unknowns here. One is, is the data right in the first place? And then secondly, did you analyze it correctly? And I don't think necessarily either of them are true. I'm not sure they analyzed it right and I'm not even sure the data is right.
So if you're jumping to the conclusion that vitamin D has been proven to work, it might be true. I certainly want it to be true because that would make me look good. But it's not there. It's just not there.
All right, here's a — I don't know how to handle this next situation. So with your permission will you give me a little flexibility on this next topic? Because I'm going to confess to you that I don't know if I'm going to handle it the right way. So I'm just going to do my best. The only thing I'm going to promise you is I'll do my best but I think I'm going to fall a little short. All right? And there's a couple of points to be made.
Number one, if I ever mentioned to you that every time there's a story in the news it comes back to me somehow, like somehow I end up being connected to stories and it doesn't make any sense to me — I mean given that I do this and I do this in public, but even doing it in public I don't have that much exposure to the general public — but the number of times that I have some kind of connection to something in the news is just weird. It's just weird.
All right, here's the story. So you know that Sam Harris was getting some pushback for some things he said about Trump. And here's what happened yesterday. I got a longish message from Sam Harris, private message, in which he explained his position better. Now here's my problem. What the hell do I do now? It was a private message. It was a private message. But I thought it was an important one. In other words, wouldn't you like to know his argument? I don't know if he's made the argument exactly that way anywhere else.
So here's what I don't want to do. I don't want to read you his message because it was a private message. But I also don't want him to be sitting out there having offered something like a defense to somebody who's been talking about him in public and just leave him exposed. Because the worst thing would be for me to paraphrase him and then argue against him when he's not here to defend himself. And by the way, I probably shouldn't tell you what he said to me privately, right, even though it was related to a public discussion. So I'm uncomfortable telling you what he said but I thought I would do it this way.
So here's the way I'm going to approach it. Do you remember I told you that one way to see if you're in cognitive dissonance yourself is see if you can defend somebody else's argument that you disagree with? If you can take the other person's argument and give it in a reasonable way that's close enough to their argument, then you're probably not in cognitive dissonance. You're probably just valuing things differently. Maybe your risk assessment's a little different, that sort of thing.
All right, so I'm going to argue Sam Harris's point to support it. So I'm not going to debate it. I'm going to try to support it and then you can see if there's any holes and I'll do the best I can. So I'm going to try to actually support it. I'm not going to try to make him look bad by giving the weak version. I'm not going to, at least I'm not going to try to do that. So if that happens that would be a mistake.
All right, number one: Does Sam Harris think that Trump is like Hitler or in that class of danger? What do you think? You've seen his public statements. Do you think that he believes that? Now you might remember that prior to Trump being elected — I think it was prior to, was it just after or prior — but there was a point when I was talking to Sam Harris on his podcast that he did make a, let's say an almost an offhand Hitler analogy to Trump. So we do know that there's at least some statement in which he's made that reference.
So some of you are confirming that you've heard him make that reference. Now in his message to me he said that he does not think that Trump is in that category with Hitler. That Hitler occupies a completely different category of danger. And so I'm going to say that it was hyperbole that he ever compared Trump to Hitler. But also early on, hold on, early on you could say there's that risk. But now that Trump has served one complete term, one would have to reassess that risk. Are you with me so far?
Would you give me this following point? That no matter what Sam Harris or anybody else said about Trump early in his term or before he was elected, that that could now be discarded. Would you agree? Because what you thought would happen has to give way to four years of experience. And I would say that Sam Harris would be on the same page. I would say that he would value the four years that we observed as a higher truth than guessing what would happen. So I would say you, all of you, and he are on the same page on that. That you would put a higher value on actual experience than guessing.
Okay, now having seen Trump perform for four years, I accept Sam's statement that there's nothing Hitler-looking per se in that. You know, there's not going to be a roundup of people. He's not going to start a nuclear war for any obvious reason. And that being tough on crime and tough on immigration is not really Hitler. Okay, so far so far would you agree?
So his current view is that Trump does not occupy a dangerous as Hitler situation. Would you accept that that's a reasonable evolution of opinion from "well we don't know what risk he poses" all the way to "well we saw four years, you know, I still have my issues but it's not a Hitler problem"? Would you accept that? I do. I think that would be a reasonable evolution of opinion based on evolving information.
Now what problems does Sam still have? Well there are two things which he's mentioned recently more than others. One is Trump University as an example of Trump's character. The other is that Trump doxed some citizens. Now I have to confess I'm not aware of those stories. Vaguely I can imagine I sort of have a memory of somebody getting maybe called out by Trump and had trouble. And if that happened I would be opposed to that.
So is there anybody here who thinks that the president of the United States should be doxing individuals? No, right? Does anybody think that the president should do that? No, I don't think that's a good move. So we could agree with him that it's suboptimal, right? I think some of you are going to say sure he can do it if they do it first, whatever. But generally speaking I don't think you want your president targeting law-abiding individuals who are exercising freedom of speech. I think we'd all be on the same page, right?
And I don't think there are any Trump supporters who think that Trump University showed Trump in a good light. My personal belief about that is that Trump was just a hands-off manager and probably didn't know what was going on there. I don't know that but it's an assumption that matches everything I know about executives who have lots of businesses. I think he had 400 businesses with his name on it if you count licensing deals. You don't look after all 400 deals. I've done licensing myself. I've had lots of licensees for Dilbert. Do you think I managed all of them and tracked them all to make sure they were doing what I wanted them to do with my property? Well we required it. I mean they had to report to me but not really. That was sort of other people doing their job and you hope they did it well.
I'm guessing, and I don't have any information to back this, but if you have 400 companies with your name on it and you're doing as much business as Trump was doing, you probably didn't watch any of them too closely. I don't know how you could. So yeah, the question is who did Trump dox? But I don't think that's going to be the critical question here.
So as I understand Sam Harris's point — and I'm going to understand it to support it — there are two examples in which Trump's character is called into question: Trump University and then doxing individuals. Would you say that those two tell you something about Trump as an individual? I think so. I think so, yeah.
Now but here's the interesting thing. Why would you pick those out? So here's my observation as a hypnotist, as a trained hypnotist. One of the things you look for to see if somebody is hypnotized is that their reaction is extremely non-standard. Not completely crazy, just completely non-standard.
When was the last time somebody said that Trump has to go because those times he doxed people? Have you heard anybody else ever say that? Has anybody ever heard anybody ever say that a big problem with Trump is his doxing of individuals? So there's no way to know what's in the head of other people and so I'm not going to diagnose somebody by reading their mind. That's not a thing. I'm just saying if you were looking for a signal for cognitive dissonance that would be a gigantic glaring signal. Doesn't mean it is. Doesn't mean it is. It just means that that's exactly what a signal would look like. A highly unusual opinion which still has some logical connective tissue.
Because when somebody is hypnotized and they come up with let's say the cognitive dissonance explanation of why they're doing something, the cognitive dissonance explanation also makes sort of sense. In other words they can piece it together with some kind of logical trail but you still look at it and say I don't think anybody else in that situation would have said that. Of all the things you could say that's an unusual one.
So without having an opinion of whether the doxing is good or bad, I think we'd all agree it's bad if we heard the examples. I'm not familiar with the examples but I'm open to the fact that if a president doxed somebody that's really bad. Shouldn't do that, right?
And so when you see an unusual opinion that's a flag. Now that doesn't mean that he's experiencing cognitive dissonance. Are you clear on that? It doesn't mean he's experiencing cognitive dissonance. It just means that if he is it would look exactly like that. That's all.
Now the other thing you would look for for cognitive dissonance is a trigger. A trigger is if something that you were sure would be true doesn't happen, right? So I said from the beginning that Trump would be an expensive president, meaning he'd cause a lot of trouble and he'd break a lot of dishes, but that there might be some big things that the country wants, at least part of the country wants, that he would get done. And sure enough he got done, you know, in my opinion, North Korea, defused that. You know, the Abraham Accords. You know, I think he tightened up the border better than, you know, not as good as somebody wanted but better than it's been done, you know. And so you could come up with a bunch of things he did.
Now in my opinion my expectation of Trump was pretty close to what happened. So there's no trigger for cognitive dissonance in my case or at least one that I can't see. Maybe you can see it but I can't see it because I got what I expected.
But now imagine if you were talking about Trump in the most let's say cataclysmic terms before he got elected and it looked like the end of the world and you'd really gone out there saying it was going to be a disaster. And then Trump gets in office and he does something closer to a good job, not at all what it looked like it was going to be if you were a critic. That's a trigger. That's a perfect trigger. That's a textbook trigger for cognitive dissonance. What you expected is wildly different than what you got.
And that wasn't true for Republicans. Republicans expected a set of behaviors from Trump and they got them for the most part. They got exactly what they expected. There's no trigger there. It's only the people who were surprised who were triggered. So that again doesn't mean he's experiencing cognitive dissonance. It just means it would look exactly like that if he were. That's all you can say.
But let me take his argument and finish it because there's something to it. And he goes on to say that Trump's what he would say is obvious character failings as evidenced by Trump University — this is Sam's argument — and as evidenced by doxing and other behaviors that look cowardly and or selfish, that those are dangerous characteristics to have in the president. But nothing like the danger of a Hitler.
And so when Sam says he's not too concerned that maybe the Hunter Biden laptop story got suppressed for the purpose of helping Trump lose the election, that maybe that's not that different than the Weiner laptop coming out that may have helped Trump get elected hypothetically. So if you said to me well those things are about equal, maybe it would be better if neither of them happen but they're not that different in impact, that's not crazy. That's not crazy.
If you put yourself in the other situation, if you knew that the only thing that kept Hillary Clinton out of office was some sketchy stuff in the news — in fact maybe that is exactly what happened, we don't know — but if you knew that's the only thing that kept her out of office and you were a Republican, how concerned would you be? You wouldn't be that concerned.
Now I don't want to speak for you but on average people are willing to accept a little imperfection on their own team if they get what they want. That's pretty normal, right? So I think it's pretty normal for somebody to say I would have accepted a little imperfection to get the outcome I wanted because I think a different president makes a big difference.
Now what about — Sam Harris also famously said that he had, I forget the exact words, but in some ways more respect for Osama bin Laden than for Trump. But this has to be understood in terms of an intellectual argument, right? As soon as you put it into an emotional argument it makes your head explode. No, bin Laden's a monster, Trump's just a politician. No, but that's not what he was talking about. He's not talking about bin Laden directly murdering people versus Trump having a policy he doesn't like. The point was that bin Laden was operating on principle. It just happened to be a principle that we hate. But he was sort of internally consistent with his Islamic beliefs, at least the extremistic Islamic beliefs. Whereas Sam's point is that Trump is not moored to any moral or ethical foundation and therefore he's a little more unpredictable and likely to operate for his own best interest in any given situation.
So do you think that it's dangerous to have somebody you can't predict as president because he's going to sort of go where the self-interest goes? That's not a terrible argument. Now I have counterarguments but I'm not going to do that in this conversation because this conversation is to see if I can explain his argument in a way that makes it make sense without making it sound crazy. And I think that his argument is not crazy if you accept the following clarifications which he has provided.
Clarification number one: He does not believe that Trump is dangerous like a Hitler would be. He believes he's unpredictable because he's not moored to a moral ethical foundation. I accept that. I accept that. If I were arguing against it, which I'm not going to do today, I would say something about the presidency has more transparency than most things and that he's offered to give us those services on our behalf and we can watch it happen while it's happening. But there's not that much transparency so there's always an issue. And so if I take Sam's argument I'd say there's not that much transparency. There's not enough because we still wonder what happens behind closed doors and stuff. But it's not a bad argument.
So if you allow that the bin Laden argument was just an intellectual exercise, which is what it was, that's fine. It's just an intellectual exercise. If you allow that the Hitler stuff was just hyperbole and also has given way to experience — we've seen what Trump can and cannot do in office — I don't think Sam's opinion is as crazy as you do.
Let me ask you this. If I said there was some other president coming into office, let's say it was a Democrat, and you felt that that Democrat's history suggested that the Democrat would do whatever it took, that there was no moral underpinnings, would you be uncomfortable with that president? Probably. Probably, right? Were you uncomfortable with LBJ? Were you uncomfortable with — I'm not sure about Bill Clinton. I'm not going to go that far. I have a different opinion about Hillary than I do about Bill. I think Bill Clinton was a solid president. That's my opinion. I think he was a solid president. Yeah. And I'm not looking for an argument on that. You know, people can disagree on stuff like that.
All right, so how did I do? How did I do? Did I — you don't have to agree with my argument but do you think that I've made Sam Harris's point look reasonable? Does it look reasonable? Well once you take away the hyperbole there's a solid core there. I guess some yeses, mostly nos. You know we're deep into team sport territory here and when you get this deeply into team sport I know you don't want to give the other team a point. I get that.
But let me ask you this. Did I at least pass the test that I could express the argument in a full-throated way? Would you accept that? Did I express the argument in a full-throated way? I think I did. I think I did. Now that would suggest that I don't have cognitive dissonance. And again this is a rule of thumb. It's not like some scientific guarantee. But the strong indication is that I can tell his argument and I don't have an unusual opinion about things.
All right, so I feel good about that. But here's my bottom line. I think that the difference between Sam's opinion and mine comes down to one thing: wildly different opinions about what is dangerous. Wildly different opinions about what's important.
For example I would say that the 50 intelligence agents lying about Hunter's laptop destroys the credibility of our most important systems and also reveals that they're corrupt. And I would put that at, in terms of a scale of one to ten, that's like a nine in terms of how bad that is. That's like a nine. How bad is a president doxing an individual? Well on a moral, ethical, and preference level it's a ten in badness. But in terms of how it affects the world it's a one. It's a one. It affects those people and I don't like that at all. You know, any doxing by a president I'm completely against. But you have to put it in perspective.
I would say that the 50 intel people, ex-intel professionals, lying is a big freaking deal. That's a nine. Doxing, it's a one. Except that the individuals involved, of course it's a ten to them. So I don't know that Sam and I differ on the logic of anything. I don't know that we have different data, at least that hasn't been obvious to me. But we're definitely valuing things differently.
I'll give you another one. I imagine that January 6 would be higher. And well since he hasn't talked about it I won't put this in his head. Let's say me compared to a Democrat. A typical Democrat would say January 6 was just horrible, like it was nearly the end of the republic. Do you know what I say about January 6? Again not counting the violence part, which is if you were a recipient of the violence or you were jailed because of it that problem is a 10 and a 10 for you, no question about it. But what effect did it have on the world or the country? In my opinion, stronger. There it is. Well okay, I just outed myself there didn't I? I guess that was a non-standard opinion wasn't it?
So then I have to ask myself was that cognitive dissonance? Here's why I say stronger. I'll give you my argument. Doesn't mean I'm not experiencing cognitive dissonance. Now keep in mind that I've condemned Trump's actions on January 6. So in theory that should protect me, right? Because I'm on record. I said Biden won from day one. You know that's not going to change. I've never gone back on that. The system elected Biden. So even if there were hypothetically any imperfections I still go with the system. We got to fix the system but you got to go with the system while you're fixing it. That's just my opinion.
So my opinion on January 6 is that it made America stronger. Would anybody agree with that before you hear my argument? Before I give you the argument: January 6, the protests, even with the violence which I condemned totally, made America stronger. Yeah, I think reasonable people can disagree on this one.
Here's my argument. It's sort of the Jordan Peterson argument about individuals that you should be dangerous but learn to control it. Your nature should be as dangerous as possible. It keeps society operating. Here's what I want. I want my government, no matter who it is, be they Democrat or be they Republican or anything else, I want my government to know that if I've got questions and my fellow citizens have questions we're going to show up. We're going to show up. Well not me. I like to have bathrooms I don't have to wait for so I won't be there. But for the people who like to do that kind of stuff they'll be there. Yeah, I'll try to do something useful at home where I'm more comfortable. But the rest of you, I love the fact that you show up.
So my take on — and I'm going to say the same thing for Black Lives Matter. All right, so here I'm going to show at least maybe a possibility that I'm not experiencing cognitive dissonance. Black Lives Matter created some bad stuff, created lots of destruction and death. I don't mind living in a country where people are going to hit the streets to fight for fairness. I don't hate that. I hate all the violence. I hate the disruption. I hate that they may be confused. I hate that they may be semi-hypnotized. I hate that the news is brainwashing people. I don't know that the protests were useful so I'm not saying they were useful.
So I'm going to make a real strong distinction. I don't think necessarily that January 6 was useful and I don't think that the BLM protests were useful in the end. But do you want to live in the country that won't do that? I don't. I want to live in a country where if the Republicans think something went wrong they're in the streets. And I want to live in the country — you might not like this — where if the Democrats think something is just terribly wrong they're going to hit the streets. So give me the country that protests. Thank you very much. And let them go wild. Let them make their case and let them see if they can prevail. Because you have seen cases where protests turn into something good, let's say civil rights. You've seen them where they don't turn into anything good, let's say Antifa. But I still want to live in this country. I still want to live where people will take to the streets.
All right, so I just value things completely different than other people and therefore we can get to different conclusions.
All right, while I'm defending people that you might not want me to defend, let me throw another one in the mix. Jake Tapper is getting a bunch of heat today because he retweeted Ivanka Trump's tweet promoting Jared's new book. And people are saying, "Jake Tapper, how can you retweet Jared? Are you part of the elite? What's going on here? Are you selling out?" say the CNN observers. To which I would like to add the following context. I also plugged Jake Tapper's book when it came out. It's an author thing. That's all it is.
As soon as you think this is more than one author being professionally courteous and maybe thinks that the audience would be interested in the book, it's not an endorsement of the person. It's not an endorsement of all that person has done. It's more like I wrote a book, you wrote a book, your book is interesting, maybe other people would like it too. That's it, right? Authors promote other people's books. It doesn't mean anything.
Scott is waffling again. What am I waffling about? Somebody says I'm waffling. I don't think I've waffled less on any livestream than today. So you could have your own opinions about Jake Tapper's politics and performance etc. But let the guy promote a book from anybody. Just let him promote a book.
Because I like to say this every few months at least: I insist on the right of association. I insist as a citizen of the United States on the right of free association. If I want to talk to the worst person in the world and get a selfie with that person I'm going to do it and I don't care what your opinion is and I'm never going to care what your opinion is. If I want to tweet somebody's book and you don't like their politics but I think the book is interesting I'm going to tweet that book. There's nothing you're going to do to talk me out of that behavior. So freedom of association, there is no wiggle room. That one's an absolute and can't ever change.
All right, Bill Maher continues to be interesting politically. And he noted on the show with 85 percent of the people Trump endorsed for the primaries won. 85 percent. And he said, quote, "Say what you want about Mr. Evil" — meaning Trump — "but boy what a politician. I mean that's impressive. Impressive in an evil way but still impressive."
So do you remember when Trump first announced? Do you remember what I seemed to be completely alone in the United States saying? I wrote a blog post called Clown Genius. He was being called a clown and I said you better watch out for the clown because this clown is a genius persuasion-wise. And then the clown became the president of the United States. And then even out of office he influenced 85 percent of the primaries.
Now can we give me some credit for calling on day one, the first one at least, maybe not the first one but among the first to say there's something going on with this guy? And I said that he would be the most persuasive person you've ever seen. I believe that that's now the case. I believe that even his biggest critics would say okay I don't like what he's saying but there's no question about his persuasion. He's got the entire package. He does. Whole package.
BJ Novak I guess was on Bill Maher's podcast and you know he's a writer and humorist, stand-up guy. He wrote for The Office and he was an actor on that. BJ Novak. If your initials are BJ you've got to learn to tell a joke. You've got to have a sense of humor. But BJ believes what I believe, which is that wokeness is really people pretending to be offended on behalf of the people who don't exist.
Have you ever met anybody who was offended by words? I never have. If you talk to anybody individually they'll say oh no it doesn't bother me. It's just something some jerk said. Why would I care about what some jerk said? But I'm pretty sure other people are going to be offended. I'm pretty sure other people are going to be offended.
Now let me say again I'm a fan of wokeness. I know it sounds weird because I'm one of the biggest critics of wokeness but also a fan. And here's how that's consistent. The Dilbert comic for which you know I'm notorious is about good ideas that are taken too far. That's what it's about. Because management is a good idea. You can't have an unmanaged company. But if you take it too far you're micromanaging. If you take it too far you're doing whatever the latest trend is before knowing it's a good idea. So everything I talk about is a basic good idea that's just been taken to some ridiculous point.
So what do I think about calling people by the name that they would like to be called? I call that good manners. That's not even a conversation. Yeah, whatever you want. If that's how you feel comfortable I'd be happy to do it. Now if somebody said I would like you to call me King Scott I Suck Before You that's my legal name. Whenever you refer to me call me King Scott I Suck Before You. And I said no, don't call me Scott. I prefer to be called King Scott I Suck Before Your Great Presence. That's my full name. Now that would be too far, right?
So there's got to be some limits on wokeness but I don't mind anybody has his or her preference. But as I've said before and I will say a million times: in return for my flexibility and my attempt to have good manners and treat people the way they would like to be treated, you're gonna have to give me a break if I get it wrong. And I'm not going to take any wiggle on that. If I get one wrong, I misgender you, whatever, and you've got a problem with that, if you correct me I will take that under advisement and hope to do better. If you attack me — everybody makes mistakes — if you attack me for that mistake because I don't have bad intentions, right? You can attack people for bad intentions. You can attack me for bad intentions. If you ever see me with bad intentions, free punch. Let me say it again. If you ever are sure — I hope you'd be sure about it, don't guess — but if you ever see me having bad intentions, free punch. Come at me as hard as you want. I try not to do that. I don't think I ever have but I try not to.
So let's keep pretending there are people who are offended when none of us have ever met any. And by the way if I ever do meet somebody who's offended by that kind of stuff I don't really want to be their friend. I wouldn't spend a minute with somebody who's offended by stuff like that because you know it's just going to come back to you basically. Somebody who's offended by words is just telling you you don't want to interact with them in any way at all. Just run away.
All right, I'm seeing some graphs again that people are saying that the vaccinations are hurting people because there are more people hospitalized who are vax than unvax. How many times do we have to go over this? That the population of people who got vaccinated are by nature the weakest ones. So of course the vaccinated would have more hospitalizations. It's exactly what you would expect. But it's being used as proof that vaccinations are hurting you.
Now let me be very clear. I don't believe any data about vaccinations. None. There's basically nothing about the pandemic that I believe because it's all been we've been fooled so many times that as soon as you think you know something you're like, well got disappointed there. Now I don't know if vaccinations helped or hurt.
But I'm going to tell you what I think my scorecard is. All right, this will offend you greatly. I'm going to say again that I had the best pandemic predictions by far in my opinion. Nobody came close. But I won't get any agreement on that because people still disagree what's true. As long as we're disagreeing about what's true then you can't say who had good predictions. But mine are shaping up to be the truest so far.
Let me give you some ideas. So in early 2020 I said vitamin D looked like it was crucial in COVID. I just told you that I don't think the studies have proven it but they're all leaning in that direction. So if that turned out to be true or even just a correlation that was important I'd say I got that one early and correctly. But it's definitely not confirmed that boosting your levels would help you with COVID. It might be later.
I predicted that the vaccines wouldn't work. Right now a lot of people believe I did the opposite. But when it was first announced the experts said we've been working for decades, we're not even close. So I said well if the experts think it can't be done I'll go with the experts. Now I don't always go with the experts but in that case I did. And sure enough the vaccinations did not work as vaccinations. But I said at the time that we're probably going to come up with better therapeutics. I would say I had one of the best predictions: that the vaccines wouldn't work as vaccinations but that we would come up with strong therapeutics, which I believe we have.
Then we see the latest studies that say ivermectin did not work. Am I ready to conclude that ivermectin could not have worked under any combination of when you gave it, who you gave it to, or in any combination of anything else? That I would say is unknown. But I said don't buy into ivermectin right away. I said wait for studies. And every day that goes by without confirmation you should lower your odds of it working. So I did the same thing with hydroxychloroquine as with ivermectin. I started with well there's some indication it might work and it doesn't hurt you, why not? But then every time some data came in that made it look like maybe it wasn't working I lowered my percentage likelihood until I got down to about 10 percent and that's where I stopped.
So that's where I have it: hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin somewhere no more than 10 percent possibility that they ever could have worked in the right dosage with the right combination with the right people at the right time, that sort of thing. So I think I had the best ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine predictions, still admitting we don't know if they work. Are you okay with that? That at this moment we still don't know but all of the information is leaning in one direction which is the direction I was going at the same time.
Yeah, what else? Let's see. Yeah I would say that. And then we don't want to talk about masks but I was I believe the only person in the country who said that Fauci was lying when he said masks don't work and he admitted he was lying. So I'm the only person who got that right. And then when masks were rolled out I said from an engineering perspective they almost certainly have to reduce the amount of spread but we won't see it in the big numbers because I told you that you wouldn't see anything with the leadership in the state and country level, which is why I was against mandates. So I was never for mandates of masks.
But unambiguously if water gets stuck on your mask there's some virus on that water. We just don't know how much and whether it made a difference but we could see it didn't make a difference on the state level. I mean the data doesn't seem to support it. So I would say that I was by far the most right about masks. Nobody was even close. I would say I was probably close to eight or nine out of ten and I think most people were closer to a three in rightness on that. Now again this depends on the data that we have now continuing to prove out which might change. So I could be wrong on any one of these things because we never have final confirmations it seems. But I would make my argument that there was nobody even in my general neighborhood of rightness. I wasn't even — nobody was even close to my predictions in my opinion. There is room for disagreement.
All right, so I asked this question on Twitter a few times and I think I have an answer now about the Mar-a-Lago information. And given that a president doesn't have any requirements for a process for declassifying, I ask the following question: If a president signals that something is declassified is that good enough? And one way to signal it would be take these top secret boxes and move them to Mar-a-Lago. To me that's declassifying because it's clear that anybody would know that taking them to Mar-a-Lago takes them away from a secure place and anybody can see them. So in my opinion that would be declassification.
And so I asked lawyers because I'm not one. I said can a president do any kind of signal, any kind of signal at all, and would that count as declassification? And the lawyer said — what did the lawyer say? What do you think? Did the lawyers say that that's true as long as he signals by his actions? The answer is yes. The people who identified as lawyers said yes, he just has to signal it by his actions and it's declassified.
There isn't any legal risk here is there? Because even if you allow that you found the lawyer who disagrees, if most lawyers think it's totally legal you're not going to get a jury to think it's illegal. If most lawyers think it's perfectly legal what you did you're not going to get a jury of 12 people to say it was illegal. It's just not going to happen. There's no legal risk here at all. Yes sir, I don't see one. Unless it's a complete rigged trial and I don't think that's going to happen because there's too much visibility.
Yeah, well we're done with the declassification talk.
All right, Lockheed Martin is putting into operation lasers on warships. So we've heard about lasers on jets. They're testing. But now they've got a laser they can put on a warship. So that's interesting. Do you know what we're going to have to use lasers for? I'll tell you the biggest use of lasers in the future: shooting down drones. The small ones, not the big military ones. Those would be a little harder. But shooting down the small ones. And you know why you're going to have to shoot those down? Because we're probably about a year away from them being filled with fentanyl and becoming the primary terrorist weapon.
Yeah, now I did write a book about that in 2003-ish. When was it? Somewhere around there. And it's called The Religion War. I might read that into YouTube and or Locals. So I might turn that into an e-book just by reading it. But there is no way that terrorists are going to not notice that fentanyl is deadly and is light and easily available. If it's light a small drone can carry it and deliver it anywhere. If it's deadly it's better than dynamite because you can't get dynamite very easily. It's hard to get. You know, see what's the explosive? C4? Yeah it's hard to get C4. But literally every kid can get fentanyl. A teenager can get fentanyl.
So there isn't any doubt where things are going. There's going to be fentanyl and it's going to be on drones and we're going to need lasers to shoot those drones out of the air. Although maybe that's bad too because the drone is still going to crash and the fentanyl is going to get out. I don't know. Maybe there's no solution. But as long as China is sending us fentanyl and it's going through the cartels it's going to us, our future is guaranteed. It's fentanyl on small drones for unlimited terrorist attacks in our population centers. There's no way to stop it except wipe out the cartels and then tell China they're next.
I would definitely kill the fentanyl dealers in China on Chinese territory because China isn't going to nuke us for taking out their terrorists. They're going to get really, really mad about it but then it's war. So we can go into their country and just take them out. Now I wouldn't drop a missile on them. I wouldn't fire a missile into China. You have to do it on the ground but it wouldn't be hard. How hard would it be to kill a fentanyl kingpin? Just by giving him an injection of fentanyl. All right, pretty easy. All you need is a blow dart with a little fentanyl and it's like and Mr. Kingpin is dead.
Now I don't know how hard it is to get a Chinese agent into China but I've got a feeling that there might be a couple people who are not happy with the government over there might want to give us a little help. There might be somebody. Yeah, blow darts with fentanyl. Get over it. As long as the fentanyl is in the dart, okay? It's not the safest thing anybody ever did but murder is never really that safe. It really isn't.
I'm going to make a prediction. There isn't the slightest chance that we will not attack the cartels in Mexico. There isn't the slightest chance that's not going to happen. Because let me tell you what's going to happen. The number of fentanyl deaths will keep climbing and at some point you're all going to be where I am. Well I've been there a long time. And where I am is we're in the middle of a war and there's nothing I won't do. Nothing. Nope. Would I kidnap the president of Mexico? Yes. Yeah I would if it would work. I mean it wouldn't work right? Would I annex Mexico? Yep. Yep I would annex Mexico. Yeah, you'd have a hard time coming up with something I wouldn't do to stop this problem. I can't think of anything I wouldn't do.
Would I start machine gunning the coyotes? Yes I would. Yeah I would start killing the coyotes where they stand anytime you can see them from our side of the border. In fact I'd send drones in and just start killing the coyotes wherever they are. Would it help? I don't care. If you took out the cartel operations would it have stopped the fentanyl trade? I don't care. I don't care. It might slow down the next person who wanted to start it but you have to make sure that everybody who deals fentanyl dies a horrible death and fairly soon.
I would also start executing our fentanyl dealers publicly. Publicly. I think a fentanyl dealer needs to be executed publicly above a certain level. I'm not talking about the onesies-twosies street dealers. I'm talking about the big ones. Public execution. In fact if Trump ran on that platform — public execution for fentanyl dealers and I will attack the cartels in office — I'd be all in. I would be all in.
Somebody thinks I'm I support Sharia. Yeah that's a little bit of a leap from attacking, from killing mass murderers to Sharia law. There's a little bit of a leap there. About the mules who transport it, I think you have to make some distinctions in terms of how much they're involved. I wouldn't kill somebody for maybe necessarily transporting it across the border if they're an American citizen. If it's not an American citizen and they transport one pill of fentanyl over the border I would kill them. I'd kill them if they transported it to sell. Yeah I would say yeah. If you don't live in this country and you take one pill across our border I'd kill them. Too far? No there's nothing that's not too far. There's nothing not too far. A hundred thousand people, kids mostly, well young people dying per year. Yeah for one pill.
Now let me say it again. I would if I do that the pill — now of course nobody's going to bring one pill right so that's hyperbole. If you're going to argue about the one pill you're just arguing hyperbole and that's useless. I'm just saying if it's obvious they're bringing fentanyl to sell I wouldn't care how much. If they bring it to sell, kill them.
All right looks like — oops what's that? The secret mice micro lesson? Yes. All right.
No more Pfizer commercials. Disproportionate punishment. Yeah you know when people are involved in mass murder I believe that their own lives should be used for something useful. Not like a regular — if a regular criminal does something you know just let the justice thing do its thing. But if you're a mass murderer I think you should be killed in whatever way is the most useful to society. And if murdering you in public makes somebody else less likely to do it, okay yeah. If murdering somebody in a horrible way in front of the public — I would hang him. I'd hang him actually because the visual of hanging is just really good. That's a good visual. Oh actually I take it back. Now you don't want to hang them because some of them would be Black. So no hanging. No hang. There's got to be something else. Public execution but no hanging. Guillotine? Yeah too clean.
Dope, six started this. Yeah. Maybe. Do you own a firearm? I want you to sneak in my house and find out. Yeah my personal defense system is "follows the around and find out." I'm not going to tell you what my personal defense situation is. It's a surprise. Let me just say this. If you get into my house your problem is getting out. Getting into my house or really any house, getting into a house is not that hard. All you need is a rock to get through a window. Getting into my house no problem. Getting out, good luck. That's all you need to know about my defense.
All right sounds like a date. All right everybody was this the best show you've ever seen? I think I've — oh let me one more thing. Apparently the web browser and TikTok app can track every keystroke made by its users. How incompetent is our government that they haven't banned TikTok? What is up with that? How incompetent that TikTok, which is clearly a military weapon, clearly is a military weapon, that we're letting the Chinese use on our youth and we're just like oh okay yeah here you go. So TikTok has to be banned. I think Trump might be willing to do it but he didn't get it done. I don't know what the limitation is there.
And the big news is that Facebook and TikTok have banned controversial figure Andrew Tate. If you don't know who Andrew Tate is you're lucky. But he's like the Andrew Dice Clay but he's got more of a homoerotic vibe to his stuff. He's not gay but he presents himself in sort of a homoerotic vibe. And he got kicked off of Facebook and Instagram, same company, for saying things which his fans say are just the truth.
Now do you remember that I said a while ago that no man could say what he's actually thinking? Like you couldn't survive if a man just said whatever he was thinking whenever he was thinking. Now I'm not saying that I'm thinking what he's thinking. I'm just saying it's a good example of somebody who is trying to say what he's actually thinking in public and he doesn't have a chance. Yeah he got a big following. Do you know why he got over 4 million followers almost instantly? Is it because males disagreed with him? No. It's because they knew he was self-immolating by saying things that they sort of also believed or thought were true or rang true anyway.
So somebody's saying that Cernovich likes him. I don't know if he likes him is the right phrase but again my right of free association is not just for me. If somebody I like or respect wants to spend some time with somebody I don't like or respect that's fine. Because Cernovich like me exerts his complete right to associate with whoever he wants. Actually is one of the things I like most about him. In fact he associated with me, Cernovich did, before I had much of a following on social media and I think that was risky. So I'm never going to give somebody a hard time for who they spend time with, endorse, prefer. That's all just their decisions.
All right there we go. Hello from Nigeria. Yeah we have to demand our freedom of association. There are exceptions. Really? Well there would be maybe exceptions for what kind of time you spend with them but not for a selfie. I don't have any exceptions for that.
All right there's some entertaining Tate impersonator videos. All right well that's all I got for today. Would you agree that this is probably the best livestream you're ever going to see? Maybe in the history of all time? Yeah very close. Very close to the best thing you'll ever see.
All right I did finish. I did fix my Photoshop problem. There was a setting that changed somehow on its own and the setting change seemed to have nothing to do with the brush tool. The brush tool has lots of settings in different places and you have to find them all so it's just a terrible interface problem. Yeah so the computer works. That's the good news. And that's all for now. I'll talk to you later. You do.
good morning everybody and welcome to another highlight of civilization it's called coffee with scott adams and aren't you lucky to have stumbled upon it or possibly through your own intelligence hard work and good looks you found it on your own that's called doing your own research and if you'd like to take this experience and it is an experience up to a new level a level heretofore never known by any human being in the history of the world all you need is a copper mug or a glass of tanker chelsea's diamond canteen jug or 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 end of the day it's the thing that makes it everything better and everybody better looking it's called the simultaneous but it's going to happen now go well i saw an uh comment on locals just now there's somebody doing this who uses a cup and a saucer oh oh a mug's not good enough for you you got your cup and your saucer all right all right all right well someday maybe the rest of us will come up to your level saucers it is just imagine that someday someday i will have a saucer well let's talk about the news i would like to publicly congratulate brian stelter as you know he's leaving his position as cnn on reliable sources i guess the ratings were not that good but i would like to congratulate brian stelter for being the only person to ever leave cnn for a non-penis related reason so that feels like a step in the right um do you remember a story wasn't that long ago about this there was a ceo named dan price and he had decided that the lowest paid person in his company would get a minimum of seventy thousand dollars and so when he made that change people said my god you you are amazing you're amazing and so for a long time he was hailed as a hero but there seems to be a string of sexual assault charges against him let me see if i can predict that that was going to happen famous young unusually good-looking ceo i think he's single what do you think is going to happen when a young good-looking powerful guy gets a lot of attention i don't know i feel like some sexual impropriety accusations are going to come out of that situation but what i say about him dan price is and i don't mean this to be too cutting or too cruel but dan price you're no brian stelter you're no brian stelter because he managed to go through an entire cnn career without any accusations of sexual impropriety now that could be either good or bad depending on your point of view but let's say that it's it's good that he didn't do it i'm going to say this again because no matter how many times i say it it can't be heard i i love this category of communication sort of a little hobby of mine things that can be said but they can't be heard what would be an example of something you could say but nobody can hear lots of things it's basically everything that doesn't agree with your opinion i can say it all day long but you're not really going to hear it it's going to change on the way in and here's one of those the people on the left and the people on the right don't have much of a problem with each other it's just the news it's just the news when i say just let's say 95 95 of it is the news telling you that you're mad at the other side and then highlighting the people who get the best zingers in on the other side and highlight the people who are getting the best singers from their other side when was the last time you had an actual you know unhealthy experience with just a regular person and if you did was the reason that you had an unpleasant experience because you could tell that that person had been hypnotized by the fake news right if you show me somebody who doesn't follow any news whatsoever and i don't care what their political uh leaning is i don't care how left they are show me the uh i'll just use an old term show me some hippie who doesn't own the television and hasn't watched the news in 20 years and i'll show you somebody i can get along with great no problem at all you put me with a bunch of hippies i love them i love them and they would probably like me too we would have nothing to fight about then take the same group of people you know roughly speaking but they've been watching cnn and msnbc for the last five years i can't even be in the room with them so is there something wrong with the people or there's something wrong with the media it's obvious it's obviously the media but the media is also in control of telling you what the problem is so the people who are in control of telling you what the problem is are the problem and that's our problem if the people who were causing the most problems would also point to themselves which by the way sometimes they do and guff held does it all the time and guff held as part of the news industry but it will tell you right away that the you know the news is part of the problem so you can you can say it all day long but people don't hear it what they hear is my team good other team bad that's all they hear if you could convince people that the the real problem was their believing of fake news because that's mostly the problem most of the problem is believing fake news here's what we need we don't need fact checkers i mean it's helpful i don't mind having them you know as long as there's some on both sides and you can see both arguments what we need is logic fixers let me give you an example today yet again in the news there's a story that vitamin d uh seems to be highly correlated with good outcomes for people who have covet if you've got a low vitamin d level and you go into the hospital with covet it's probably grim uh but if you had high vitamin d and you go you get covered even if you're hospitalized probably won't be that bad so what what did most of you conclude do you remember in i don't know it was probably early in i don't know what month it is maybe some of you know what month in 2022 in the spring did i say hey it looks like all the places that are having bad time with covid are coincidentally where they have low vitamin d do you remember me saying that i said is it my imagination there's all the all the people in all the places seems to be highly correlated with low vitamin d right but i want to believe that right how much do you think i want to believe that the very first thing i said i think it was i think it was march i said the first in may i did a long thread but i think it was way earlier that i noticed the correlation if somebody if somebody has either a date on that i'd really like i'd really love to know but all right consider my situation right i'm a public figure and i make predictions and assertions about reality don't you think i want to be right about that like how much do i want to be right the vitamin d was really the magic bullet all along right because that would make me look smart it would make me look smart so i want that to be true but here's the problem every time a new study comes out they show correlation and they don't show causation they suggest that the argument for causation is getting stronger but it isn't because it's just more observational studies it doesn't matter how many you do because the problem is that people who have poor health in general have low vitamin d so if you notice that all the people with low vitamin d are dying it's either telling you that vitamin d makes the difference or it's telling you that people in poor health often have low vitamin d it doesn't mean it's the reason the people are having bad outcomes now we do know we do know that vitamin d is essential for your health i think we know that i mean i doubt that's going to change so certainly vitamin d is helpful we just don't know if these big numbers are really because of vitamin d or is just a correlation people who have bad health have bad vitamin d right so i would love to have somebody explain to people as it happens well we don't know if the data is right but the way you're thinking about the data is definitely wrong you get that right there are two unknowns here one is is the data right in the first place and then secondly did you analyze it correctly and i don't think necessarily either of them are true i'm not sure they analyzed it right and i'm not even sure the data is right so if you're jumping to the conclusion that vitamin d has been proven to work it might be true i certainly want it to be true because that would make me look good but it's not there it's just not there all right here's a uh i don't know how to handle this next situation so with your permission will you give me a little flexibility on this next topic because i'm going to confess to you that i don't know if i'm going to handle it the right way right so i'm just going to do my best so the only thing i'm going to promise you is i'll do my best but i think i'm going to fall a little short all right and there's a couple of points to be made number one if i ever mentioned to you that every time there's a story in the news it comes back to me somehow like somehow i end up being connected to stories and it doesn't make any sense to me i mean given that i do this and i do this in public but even doing it in public i don't have that much exposure to the general public but the number of times that i have some kind of connection to something in the news is just weird it's just weird all right here's the story so you know that sam harris was getting some uh pushback for some things he said about trump and um here's what happened yesterday i got a longish message from sam harris private message in which he explained his position better now here's my problem what the hell do i do now it was a private message it was a private message but i thought it was an important one in other words wouldn't you like to know his argument i don't know if he's if he's made the argument exactly that way anywhere else so here's what i don't want to do i don't want to read you his message because it was a private message but i also don't want him to be sitting out there having offered something like a defense to somebody who's been talking about him in public and just leave him exposed because the worst thing would be for me to paraphrase him and then argue against him when he's not here to defend himself and by the way i probably shouldn't tell you what he said to me privately right even though it was related to a public discussion right so i'm uncomfortable telling you what he said but i thought i would do it this way so here's the way i'm going to approach it do you remember i told you that one way to see if you're in cognitive dissonance yourself is see if you can defend somebody else's argument that you disagree with if you can take the other person's argument and give it in a reasonable way that's close enough to their argument then you're probably not in cognitive dissonance you're probably just valuing things differently maybe your risk your risk assessments a little different that sort of thing all right so i'm going to argue sam harris's point to support it right so i'm not going to debate it i'm going to try to support it and then you can see if there's any holes and i'll do the best i can right so i'm going to try to actually support it i'm not going to try to make him look bad by giving the weak version i'm not going to at least i'm not going to try to do that so if that happens that would be a mistake all right number one does sam harris think that trump is like hitler or in that class of danger what do you think you've seen his public statements do you think that he believes that now you might remember that prior to trump being elected i think it was prior to was it just after or prior but there was a point when when i was talking to sam harris on his podcast that he did make a he made a let's say an almost an offhand hitler analogy to trump so we do know that there's at least some statement in which he's made that reference right so some of you are confirming that you've heard him make that reference now in his message to me he said that he does not think that trump is in that category with hitler the hitler occupies a completely different category of danger and so i'm gonna i'm gonna say that it was hyperbole that he ever compared trump to hitler but also early on hold on early on you could say there's that risk but now that now that trump has served one complete term one would have to reassess that risk are you right are you with me so far would you give me this following point that no matter what sam harris or anybody else said about trump early in his term or before he was elected that that that could now be discarded would you would you agree because what you thought would happen has to give way to four years of experience and i would say that sam harris would be on the same page i would say that he would value the four years that we observed as a higher truth than guessing what would happen right so i would say you all of you and he are on the same page on that that you would put a higher value on actual experience than guessing okay now having seen trump perform for four years i accept sam's statement that there's nothing hitler looking per se in that you know there's not going to be a roundup of people he's not going to start a nuclear war for you know any any obvious reason and that being tough on crime and tough on immigration is not really hitler okay so so far so far would you agree so his current view is that trump does not occupy a dangerous ass hitler situation would you would you accept that that's a reasonable evolution of opinion from well we don't know what risk he poses all the way to well we saw four ears you know i still have my issues but it's not a hitler problem would you accept that i do i think that would be a reasonable evolution of opinion based on evolving information now what problems does sam still have well there are two things which he's mentioned um recently more than others one is trump university as an example of trump's character the other is that trump doxed some citizens now i have to confess i'm not aware of those stories vaguely i can imagine i sort of have a memory of somebody getting maybe called out by trump and had trouble and if that happened i would be opposed to that so is there anybody here who thinks that the president of the united states should be doxing individuals no right does anybody think that the president should do that no i don't think that's a good move so we could agree with him that it's it's suboptimal right i think some of you are going to say sure he can do it if they do it first whatever but generally speaking i don't think you want your president targeting law-abiding individuals who have or exercising freedom of speech i think we'd all be in the same page right and i don't think there are any trump supporters who think that trump university showed trump in a good light my personal belief about that is that trump was just a hands-off manager and probably didn't know what was going on there i don't know that but it's an assumption that matches everything i know about executives who have lots of businesses i think he had 400 businesses with his name on it if you count licensing deals you don't you don't look after all 400 deals i've done licensing myself right i've had lots of licensees for dilbert do you think i managed all of them and tracked them all to make sure they were doing what i wanted them to do with my property well we required it i mean they had to report to me but not really not really that was sort of other people doing their job and you hope they did it well i'm guessing and i don't have any information to back this but if you have 400 companies with your name on it and you're doing as much business as trump was doing you probably didn't watch any of them too closely i don't know how you could so um yeah so the question is who did trump dox but i don't think that's going to be the critical question here so as i understand um sam harris's point and and i'm going to understand it to support it there are two examples in which trump's character is called into question trump university and then doxing individuals would you say that those two tell you something about trump as an individual i think so i think so yeah now there but here's the interesting thing why would you pick those out so here's my observation as a hypnotist as a trained hypnotist one of the things you look for to see if somebody is hypnotized is that their reaction is extremely non-standard not completely crazy just completely non-standard when was the last time somebody said that trump has to go because that those times he doxed people have you heard anybody else ever say that has anybody ever heard anybody ever say that a big problem with trump is his doxing of individuals so there's no way to know what's in the head of other people and so i'm not going to diagnose somebody by reading their mind that's not a thing i'm just saying if you were looking for a signal for a cognitive distance that would be a gigantic glaring signal doesn't mean it is doesn't mean it is it just means that that's exactly what a signal would look like a highly unusual opinion which still has some logical connect connective tissue because when somebody is hypnotized and they come up with let's say the cognitive dissonance explanation of why they're doing something the cognitive dissonance explanation also makes sort of sense in other words they can they can piece it together with some kind of logical trail but you still look at it you say i don't think anybody else in that situation would have said that of all the things you could say that's an unusual one so without saying without having an opinion of whether the doxing is good or bad i think we'd all agree it's bad if we heard the examples i'm not i'm not familiar with the examples but i'm open to the fact that if a president docks somebody that's really bad shouldn't do that right and so so when you see an unusual opinion that's a flag now that doesn't mean that he's experiencing cognitive dissonance are you clear on that it doesn't mean he's experiencing cognitive dissonance it just means that if he is it would look exactly like that that's all now the the other thing you would look for for cognitive dissonance is a trigger a trigger is if something that you were sure would be true doesn't happen right so i was i said from the beginning that trump would be an expensive president meaning he'd cause a lot of trouble and he'd break a lot of dishes but that there might be some big things that the country wants earliest part of the country wants that he would get done and sure enough he got done you know in my opinion north korea defused that you know the abraham accords you know i think he tightened up the border better than you know not as good as somebody wanted but better than it's been done you know and and so you could come up with a bunch of things they did now in my opinion my expectation of trump was pretty close to what happened so there's no trigger for cognitive dissonance in my case or at least one that i can't see maybe you can see it but i can't see it because i got what i expected but now imagine if you were talking about trump in in the most let's say cataclysmic terms before he got elected and it was just it looked like the end of the world and you'd really gone out there saying it was going to be a disaster and then trump gets an office and he does something closer to a good job not at all what it looked like it was going to be if you were a critic that's a trigger that's a perfect trigger that's that's a textbook trigger for cognitive dissonance what you expected is wildly different than what you got and that wasn't true for republicans republicans expected a set of behaviors from trump and they got them for the most part they got exactly what they expected there's no trigger there it's only the people who were surprised who were triggered so that again that doesn't mean he's experiencing cognitive dissonance it just means it would look exactly like that if he were that's all you can say but let me take his argument and uh and finish it because there's something to it and he goes on to say that you know trump's uh what he would say is obvious character failings as evidenced by trump university this is sam's argument and uh as evidenced by doxing and other behaviors that look cowardly and or selfish that those are dangerous characteristics to have in the president but nothing like nothing like the danger of a hitler and so and so when sam says he's not too concerned that maybe the hunter biden laptop story got suppressed for the purpose of helping helping trump lose the election that maybe that's not that different than the weiner laptop coming out that may have helped trump get elected hypothetically so if you said to me well those things are about equal maybe it would be better if neither of them happen but but they're not that different in in an impact that's not that's not uh that's not crazy that's not crazy if you put yourself in the other situation if if you knew that the only thing that kept hillary clinton out of office was some sketchy stuff in the news in fact maybe that is exactly what happened we don't know but if you knew that's the only thing that kept her out of office and you were a republican how concerned would you be you wouldn't be that concerned now i don't want to speak for you but on average people are willing to accept a little imperfection on their own team if they get what they want that's pretty normal right so i think it's pretty normal for somebody to say i would have accepted a little imperfection to get the outcome i wanted because i think the the a different president makes a big difference now what about the sam harris also famously said that he had i forget the exact words but in some ways more respect for osama bin laden than for trump but this was this has to be understood in terms of an intellectual argument right as soon as you put it into an emotional argument it makes your head explode no bin laden's a monster you know trump's just a politician no but that's not what he was talking about he's not talking about you know bin laden directly murdering people versus trump having a policy it doesn't like the the point was that bin laden was operating on principle it just happened to be a principle that we hate right but he was sort of internally consistent with his islamic beliefs at least the extremistic islamic beliefs whereas sam's point is that trump is not moored to any moral or ethical foundation and therefore he's a little more unpredictable and likely to operate for his own best interest in any given situation so do you think that it's dangerous to have somebody you can't predict as president because he's going to sort of go where where the self-interest goes that's that's not a terrible argument now i have you know i can counter the argument but i'm not going to do that in this conversation because this conversation is to see if i can explain his argument in a way that makes it make sense without making it sound crazy and i think that his argument is not crazy if you accept the following clarifications which he has provided clarifa clarification number one he does not believe that trump is dangerous like a hitler would be he believes he's unpredictable because he's not moored to a moral ethical foundation i accept that i accept that if i were arguing against it which i'm not going to do today i would say something about the presidency has more transparency than most things and that he's offered to give us those services on our behalf and we can watch it happen while it's happening right but there's not that much transparency so there's always an issue and so if i take sam's argument i'd say there's not that much transparency there's not enough because we still wonder what happens behind closed doors and stuff but uh it's not a bad argument so if you allow that the bin laden argument was just an intellectual exercise which is what it was that's fine it's just an intellectual exercise if you allow that the trump that the hitler stuff was just hyperbole and also has given given way to experience we've seen what trump can and cannot do in office i i don't think sam's opinion is as crazy as you do let me ask you this if i said there was some other president coming into office let's say it was a democrat and you felt that that democrat's history suggested that the democrat would do whatever it took that there was no moral underpinnings would you be uncomfortable with that president probably probably right yeah were you uncomfortable with lbj were you uncomfortable with i'm not sure about bill clinton i'm not going to go that far i have a different opinion about hillary than i do about bill i think bill clinton was a solid president that's my opinion i think he was a solid president yeah and i'm not looking for an argument on that you know people can disagree on stuff like that all right so how did i do how did i do did i you don't have to agree with my argument but do you think that i've made sarah harrison's point look reasonable does it look reasonable well once you take away the hyperbole there's a solid core there i guess some yeses mostly knows you know we're we're deep into team sport territory here and when you get this deeply into team sport i know you're not you don't want to give the other team a point i get that but let me ask you this did i at least pass the test that i could i could express the argument in a full-throated way would you accept that did i express the argument in a full-throated way i think i did i think i did now that would suggest that i don't have cognitive dissonance and again this this is a rule of thumb it's not like some scientific guarantee but the the strong indication is that i can tell his argument and i don't have an unusual opinion about things all right so i okay i feel good about that um but here's here's my bottom line i think that the difference between sam's opinion and mine comes down to one thing wildly different opinions about what is dangerous wildly different opinions about what's important for example i would say that the 50 intelligence agents lying about hunter's laptop destroys the credibility of our most important systems and also reveals that they're corrupt and i would put that at a in terms of a scale of one to ten that's like a nine in terms of how bad that is that's like a nine how bad is a president doxing an individual well on a moral ethical and preference level it's a it's a ten in badness but in terms of how it affects the world it's a one it's a one it affects those people and i don't like that at all you know any doxing by president i'm completely against but you have to put it in perspective i would say that the the 50 intel people ex-intel professionals lying is a big freaking deal that's a nine doxing it's a one except that the individual's involved of course it's attend to them so i don't know that sam and i differ on the logic of anything i don't know that we have different data at least that hasn't been obvious to me but we're definitely valuing things differently i'll give you another one i imagine that january 6 would be higher and well since he hasn't talked about it i won't put this in his head let's say me compared to a democrat a typical democrat would say january 6 was just horrible like it was like the nearly the end of the republic do you know what i say about january 6 again not counting the violence part which is if you were a recipient of the violence or you were jailed because of it that problem is a 10 and a 10 for you no question about it but what effect did it have on the world or the country in my opinion stronger the their theirs well okay i just outed myself there didn't i i guess that was a non-standard opinion wasn't it so then then i have to ask myself was that cognitive dissonance here's why i say stronger i'll give you my argument doesn't mean i'm not experiencing cognitive dissonance now keep in mind that i've condemned trump's actions on january 6.
so in theory that should protect me right because i'm on record i said biden one from day one you know that's not going to change i've never gone back on that the system elected biden so even if there were you know hypothetically any imperfections i still go with the system we got to fix the system but you got to go with the system while you're fixing it that's just my opinion so um my opinion on january 6 is that made america stronger would anybody agree with that before you hear my argument before i give you the argument january 6 the protests even with the violence which i condemned totally made america stronger yeah i think reasonable people can disagree on this one here's my argument it's sort of the jordan peterson argument about individuals that you should be dangerous but learn to not learn to control it right your nature should be as dangerous as possible it keeps society you know operating here's what i want i want my government no matter who it is be they democrat or be they republican or anything else i want my government to know that if i've got questions and and my fellow citizens have questions we're going to show up we're going to show up well not me i like to have you know i like to have bathrooms i don't have to wait for so i won't be there but but for the people who like to do that kind of stuff they'll be there yeah i'll try to do you know something useful at home where i'm more comfortable but but the rest of you i love the fact that you show up so my take on um and i'm going to say the same thing with for black lives matter all right so here i'm going to show at least maybe a possibility that i'm not experiencing cognitive dissonance black lives matter created some bad stuff created you know lots of destruction and death i don't mind living in a country where people are going to hit the streets to fight for fairness i don't hate that i hate all the violence i hate the disruption i hate that they may be confused i hate that they may be semi-hypnotized i hate that the news is is brainwashing people i don't know that the protests were useful so i'm not saying they were useful so i'm going to make a real strong distinction i don't think necessarily that january 6 was useful and i don't think that the blm protests were useful in the end but do you want to live in the country that won't do that i don't i want to live in a country where if the republicans think something went wrong they're in the streets and i want to live in the country you might not like this where if the democrats think something is just terribly wrong they're going to hit the streets right so give me the country that protests thank you very much and let them let them go wild let them make their case and let them see if they can you know prevail because you have seen cases where protests turn into something good let's say civil rights you've seen them where they don't turn into anything good let's say antifa but i still want to live in this country i still want to still want to live where people will take to the streets all right so i just value things completely different than other people and therefore we can get to different uh conclusions all right while i'm defending people that uh you might not want me to defend let me throw another one in the mix jake tapper is getting a bunch of heat today because he retweeted ivanka trump's tweet uh promoting jared's new book and people are saying jake tapper how can you retweet jared are you part of the you know the elite what's going on here are you selling this out say the cnn observers to which i would like to add the following context i also plugged jake tapper's book when it came out it's an author thing that's all it is as soon as you think this is more than one author being let's say professionally courteous and maybe thinks that the audience would be interested in the book it's not an endorsement of the person it's not an endorsement of all that person has done it's more like i wrote a book you wrote a book about your book is interesting maybe other people would like it too that's it right all right authors promote other people's books it doesn't mean anything scott is waffling again what the am i waffling about somebody says i'm waffling i don't think i've waffled less on any livestream than today so you could have your own opinions about jake tappers politics and performance etc but let the guy promote a book from anybody right just let him promote a book because um and i like to say this every every few months at least i insist on the right of association i insist as a citizen of the united states on the right of free association if i want to talk to the worst person in the world and get a selfie with that person i'm going to do it and i don't care what your opinion is and i'm never going to care what your opinion is if i want to if i want to tweet somebody's book and you don't like their politics but i think the book is interesting i'm going to tweet that book right there's nothing you're going to do to talk me out of that behavior so freedom of association there is no wiggle room that one's an absolute and can't ever change all right um bill maher continues to be interesting politically uh and he noted on the show with 85 percent of the people trump endorsed for the primaries won 85 percent uh and he said he said quote say what you want about mr evil meaning trump but boy what a politician i mean that's impressive impressive an evil evil way but still impressive so do you remember when trump first announced do you remember what i seem to be completely alone in the united states saying i wrote a blog post called uh um clown genius he was being called a clown and i said um you better watch out for the clown because this clown is a genius persuasion-wise and then the clown became the president of the united states and then even out of office uh he influenced you know an 85 of the primaries now can we give me some credit for calling on day one the first one at least maybe not the first one but among the first to say there's something going on with this guy right and i said that he would be the most persuasive person you've ever seen i believe that that's now the case i believe that even his biggest critics would say okay i don't like what he's saying but there's no question about his persuasion he's got the entire package he does whole package bj novak i guess was on bill maher's podcast and you know he's a writer and humorist stand-up guy he wrote for the office and he was an actor on that bj novak um if your initials are bj you've got to learn to tell a joke you've got to have a sense of humor but bj believes what i believe which is that wokeness is really people pretending to be offended on behalf of the people who don't exist have you ever met anybody who was offended by words i don't never have if you talk to anybody individually they'll say oh no it doesn't bother me it's just some something some jerk said why would i care about what some jerk said but i'm pretty sure other people are going to be offended i'm pretty sure other people are going to be offended now let me say again i'm a fan of oldness i know i know it sounds weird because i'm one of the biggest critics of wokeness but also a fan and here's how that's consistent the dilbert comic for which you know i'm notorious is about good ideas that are taken too far that's what it's about because management is a good idea you can't have an unmanaged company but if you take you too far you're micromanaging if you take it too far you're doing whatever the latest trend is before knowing it's a good idea so everything i talk about is a basic good idea that's just been taken to some ridiculous point so what do i think about calling people by the name by the name that they would like to be called i call that good manners that's not even a conversation yeah whatever you want if if that's how you feel comfortable i'd be happy to do it now if somebody said i would like you to call me king scott and i suck before you that's my legal name whenever you refer to me call me king scott i suck before you and i said no no don't call me scott i prefer to be called king scott i suck before your great presence that's my full name now that would be too far right so there's got to be some limits on wokeness but i don't mind anybody has he her preference but as i've said before and i will say a million times said before and i'll say it a million times in return for my flexibility and my attempt to have good manners and treat people the way they would like to be treated you're gonna have to give me a break if i get it wrong and i'm not going to take any wiggle on that if i get one wrong i misgender you whatever and you've got a problem with that if you correct me i will take that under advisement and hope to do better if you attack me you everybody makes mistakes you if you attack me for that mistake because i don't have bad intentions right you can attack people for bad intentions you can attack me for bad intentions if you ever see me with bad intentions free hip free punch let me say it again if you ever are sure i'd hope i'd hope you'd be sure about it don't guess but if you ever see me having bad intentions free punch come at me as hard as you want right i tried not to do that i don't i don't think i ever have but try not to all right so let's keep pretending there are people who are offended when none of us have ever met any and by the way if i ever do meet somebody who's offended by that kind of stuff i don't really want to be their friend i wouldn't spend a minute with somebody who's offended by stuff like that because you know it's just going to come back to you basically somebody who's offended by words is just telling you you don't want to interact with them in any way at all just run away all right uh i'm seeing some graphs again that uh people are saying that the vaccinations are hurting people because there are more people hospitalized who are vax than unvaxed how many times do we have to go over this that the population of people who got vaccinated are by nature the weakest ones so of course the vaccinated would have more hospitalizations it's exactly what you would expect but it's being used as proof that vaccinations are hurting you now let me be very clear i don't know i don't believe any data about vaccinations none there's basically nothing about the pandemic that i believe because it's all been we've been fooled so many times that as soon as you think you know something you're like well got disappointed there now i don't know if vaccinations helped or hurt but i'm going to tell you what i think my my uh scorecard is all right this will offend you greatly um i'm going to say again that i had the best pandemic predictions by far in my opinion nobody came close but i won't get any agreement on that because people still disagree what's true as long as we're disagreeing about what's true then you can't say who who who had good predictions but mine are shaping up to be the truest so far let me give you some ideas so in early 2020 i said vitamin d looked like it was crucial in covet i just told you that i don't think the studies have proven it but they're all leaning in that direction right so if that turned out to be true or even just a correlation that was important i'd say i got that one early and correctly but it's not it's not it's definitely not confirmed that boosting your levels would help you with cova it might be later i predicted that uh the vaccines wouldn't work right now a lot of people believe i did the opposite but when it was first announced the expert said we've been working for decades we're not even close so i said well if the experts think it can't be done i'll go with the experts now i don't always go with the experts but in that case i did and sure enough the vaccinations did not work as vaccinations but i said at the time we that we're probably going to come up with better therapeutics i would say i had one of the best predictions that the vaccines wouldn't work as vaccinations but that we would come up with strong therapeutics which i believe we have then we see the latest studies that say ivermectin did not work am i ready to conclude that ivor mechtin could not have worked under any combination of when you gave it who you gave it to or in any combination of anything else that i would say is unknown unknown but i said don't don't buy into ivermectin right away i said wait for studies and every day that goes by without confirmation you should lower your odds of it working so i did the same thing with hydroxychloroquine as with ivermectin i started with well there's some indication it might work and it doesn't hurt you why not but then every time some data command came in that made it look like maybe it wasn't working i lowered my percentage likelihood until i got down to about 10 percent and that's where i stopped so that's where i have it hydroxychloroquine and ivormectin somewhere no more than 10 possibility that they ever could have worked in the right dosage with the right combination with the right people at the right time that sort of thing so i think i had the best ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine predictions still admitting still admitting we don't know if they work are you okay with that that at this moment we still don't know but all of the information is leaning in one direction which is the direction i was going at the same time yeah what else let's see yeah i would say that and then we don't want to talk about masks but i was the i believe the only person in the country who said that fauci was lying when he said masks don't work and he admitted he was lying so i'm the only person who got that right and then when masks were rolled out i said from an engineering perspective they almost certainly have to reduce the amount of spread but we won't see it in the big numbers because i told you that you wouldn't see anything with leadership in the the state and country level which is why i was against mandates so i was never i was never for mandates of masks but unambiguously if if water gets stuck on your mask there's some virus on that water we just don't know how much and whether it made a difference but we could see it didn't make a difference on the state level i mean the data doesn't seem to support it so i would say that i was by far the most right about masks nobody was even close i would say i was probably close to eight or nine out of ten and i think most people were closer to a three in rightness on that now again this depends on the data that we have now continuing to prove out which might change so i could be let me say clearly i could be wrong on any one of these things because we never have final confirmations it seems but i would make my argument that there was nobody even in my general neighborhood of rightness i wasn't even nobody was even close to my predictions in my opinion there is room for disagreement all right so i asked this question on twitter a few times and i think i have an answer now about the mar-a-lago information and given that a president doesn't have any requirements for a process for declassifying i ask the following question if a president signals that something is declassified is that good enough and one way to signal it would be take these top secret boxes and move them to mar-a-lago to me that's declassifying because it's clear that anybody would know that taking them to mar-a-lago takes them away from a secure place and you know anybody can see them so in my opinion that would be declassification and so i asked lawyers because i'm not one i said can a president do any kind of signal any kind of signal at all and would that count as declassification and the lawyer said what did the lawyer say what do you think did the lawyers say that that's true as long as he signals by his actions the answer is yes the people who identified as lawyers said yes he just has to signal it by his actions and it's declassified there isn't any legal risk here is there because even if you allow that um you found let's say you found the lawyer who disagrees if most lawyers think it's totally legal you're not going to get a jury to think it's illegal right if most lawyers think it's perfectly legal what you did you're not going to get a jury 12 people to say it was illegal it's just not going to happen there's no legal risk here at all yes sir i don't see one unless unless it's a complete rigged trial and i don't think that's going to happen because there's too much visibility yeah well we're done with the declassification talk all right lockheed martin is putting into operation lasers on warships so we've heard about lasers on jets they're testing but now they've got a laser they can put on a warship so that's interesting do you know what we're going to have to use lasers for i'll tell you the biggest use of lasers in the future shooting down drones the small ones not not the big military ones those would be a little harder by shooting down the small ones and you know why you're going to have to shoot those down because we're probably about a year away from them being filled with fentanyl and becoming the primary uh terrorist weapon yeah now i did write a book about that in 2003-ish when was it somewhere around there and it's called the religion war i might read that read the religion or into youtube and or locals so i might turn that into an e-book just by reading it um but there is no way that terrorists are going to not notice the fentanyl is deadly and is light and easily available if it's light a small drone can carry it and deliver it anywhere if it's deadly it's better than dynamite because you can't get dynamite very easily it's hard to get you know see what's the explosive c c4 yeah it's hard to get c4 but literally every kid can get fentanyl a teenager can get fentanyl so there isn't any doubt where things are going there's going to be fentanyl and it's going to be on drones and we're going to need lasers to shoot those drones out of the air although maybe that's bad too because the drone is still going to crash and the fentanyl is going to get out i don't know maybe there's no solution but um as long as china is sending us fentanyl and it's going through the cartels it's going to us our our future is guaranteed it's fentanyl on small drones for unlimited terrorist attacks in our population centers there's no way to stop it except wipe out the cartels and then tell china they're next i would definitely kill the fentanyl dealers in in china on chinese territory because china isn't going to nuke us for taking out their terrorists they're going to get really really mad about it but them it's war so we we can go into their country and just take them out now i wouldn't i wouldn't drop a missile on them i wouldn't fire a missile into china you have to do it on the ground but it wouldn't be hard how hard would it be to kill a fentanyl kingpin just by giving him an injection of fentanyl all right pretty easy all right all you need is a blow dart with a little fentanyl and it's like and mr kingpin is dead now i don't know how hard it is to get a chinese agent into china but i've got a feeling that there might be a couple people who are not happy with the government over there might want to give us a little help there might be somebody yeah blow darts with fentanyl get over it as long as the fentanyl is in the dark okay it's not the safest thing anybody ever did but murder is never really that safe it really isn't um i'm going to make a prediction there isn't the slightest chance that we will not attack the cartels in mexico there isn't the slightest chance that's not going to happen because let me tell you what's going to happen let me tell you what's going to happen the number of fentanyl deaths will keep climbing and at some point you're all going to be where i am well i've been there a long time and where i am is we're in the middle of a war and there's nothing i won't do nothing nope would i kidnap the president of mexico yes yeah i would if if it would work i mean it wouldn't work right would i would i annex mexico yep yep i would annex mexico yeah you'd you would have a hard time coming up with something i wouldn't do to stop this problem i can't think of anything i wouldn't do would i would i start machine gunning uh the what do you call them the uh the coyotes yes i would yeah i would start killing the coyotes where they stand anytime you can see them from our side of the border in fact i'd send drones in and just start killing the coyotes wherever they are would it help i don't care if you if you took out the cartel operations would have stopped the fentanyl trade i don't care i don't care it might slow down the next person who wanted to start it but you have to make sure that everybody who deals fentanyl dies a horrible death and fairly soon i would also start uh executing our fentanyl dealers publicly publicly i think a fentanyl dealer needs to be executed publicly above a certain level i'm not talking about you know the onesies twosies street dealers i'm talking about the big ones public execution in fact if if trump ran on that platform public execution for fentanyl dealers and i will attack the cartels in in office i'd be all in i would be all in somebody thinks i'm i support sharia yeah that's that's a little bit of a leap from attacking from killing mass murders to sharia law uh there's a little bit of a leap there about the mules who transport it i i think you have to make um some some distinctions in terms of how much they're involved i wouldn't kill somebody for maybe necessarily transporting it across the border if they're an american citizen if it's not an american citizen and they transport one pill of fentanyl over the border i would kill them i'd kill them if they transported it to sell yeah i would say yeah if you're if you don't live in this country and you take one pill across our border i'd kill them too far no there's nothing that's not too far there's nothing not too far right a hundred thousand peop kids mostly uh well young people dying per year yeah for one pill now let me say it again i would if i do that the pill now of course nobody's going to bring one pill right so that's hyperbole if you're going to argue about the one pill you're just arguing hyperbole and that's useless i'm just saying if it's obvious they're bringing fentanyl to sell i wouldn't care how much if they bring it to sell kill all right looks like uh oops what's that uh the secret mice micro lesson yes all right um no more pfizer commercials disproportionate punishment punishment yeah you know um when people are involved in mass murder i believe that their own lives should be used for something useful not like a regular if a regular criminal does something you know just let the justice thing do his thing but if you're a mass murderer i think you should be killed in whatever way is the most useful to society and if murdering you in public make somebody else less likely to do it okay yeah if if murdering somebody in a horrible way in front of the public i would hang him i'd hang him actually because the visual of hanging is just really good that's a good visual oh actually i take it back now you don't want to hang them because some of them would be black so no hanging no hang there's got to be something else public execution but no hanging guillotine yeah too clean um dope six started this yeah maybe do you own a firearm i want you to sneak in my house and find out yeah my my uh my personal defense system is follows the around and find out i'm not going to tell you what my personal defense situation is it's a surprise let me just say this if you get into my house your problem is getting out getting into my house or really any house getting into a house is not that hard all you need is a you know a rock right to get through a window getting into my house no problem getting out good luck that's all you need to know about my my defense all right sounds like a date all right everybody was this the best show you've ever seen i think i've oh let me one more thing apparently uh the web browser and tick tock app can track every keystroke made by its users how incompetent is our government that they haven't banned tick tick-tock what is up with that how incompetent that tick-tock which is clearly a military weapon clearly is a military weapon that we're letting the chinese use on our youth and we're just like oh okay yeah here you go so tick-tock has to be banned i think trump might be willing to do it but he didn't you know he didn't get it done i don't know what the limitation is there um and uh oh the big news is that the facebook and tick tock have band controversial figure andrew taint if you don't know who andrew taint is you're lucky but he's like the andrew dice clay but he's got more of a homoerotic vibe to to his stuff he's not gay but he presents himself in sort of a homoerotic vibe uh and he got kicked off of facebook and uh and and instagram same company for saying things which is fans say are just the truth now do you remember that i said a while ago that no man could say what he's actually thinking like you couldn't survive if a man just said whatever he was thinking whenever he was thinking now i'm not saying that i'm thinking what he's thinking i'm just saying it's a good example of somebody who is trying to say what he's actually thinking in public and he's he doesn't have a chance yeah he got a big following do you know why he got over 4 million followers almost instantly is it because males did disagreed with him no it's because they knew he was he was self-immolating by saying things that they sort of also believed or thought were true or rang true anyway so uh well so somebody's saying that uh that cernovich likes him i don't know if he likes him is the right phrase but again my right of a free association is not just for me yeah if somebody i i like or respect wants to spend some time with somebody i don't like or respect that's fine because cernovich like me exerts his complete right to associate with whoever he wants actually is one of the things i like most about him in fact he associated with me cernovich did before before i had much of a following on social media and i think that was risky so uh i'm never going to give somebody a hard problem for who they spend time with endorse prefer that's that's all just their decisions um all right there we go hello from nigeria yeah we have to demand our freedom of association there are exceptions um really well there would be maybe exceptions for what kind of time you spend with them but not for a selfie i don't have any exceptions for that all right there's some entertain taint uh impersonator videos all right well uh that's all i got for today would you agree that this is uh probably the best live stream you're ever going to see maybe in the history of all time yeah very close very close to the best thing you'll ever see all right uh i did finish i did fix my photoshop problem there was a setting that changed somehow on his own and the setting the change seemed to have nothing to do with the brush tool the brush tool has lots of settings in different places and you have to find them all so it's just a terrible interface problem yeah so the computer works that's the good news and that's all for now i'll talk to you later you do
good morning everybody
and welcome
to another highlight of civilization
it's called coffee with scott adams and
aren't you lucky
to have stumbled upon it or possibly
through your own intelligence hard work
and good looks
you found it on your own
that's called doing your own research
and if you'd like to take this
experience and it is an experience
up to a new level
a level heretofore never known by any
human being in the history of the world
all you need is a copper mug or a glass
of tanker chelsea's diamond canteen jug
or 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 end of the day it's
the thing that makes it everything
better and everybody better looking it's
called the simultaneous but it's going
to happen now
go
well i saw an uh comment on locals just
now there's somebody doing this who uses
a cup and a saucer
oh
oh
a mug's not good enough for you
you got your cup and your saucer
all right
all right all right
well someday maybe the rest of us will
come up to your level
saucers it is
just imagine that someday
someday i will have a saucer
well let's talk about the news
i would like to publicly congratulate
brian stelter
as you know he's leaving his position as
cnn
on reliable sources
i guess the ratings were not that good
but i would like to congratulate brian
stelter for being
the only person to ever leave cnn
for a non-penis related reason
so
that feels like a step in the right
um
do you remember a story wasn't that long
ago
about this there was a ceo
named dan price
and he had decided that the lowest paid
person in his company
would get a minimum of seventy thousand
dollars
and so when he made that change
people said my god
you
you are amazing
you're amazing
and so for a long time he was hailed as
a hero
but
there seems to be a string of sexual
assault charges against him
let me see if i can predict that that
was going to happen
famous
young unusually good-looking
ceo i think he's single
what do you think is going to happen
when a young
good-looking powerful guy
gets a lot of attention
i don't know
i feel like some sexual impropriety
accusations are going to come out of
that situation
but
what i say about him dan price is
and i don't mean this to be too cutting
or too cruel but dan price
you're no brian stelter
you're no brian stelter
because he managed to go through an
entire cnn career
without any accusations of sexual
impropriety
now that could be either good or bad
depending on your point of view but
let's say that it's it's good that he
didn't do it
i'm going to say this again because no
matter how many times i say it
it can't be heard
i i love this category of communication
sort of a little hobby of mine
things that can be said
but they can't be heard
what would be an example of something
you could say
but nobody can hear
lots of things
it's basically everything that doesn't
agree with your opinion
i can say it all day long but you're not
really going to hear it it's going to
change on the way in
and
here's one of those
[Music]
the people on the left and the people on
the right don't have much of a problem
with each other
it's just the news
it's just the news
when i say just let's say 95
95 of it is the news telling you that
you're mad at the other side
and then highlighting the people who get
the best zingers in on the other side
and
highlight the people who are getting the
best singers from
their other side
when was the last time you had an actual
you know unhealthy experience with just
a regular person
and if you did
was the reason that you had an
unpleasant experience because you could
tell that that person had been
hypnotized by the fake news
right if you show me somebody who
doesn't follow any news whatsoever
and i don't care what their political uh
leaning is i don't care how left they
are
show me the uh i'll just use an old term
show me some hippie who doesn't own the
television and hasn't watched the news
in 20 years
and i'll show you somebody i can get
along with great
no problem at all
you put me with a bunch of hippies
i love them
i love them
and they would probably like me too we
would have nothing to fight about
then take the same group of people you
know roughly speaking but they've been
watching cnn and msnbc for the last
five years
i can't even be in the room with them
so is there something wrong with the
people
or there's something wrong with the
media it's obvious it's obviously the
media
but the media is also in control of
telling you what the problem is
so the people who are in control of
telling you what the problem is are the
problem
and that's our problem
if the people who were causing the most
problems would also point to themselves
which by the way sometimes they do
and guff held does it all the time
and guff held as part of the news
industry
but
it will tell you right away that the you
know the news is part of the problem
so
you can you can say it all day long but
people don't hear it what they hear is
my team good other team bad
that's all they hear
if you could convince people
that the the real problem was their
believing of fake news
because that's mostly the problem
most of the problem is believing fake
news
here's what we need we don't need fact
checkers
i mean it's helpful i don't mind having
them
you know as long as there's some on both
sides and you can see both arguments
what we need is
logic fixers
let me give you an example
today yet again in the news there's a
story that vitamin d
uh seems to be highly correlated with
good outcomes for people who have covet
if you've got a low vitamin d level and
you go into the hospital with covet
it's probably grim
uh but if you had high vitamin d and you
go you get covered even if you're
hospitalized probably won't be that bad
so what what did most of you conclude do
you remember in
i don't know it was probably early in i
don't know what month it is maybe some
of you know what month in 2022 in the
spring
did i say hey
it looks like all the places that are
having bad time with covid are
coincidentally where they have low
vitamin d
do you remember me saying that i said is
it my imagination there's all the all
the people
in all the places seems to be highly
correlated with low vitamin d
right
but
i want to believe that right
how much do you think i want to believe
that the very first thing i said
i think it was i think it was march i
said the first in may i did a long
thread
but i think it was way earlier
that i noticed the correlation if
somebody if somebody has either a date
on that i'd really like i'd really love
to know but all right consider my
situation right i'm a public figure
and i make predictions and
assertions about reality
don't you think i want to be right about
that
like how much do i want to be right
the vitamin d was really the magic
bullet all along
right because that would make me look
smart
it would make me look smart so i want
that to be true but here's the problem
every time a new study comes out they
show correlation and they don't show
causation they suggest
that the argument for causation is
getting stronger
but it isn't because it's just more
observational studies it doesn't matter
how many you do
because the problem is
that people who have poor health in
general have low vitamin d
so if you notice that all the people
with low vitamin d are dying
it's either telling you that vitamin d
makes the difference
or it's telling you that people in poor
health
often have low vitamin d
it doesn't mean it's the reason the
people are having bad outcomes now we do
know
we do know that vitamin d is essential
for your health i think we know that i
mean i doubt that's going to change
so certainly vitamin d is helpful
we just don't know if these big numbers
are really because of vitamin d or is
just a correlation people who have bad
health have bad vitamin d
right
so i would love to have somebody explain
to people as it happens well we don't
know if the data is right but the way
you're thinking about the data is
definitely wrong
you get that right
there are two unknowns here one is is
the data right in the first place
and then secondly did you analyze it
correctly
and i don't think necessarily either of
them are true
i'm not sure they analyzed it right and
i'm not even sure the data is right so
if you're jumping to the conclusion that
vitamin d has been proven to work
it might be true i certainly want it to
be true
because that would make me look good but
it's not there it's just not there
all right here's a uh
i don't know how to handle this next
situation
so
with your permission
will you give me a little flexibility on
this next topic
because i'm going to confess to you that
i don't know if i'm going to handle it
the right way
right so i'm just going to do my best so
the only thing i'm going to promise you
is i'll do my best
but i think i'm going to fall a little
short
all right
and there's a couple of points to be
made number one if i ever mentioned to
you that every time there's a story in
the news
it comes back to me somehow
like somehow i end up being connected to
stories
and it doesn't make any sense to me i
mean given that i do this and i do this
in public
but even doing it in public i don't have
that much exposure to the general public
but the number of times that i have some
kind of
connection to something in the news is
just weird it's just weird
all right
here's the story
so you know that sam harris was getting
some uh pushback for some things he said
about trump
and
um
here's what happened yesterday i got a
longish message from sam harris private
message
in which he
explained his position better
now here's my problem
what the hell do i do now
it was a private message
it was a private message but i thought
it was an important one
in other words wouldn't you like to know
his argument
i don't know if he's if he's made the
argument exactly that way anywhere else
so here's what i don't want to do
i don't want to read you his message
because it was a private message
but i also don't want him to be sitting
out there
having offered something like a defense
to somebody who's been talking about him
in public
and just leave him exposed
because the worst thing would be for me
to
paraphrase him and then argue against
him when he's not here to defend himself
and by the way i probably shouldn't tell
you what he said to me privately
right even though it was related to a
public discussion
right so i'm uncomfortable telling you
what he said but i thought i would do it
this way so here's the way i'm going to
approach it
do you remember i told you that
one way to see if you're in cognitive
dissonance yourself
is see if you can
defend somebody else's argument that you
disagree with
if you can take the other person's
argument
and give it in a reasonable way that's
close enough to their argument then
you're probably not in cognitive
dissonance you're probably just valuing
things differently
maybe your risk your risk assessments a
little different that sort of thing
all right
so i'm going to argue sam harris's point
to support it
right so i'm not going to debate it i'm
going to try to support it
and then you can see if there's any
holes and i'll do the best i can right
so i'm going to try to actually support
it i'm not going to try to make him look
bad
by giving the weak version
i'm not going to at least i'm not going
to try to do that so if that happens
that would be a mistake all right
number one
does
sam harris think that trump
is like hitler or in that class of
danger
what do you think you've seen his public
statements
do you think that he believes that
now you might remember that prior to
trump being elected
i think it was prior to was it just
after or prior
but there was a point when
when i was talking to sam harris on his
podcast
that he did make a
he made a
let's say an almost an offhand
hitler analogy to trump
so we do know that there's at least some
statement in which he's
made that
reference right
so some of you are confirming that
you've heard him make that reference
now
in his message to me
he said that he does not think that
trump is in that category with hitler
the hitler occupies
a completely different category of
danger
and so i'm gonna i'm gonna say that it
was hyperbole
that he ever compared trump to hitler
but also early on
hold on
early on you could say there's that risk
but now that now that trump has served
one complete term
one would have to reassess that risk are
you right are you with me so far
would you give me this following point
that no matter what
sam harris or anybody else
said about trump early in his term or
before he was elected
that that that could now be discarded
would you would you agree because what
you thought would happen
has to give way to four years of
experience
and i would say that sam harris would be
on the same page
i would say that he would value the four
years that we observed
as a higher truth than guessing what
would happen right
so i would say you all of you and he are
on the same page on that
that you would put a higher value on
actual experience than guessing okay
now having seen trump
perform for four years
i accept
sam's statement that there's nothing
hitler looking per se in that you know
there's not going to be a roundup of
people
he's not going to start a nuclear war
for you know any any obvious reason
and that being tough on crime and tough
on immigration is not really hitler okay
so so far so far would you agree
so his current view is that trump does
not occupy a
dangerous ass hitler situation would you
would you accept that that's a
reasonable evolution of opinion
from
well we don't know what risk he poses
all the way to well we saw four ears
you know i still have my issues but it's
not a hitler problem would you accept
that i do
i think that would be a reasonable
evolution of opinion based on
evolving information
now
what problems does sam still have
well there are two things which he's
mentioned um recently
more than others
one is trump university
as an example of trump's character
the other is
that trump doxed
some citizens
now i have to confess i'm not aware of
those stories
vaguely i can imagine i sort of have a
memory of somebody getting
maybe called out by trump and had
trouble and if that happened
i would be opposed to that
so is there anybody here who thinks that
the president of the united states
should be doxing individuals
no right does anybody think that the
president should do that
no
i don't think that's a good move so we
could agree with him that it's
it's suboptimal right i think some of
you are going to say sure he can do it
if they do it first whatever but
generally speaking
i don't think you want your president
targeting law-abiding individuals who
have or exercising freedom of speech
i think we'd all be in the same page
right
and i don't think there are any trump
supporters
who think that trump
university showed trump in a good light
my personal belief about that is that
trump was just a hands-off manager
and probably didn't know what was going
on there
i don't know that
but it's an assumption
that matches everything i know about
executives who have lots of businesses i
think he had 400 businesses with his
name on it if you count licensing deals
you don't you don't look after all 400
deals i've done licensing myself
right i've had lots of licensees for
dilbert do you think i managed all of
them and
tracked them all to make sure they were
doing what i wanted them to do with my
property
well we required it i mean they had to
report to me but not really
not really that was sort of other people
doing their job and you hope they did it
well
i'm guessing and i don't have any
information to back this
but if you have 400 companies with your
name on it
and you're doing as much business as
trump was doing
you probably didn't watch any of them
too closely
i don't know how you could
so
um
yeah so the question is who did trump
dox but i don't think that's going to be
the critical question here
so
as i understand
um
sam harris's point
and and i'm going to understand it to
support it
there are two examples in which trump's
character is called into question
trump university
and then doxing individuals
would you say that those two tell you
something about trump as an individual
i think so
i think so
yeah
now there
but here's the interesting thing
why would you pick those out
so here's my observation as a hypnotist
as a trained hypnotist
one of the things you look for to see if
somebody is hypnotized
is that their reaction is extremely
non-standard
not completely crazy
just completely non-standard
when was the last time somebody said
that trump has to go because that those
times he doxed people
have you heard anybody else ever say
that
has anybody ever heard anybody
ever say
that a big problem with trump is his
doxing of individuals
so
there's no way to know what's in the
head of other people and so i'm not
going to diagnose somebody
by reading their mind that's not a thing
i'm just saying if you were looking for
a signal for a cognitive distance
that would be a gigantic glaring signal
doesn't mean it is
doesn't mean it is
it just means that that's exactly what a
signal would look like
a highly unusual
opinion
which still has some logical connect
connective tissue
because when somebody is hypnotized and
they come up with
let's say the cognitive dissonance
explanation of why they're doing
something
the cognitive dissonance explanation
also makes sort of sense
in other words they can they can piece
it together with some kind of logical
trail
but you still look at it you say i don't
think anybody else in that situation
would have said that
of all the things you could say
that's an unusual one
so without saying without having an
opinion of whether the doxing
is good or bad i think we'd all agree
it's bad if we heard the examples i'm
not i'm not familiar with the examples
but i'm open to the fact that
if a president docks somebody that's
really bad
shouldn't do that
right
and so
so when you see an unusual opinion
that's a flag
now that doesn't mean that he's
experiencing cognitive dissonance are
you clear on that
it doesn't mean he's experiencing
cognitive dissonance
it just means that if he is
it would look exactly like that
that's all
now the the other thing you would look
for for cognitive dissonance is a
trigger
a trigger is if something that you were
sure would be true
doesn't happen right
so i was i said from the beginning that
trump would be an expensive president
meaning he'd cause a lot of trouble and
he'd break a lot of dishes
but that there might be some big things
that the country wants earliest part of
the country wants
that he would get done
and sure enough he got done you know in
my opinion north korea defused that
you know the abraham accords
you know i think he tightened up the
border better than
you know not as good as somebody wanted
but better than it's been done
you know and and so you could come up
with a bunch of things they did
now in my opinion
my expectation of trump was pretty close
to what happened
so there's no trigger for cognitive
dissonance in my case or at least one
that i can't see maybe you can see it
but i can't see it
because i got what i expected
but now imagine if you were talking
about trump in in the most
let's say
cataclysmic terms before he got elected
and it was just it looked like the end
of the world and you'd really gone out
there saying it was going to be a
disaster
and then trump gets an office and he
does something closer to a good job
not at all what it looked like it was
going to be if you were a critic
that's a trigger
that's a perfect trigger that's that's a
textbook
trigger for cognitive dissonance what
you expected is wildly different than
what you got
and that wasn't true for republicans
republicans expected a set of behaviors
from trump and they got them
for the most part they got exactly what
they expected there's no trigger there
it's only the people who were surprised
who were triggered
so that again that doesn't mean he's
experiencing cognitive dissonance it
just means it would look exactly like
that if he were that's all you can say
but let me take his argument and uh and
finish it because there's something to
it
and he goes on to say that you know
trump's uh what he would say is obvious
character failings
as evidenced by trump university this is
sam's argument and uh as evidenced by
doxing and other behaviors that look
cowardly and or selfish
that those are dangerous characteristics
to have in the president
but nothing like
nothing like the danger of a hitler
and so
and so
when sam says he's not too concerned
that maybe the hunter biden laptop story
got suppressed
for the purpose of
helping
helping trump lose the election
that maybe that's not that different
than
the weiner laptop coming out that may
have helped trump get elected
hypothetically
so if you said to me well those things
are about equal
maybe it would be better if neither of
them happen but but they're not that
different
in
in
an impact
that's not
that's not
uh that's not crazy that's not crazy
if you put yourself in the other
situation
if if you knew
that the only thing that kept hillary
clinton out of office
was some sketchy stuff in the news
in fact maybe that is exactly what
happened we don't know but if you knew
that's the only thing that kept her out
of office and you were a republican
how concerned would you be
you wouldn't be that concerned
now i don't want to speak for you but on
average
people are willing to accept a little
imperfection on their own team if they
get what they want
that's pretty normal
right so i think it's pretty normal for
somebody to say i would have accepted a
little imperfection
to get the outcome i wanted because i
think the the a different president
makes a big difference
now what about the
sam harris also famously
said that he had i forget the exact
words but in some ways more respect for
osama bin laden
than for trump
but this was this has to be
understood in terms of an intellectual
argument
right as soon as you put it into an
emotional argument it makes your head
explode no bin laden's a monster
you know trump's just a politician no
but that's not what he was talking about
he's not talking about you know bin
laden
directly murdering people versus
trump having a policy it doesn't like
the the point was that bin laden was
operating on principle
it just happened to be a principle that
we hate
right but he was sort of internally
consistent with his islamic beliefs
at least the extremistic islamic beliefs
whereas sam's point is that
trump is not
moored to any moral
or ethical foundation and therefore he's
a little more unpredictable and likely
to operate for his own best interest
in any given situation
so do you think that it's dangerous to
have somebody you can't predict as
president
because he's going to sort of go where
where the self-interest goes
that's that's not a terrible argument
now i have you know i can counter the
argument
but i'm not going to do that in this
conversation
because this conversation is to see if i
can explain his argument
in a way that
makes it make sense
without making it sound crazy
and i think that his argument is not
crazy
if you accept the following
clarifications
which he has provided
clarifa clarification number one he does
not believe that trump is dangerous like
a hitler would be
he believes he's unpredictable because
he's not moored to a moral ethical
foundation
i accept that
i accept that if i were arguing against
it which i'm not going to do today
i would say something about the
presidency has more transparency than
most things and that he's offered to
give us
those services on our behalf and we can
watch it happen while it's happening
right but there's not that much
transparency so there's always an issue
and so if i take sam's argument i'd say
there's not that much transparency
there's not enough because we still
wonder what happens behind closed doors
and stuff
but uh it's not a bad argument so if you
allow that the bin laden argument was
just an intellectual exercise which is
what it was that's fine it's just an
intellectual exercise
if you allow that the trump that the
hitler stuff was just hyperbole
and also has given given way to
experience we've seen what trump can and
cannot do in office i i don't think
sam's opinion is as crazy
as you do
let me ask you this
if i said there was some other president
coming into office
let's say it was a democrat and you felt
that that democrat's
history
suggested that the democrat would do
whatever it took
that there was no moral underpinnings
would you be uncomfortable with that
president probably
probably
right
yeah were you uncomfortable with lbj
were you uncomfortable with
i'm not sure about bill clinton i'm not
going to go that far
i have a different opinion about hillary
than i do about bill i think bill
clinton was a solid president that's my
opinion
i think he was a solid president
yeah and i'm not looking for an argument
on that
you know people can disagree on stuff
like that
all right
so how did i do
how did i do
did i you don't have to agree with my
argument but do you think that i've made
sarah harrison's point look reasonable
does it look reasonable
well once you take away the hyperbole
there's a solid core there
i guess some yeses mostly knows you know
we're
we're deep into team sport territory
here
and when you get this deeply into team
sport i know you're not you don't want
to give the other team a point i get
that
but
let me ask you this
did i at least pass the test that i
could i could express the argument
in a full-throated way
would you accept that
did i express the argument in a
full-throated way
i think i did i think i did now that
would suggest
that i don't have cognitive dissonance
and again this this is a rule of thumb
it's not like some scientific guarantee
but the the strong indication is that i
can tell his argument
and i don't have an unusual opinion
about things
all right
so i okay i feel good about that
um
but here's here's my bottom line i think
that the difference between sam's
opinion and mine comes down to one thing
wildly different opinions about what is
dangerous wildly different opinions
about what's important
for example
i would say that the 50 intelligence
agents
lying about hunter's laptop
destroys the credibility of our most
important systems
and also reveals that they're corrupt
and i would put that at a in terms of a
scale of one to ten
that's like a nine
in terms of how bad that is that's like
a nine
how bad is a president doxing
an individual
well on a moral ethical
and preference level it's a it's a ten
in badness
but in terms of how it affects the world
it's a one it's a one
it affects those people and i don't like
that at all
you know any doxing by president i'm
completely against
but you have to put it in perspective
i would say that the the 50 intel people
ex-intel professionals lying is a big
freaking deal
that's a nine
doxing it's a one
except that the individual's involved of
course it's attend to them
so i don't know that sam and i differ on
the logic of anything
i don't know that we have different data
at least that hasn't been obvious to me
but we're definitely valuing things
differently i'll give you another one
i imagine that january 6 would be higher
and well since he hasn't talked about it
i won't put this in his head let's say
me compared to a democrat a typical
democrat would say
january 6 was just horrible like it was
like the nearly the end of the republic
do you know what i say about january 6
again
not counting the violence part which is
if you were a recipient of the violence
or you were jailed because of it
that problem is a 10 and a 10 for you
no question about it
but what effect did it have on the world
or the country in my opinion
stronger
the their theirs well okay i just outed
myself there didn't i
i guess that was a non-standard opinion
wasn't it
so then then i have to ask myself was
that cognitive dissonance
here's why i say stronger i'll give you
my argument
doesn't mean i'm not experiencing
cognitive dissonance
now keep in mind that i've condemned
trump's actions on january 6. so in
theory
that should protect me
right because i'm on record i said biden
one from day one
you know that's not going to change i've
never gone back on that
the system elected biden
so even if there were you know
hypothetically any imperfections
i still go with the system we got to fix
the system
but you got to go with the system while
you're fixing it that's just my opinion
so
um
my opinion on january 6 is that made
america stronger
would anybody agree with that before you
hear my argument
before i give you the argument january 6
the protests even with the violence
which i condemned totally
made america stronger
yeah i think reasonable people can
disagree on this one
here's my argument
it's sort of the jordan peterson
argument about individuals
that you should be dangerous
but learn to not learn to control it
right your nature should be as dangerous
as possible it keeps society
you know
operating here's what i want i want my
government no matter who it is
be they democrat or be they republican
or anything else i want my government to
know
that if i've got questions
and and my fellow citizens have
questions we're going to show up
we're going to show up
well not me i like to have you know i
like to have bathrooms i don't have to
wait for so i won't be there
but
but for the people who like to do that
kind of stuff they'll be there
yeah i'll try to do you know something
useful at home
where i'm more comfortable
but
but the rest of you i love the fact that
you show up
so my take on um
and i'm going to say the same thing with
for black lives matter
all right so here i'm going to show at
least maybe a possibility that i'm not
experiencing cognitive dissonance
black lives matter created some
bad stuff
created you know lots of destruction and
death
i don't mind living in a country where
people are going to hit the streets to
fight for
fairness
i don't hate that
i hate all the violence i hate the
disruption i hate that they may be
confused i hate that they may be
semi-hypnotized i hate that the news
is is brainwashing people
i don't know that the protests were
useful so i'm not saying they were
useful
so i'm going to make a real strong
distinction
i don't think necessarily that january 6
was useful
and i don't think that the blm protests
were useful in the end
but do you want to live in the country
that won't do that
i don't
i want to live in a country where if the
republicans think something went wrong
they're in the streets
and i want to live in the country you
might not like this
where if the democrats think something
is just terribly wrong they're going to
hit the streets
right
so give me the country that protests
thank you very much
and let them let them go wild let them
make their case and let them see if they
can you know prevail
because you have seen cases where
protests turn into something good let's
say civil rights you've seen them where
they don't turn into anything good let's
say antifa
but
i still want to live in this country
i still want to still want to live where
people will take to the streets
all right
so i just value things completely
different than other people and
therefore we can get to different uh
conclusions
all right while i'm defending people
that uh you might not want me to defend
let me throw another one in the mix
jake tapper is getting a bunch of heat
today
because he retweeted ivanka trump's
tweet
uh promoting jared's new book
and people are saying jake tapper
how can you retweet jared are you part
of the you know the elite
what's going on here are you selling
this out say the cnn
observers to which i would like to add
the following context
i also plugged jake tapper's book
when it came out
it's an author thing
that's all it is
as soon as you think this is more than
one author
being let's say professionally courteous
and maybe thinks that the audience would
be interested in the book
it's not an endorsement of the person
it's not an endorsement of all that
person has done
it's more like i wrote a book you wrote
a book about your book is interesting
maybe other people would like it too
that's it
right
all right authors promote other people's
books
it doesn't mean anything
scott is waffling again
what the am i waffling about
somebody says i'm waffling i don't think
i've waffled less on any
livestream than today
so you could have your own opinions
about jake tappers politics and
performance etc but
let the guy promote a book
from anybody
right just let him promote a book
because
um
and i like to say this every
every few months at least
i insist
on the right of association
i insist
as a citizen of the united states
on the right of free association
if i want to talk to the worst person in
the world and get a selfie with that
person i'm going to do it
and i don't care what your opinion is
and i'm never going to care what your
opinion is if i want to if i want to
tweet somebody's book and you don't like
their politics but i think the book is
interesting
i'm going to tweet that book
right there's nothing you're going to do
to talk me out of that behavior so
freedom of association
there is no
wiggle room
that one's an absolute and can't ever
change
all right
um
bill maher continues to be interesting
politically
uh and he noted on the show with 85
percent of the people trump endorsed for
the primaries won
85 percent
uh and he said he said quote say what
you want about mr evil
meaning trump but boy what a politician
i mean that's impressive impressive an
evil evil way but still impressive
so
do you remember when trump first
announced
do you remember what i seem to be
completely alone in the united states
saying i wrote a blog post called uh
um clown genius he was being called a
clown and i said um you better watch out
for the clown
because this clown is a genius
persuasion-wise
and then the clown became the president
of the united states
and then even out of office
uh he influenced
you know an 85 of the primaries
now
can we give me some credit
for calling on day one the first one
at least maybe not the first one but
among the first
to say there's something going on with
this guy
right and i said that he would be the
most persuasive person you've ever seen
i believe that that's now the case
i believe that even his biggest critics
would say okay i don't like what he's
saying
but there's no question about his
persuasion he's got the entire package
he does whole package
bj novak i guess was on bill maher's
podcast and you know he's a writer and
humorist stand-up guy
he wrote for the office and he was an
actor on that bj novak
um
if your initials are bj
you've got to learn to tell a joke
you've got to have a sense of humor
but bj believes what i believe which is
that wokeness is really people
pretending to be offended on behalf of
the people who don't exist
have you ever met anybody who was
offended
by words
i don't never have
if you talk to anybody individually
they'll say oh no it doesn't bother me
it's just some something some jerk said
why would i care about what some jerk
said
but i'm pretty sure
other people are going to be
offended i'm pretty sure other people
are going to be offended
now
let me say again
i'm a fan of oldness
i know i know it sounds weird because
i'm one of the biggest critics of
wokeness but also a fan
and here's how that's consistent
the dilbert comic
for which
you know i'm notorious
is about good ideas that are taken too
far
that's what it's about
because management is a good idea you
can't have an unmanaged company but if
you take you too far you're
micromanaging
if you take it too far you're doing
whatever the latest trend is before
knowing it's a good idea so everything i
talk about is a basic good idea that's
just been taken to some ridiculous point
so what do i think about
calling people by the name
by the name that they would like to be
called
i call that good manners
that's not even a conversation
yeah whatever you want
if if that's how you feel comfortable
i'd be happy to do it now if somebody
said i would like you to call me
king scott
and
i suck before you that's my legal name
whenever you refer to me call me king
scott i suck before you
and i said no no don't call me scott
i prefer to be called king scott i suck
before your great presence
that's my full name
now that would be too far right so
there's got to be some limits on
wokeness
but i don't mind anybody has
he her preference
but as i've said before and i will say a
million times
said before and i'll say it a million
times
in return for my flexibility
and my attempt to have good manners and
treat people the way they would like to
be treated
you're gonna have to give me a break if
i get it wrong
and i'm not going to take any wiggle on
that
if i get one wrong i misgender you
whatever
and you've got a problem with that
if you correct me i will take that under
advisement and hope to do better
if you attack me
you
everybody makes mistakes
you if you attack me for that
mistake because i don't have bad
intentions right you can attack people
for bad intentions
you can attack me for bad intentions if
you ever see me with bad intentions
free hip
free punch
let me say it again
if you ever are sure i'd hope i'd hope
you'd be sure about it
don't guess
but if you ever see me having bad
intentions
free punch
come at me as hard as you want
right i tried not to do that i don't i
don't think i ever have
but
try not to
all right
so
let's keep pretending there are people
who are offended when
none of us have ever met any
and by the way if i ever do meet
somebody who's offended by that kind of
stuff
i don't really want to be their friend
i wouldn't spend a minute with somebody
who's offended by stuff like that
because you know it's just going to come
back to you
basically somebody who's offended by
words is just telling you you don't want
to interact with them in any way at all
just run away
all right
uh i'm seeing some graphs again
that uh
people are saying that the vaccinations
are hurting people
because there are more people
hospitalized who are vax than unvaxed
how many times do we have to go over
this
that the population of people who got
vaccinated are by nature the weakest
ones
so of course the vaccinated would have
more hospitalizations
it's exactly what you would expect but
it's being used as proof that
vaccinations are hurting you
now let me be very clear
i don't know
i don't believe any data about
vaccinations
none
there's basically nothing about the
pandemic that i believe
because it's all been we've been fooled
so many times
that as soon as you think you know
something you're like well got
disappointed there
now i don't know if vaccinations helped
or hurt
but i'm going to tell you what i think
my my uh scorecard is all right
this will offend you greatly um i'm
going to say again that i had the best
pandemic predictions by far
in my opinion nobody came close
but i won't get any agreement on that
because people still disagree what's
true
as long as we're disagreeing about
what's true
then you can't say who who who had good
predictions
but
mine are shaping up to be the truest so
far let me give you some ideas
so in early 2020 i said vitamin d looked
like it was
crucial in covet
i just told you that i don't think the
studies have proven it
but they're all leaning in that
direction
right so
if that turned out to be
true or even just a correlation that was
important i'd say i got that one early
and correctly
but it's not it's not it's definitely
not confirmed that
boosting your levels would help you
with cova it might be later
i predicted that uh
the vaccines wouldn't work
right now a lot of people
believe i did the opposite
but when it was first announced the
expert said we've been working for
decades we're not even close
so i said well if the experts think it
can't be done i'll go with the experts
now i don't always go with the experts
but in that case i did
and sure enough the vaccinations did not
work as vaccinations
but i said at the time we that we're
probably going to come up with better
therapeutics
i would say i had one of the best
predictions that the vaccines wouldn't
work
as vaccinations but that we would come
up with strong therapeutics
which i believe we have
then we see the latest studies that say
ivermectin did not work
am i ready to conclude that ivor mechtin
could not have worked under any
combination of when you gave it who you
gave it to or in any combination of
anything else that i would say is
unknown
unknown
but
i said don't don't buy into ivermectin
right away
i said
wait for studies and every day that goes
by without confirmation
you should lower your odds of it working
so i did the same thing with
hydroxychloroquine as with ivermectin i
started with well
there's some indication it might work
and it doesn't hurt you
why not
but then every time some data command
came in that made it look like maybe it
wasn't working i lowered my percentage
likelihood until i got down to about 10
percent and that's where i stopped
so that's where i have it
hydroxychloroquine
and ivormectin
somewhere no more than 10
possibility that they ever could have
worked
in the right dosage with the right
combination with the right people at the
right time that sort of thing
so i think i had the
best ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine
predictions
still admitting still admitting we don't
know if they work
are you okay with that
that at this moment we still don't know
but all of the information is leaning in
one direction which is the direction i
was going at the same time
yeah what else let's see
yeah i would say that and then we don't
want to talk about masks but i was the i
believe the only person in the country
who said that fauci was lying when he
said masks don't work
and he admitted he was lying
so i'm the only person who got that
right
and then when masks were rolled out
i said from an engineering perspective
they almost certainly have to reduce the
amount of
spread
but we won't see it in the big numbers
because i told you that you wouldn't see
anything with leadership in the
the state and country level
which is why i was against mandates so i
was never i was never for mandates of
masks but unambiguously if if water gets
stuck on your mask there's some virus on
that water
we just don't know how much and whether
it made a difference but we could see it
didn't make a difference on the state
level
i mean the data doesn't seem to
support it
so i would say that i was by far the
most right about masks nobody was even
close
i would say i was
probably close to
eight or nine out of ten
and i think most people were closer to a
three in rightness on that
now again
this depends on the data that we have
now
continuing to prove out which might
change so i could be let me say clearly
i could be wrong on any one of these
things
because
we never have final confirmations it
seems
but i would make my argument that there
was nobody even in my
general
neighborhood of rightness i wasn't even
nobody was even close
to my predictions in my opinion there is
room for disagreement
all right
so i asked this question on twitter a
few times and i think i have an answer
now about the mar-a-lago
information
and given that a president doesn't have
any requirements for a process for
declassifying
i ask the following question
if a president
signals
that something is declassified is that
good enough and one way to signal it
would be
take these top secret boxes and move
them to mar-a-lago
to me that's declassifying
because it's clear that anybody would
know that taking them to mar-a-lago
takes them away from a secure place
and you know anybody can see them
so in my opinion that would be
declassification and so i asked lawyers
because i'm not one
i said
can a president do any kind of signal
any kind of signal at all
and would that count as declassification
and the lawyer said what did the lawyer
say
what do you think
did the lawyers say that that's true as
long as he signals
by his actions
the answer is yes
the people who identified as lawyers
said yes he just has to signal it by his
actions and it's declassified
there isn't any legal risk here is there
because even if you allow that um you
found let's say you found the lawyer who
disagrees
if most lawyers think it's totally legal
you're not going to get a jury to think
it's illegal
right
if most lawyers think it's perfectly
legal what you did
you're not going to get a jury 12 people
to say it was illegal it's just not
going to happen
there's no legal risk here at all
yes sir
i don't see one unless unless it's a
complete rigged trial and i don't think
that's going to happen because there's
too much
visibility
yeah well we're done with the
declassification talk
all right
lockheed martin is
putting into operation lasers on
warships
so we've heard about lasers on jets
they're testing but now they've got a
laser they can put on a warship
so
that's interesting do you know what
we're going to have to use lasers for
i'll tell you the biggest use of lasers
in the future
shooting down drones
the small ones not not the big military
ones those would be a little harder
by shooting down the small ones
and you know why you're going to have to
shoot those down
because we're probably about a year away
from them being filled with fentanyl
and
becoming the primary uh terrorist weapon
yeah
now i did write a book about that
in
2003-ish when was it
somewhere around there
and it's called the religion war i might
read that
read the religion or into
youtube and or locals
so i might turn that into an e-book just
by reading it
um
but there is no way
that terrorists are going to not notice
the fentanyl is deadly
and is light
and easily available
if it's light
a small drone can carry it and deliver
it anywhere if it's deadly it's better
than dynamite because you can't get
dynamite very easily it's hard to get
you know see
what's the explosive c
c4 yeah it's hard to get c4
but literally every kid can get fentanyl
a teenager can get fentanyl so there
isn't any doubt where things are going
there's going to be fentanyl and it's
going to be on drones
and we're going to need lasers to shoot
those drones out of the air
although maybe that's bad too because
the drone is still going to crash and
the fentanyl is going to get out i don't
know maybe there's no solution
but
um as long as china is sending us
fentanyl and it's going through the
cartels
it's going to us
our our future is guaranteed it's
fentanyl on small drones for
unlimited terrorist attacks in our
population centers
there's no way to stop it
except
wipe out the cartels
and then tell china they're next
i would definitely kill the fentanyl
dealers
in in china on chinese territory
because china isn't going to nuke us
for taking out their terrorists
they're going to get really really mad
about it
but them
it's war
so we we can go into their country and
just take them out now i wouldn't i
wouldn't drop a missile on them
i wouldn't fire a missile into china
you have to do it on the ground
but it wouldn't be hard how hard would
it be to kill a fentanyl kingpin just by
giving him an injection of fentanyl
all right
pretty easy all right all you need is a
blow dart with a little fentanyl and
it's like
and
mr kingpin is dead
now
i don't know how hard it is to get a
chinese agent into china
but i've got a feeling that there might
be a
couple people who are not happy with the
government over there might want to give
us a little help
there might be somebody
yeah blow darts with fentanyl get over
it
as long as the fentanyl is in the dark
okay it's not the safest thing anybody
ever did but murder is never really that
safe it really isn't
um i'm going to make a prediction
there isn't the slightest chance that we
will not attack the cartels in mexico
there isn't the slightest chance that's
not going to happen
because let me tell you what's going to
happen
let me tell you what's going to happen
the number of fentanyl deaths will keep
climbing
and at some point
you're all going to be where i am
well i've been there a long time
and where i am is we're in the middle of
a war and there's nothing i won't do
nothing nope
would i kidnap the president of mexico
yes
yeah i would
if if it would work i mean it wouldn't
work
right
would i would i annex mexico
yep
yep i would annex mexico
yeah you'd you would have a hard time
coming up with something i wouldn't do
to stop this problem
i can't think of anything i wouldn't do
would i would i start machine gunning
uh the
what do you call them the uh the coyotes
yes i would yeah i would start killing
the coyotes where they stand anytime you
can see them from our side of the border
in fact i'd send drones in and just
start killing the coyotes wherever they
are
would it help i don't care
if you if you took out the cartel
operations would have stopped the
fentanyl trade
i don't care
i don't care it might slow down the next
person who wanted to start it
but you have to make sure that everybody
who deals fentanyl dies a horrible death
and fairly soon
i would also start uh executing our
fentanyl dealers
publicly
publicly
i think a fentanyl dealer needs to be
executed publicly
above a certain level i'm not talking
about you know the onesies twosies
street dealers
i'm talking about the big ones
public execution
in fact if if trump ran on that platform
public execution for fentanyl dealers
and i will attack the cartels in
in office
i'd be all in
i would be all in
somebody thinks i'm i support sharia
yeah that's that's a little bit of a
leap
from attacking
from killing
mass murders to sharia law
uh there's a little bit of a leap there
about the mules who transport it i i
think you have to make
um
some
some distinctions
in terms of how much they're involved i
wouldn't kill somebody for maybe
necessarily transporting it across the
border if they're an american citizen
if it's not an american citizen and they
transport
one pill of fentanyl over the border i
would kill them
i'd kill them
if they transported it to sell
yeah
i would say yeah if you're if you don't
live in this country and you take one
pill across our border i'd kill them
too far no there's nothing that's not
too far
there's nothing not too far
right a hundred thousand peop kids
mostly uh well young people dying per
year
yeah for one pill now let me say it
again i would if i do that the pill now
of course nobody's going to bring one
pill
right so that's hyperbole if you're
going to argue about the one pill you're
just arguing hyperbole and that's
useless
i'm just saying if it's obvious they're
bringing fentanyl to sell
i wouldn't care how much
if they bring it to sell kill
all right
looks like uh
oops what's that
uh the secret mice micro lesson yes
all right um
no more pfizer commercials
disproportionate punishment
punishment
yeah
you know um when people are involved in
mass murder
i believe that their own lives should be
used for something useful
not like a regular if a regular criminal
does something you know just let the
justice
thing do his thing but if you're a mass
murderer
i think you should be killed in whatever
way is the
most useful to society and if murdering
you in public make somebody else less
likely to do it
okay
yeah if if murdering somebody in a
horrible way in front of the public i
would hang him i'd hang him actually
because the visual of hanging is just
really good
that's a good visual oh actually i take
it back
now you don't want to hang them because
some of them would be black
so no hanging
no hang
there's got to be something else public
execution but no hanging
guillotine
yeah too clean
[Music]
um
dope six started this yeah maybe
do you own a firearm
i want you to sneak in my house and find
out
yeah my
my uh
my personal defense system is
follows the around and find out
i'm not going to tell you what my
personal defense situation is
it's a surprise
let me just say this
if you get into my house
your problem is getting out
getting into my house or really any
house getting into a house is not that
hard all you need is a you know a rock
right to get through a window
getting into my house no problem
getting out
good luck
that's all you need to know about my my
defense
all right
sounds like a date
all right everybody was this the best
show you've ever seen i think i've oh
let me one more thing
apparently uh
the web browser and tick tock app can
track every keystroke made by its users
how incompetent is our government that
they haven't banned tick tick-tock
what is up with that
how incompetent that tick-tock
which is clearly a military weapon
clearly
is a military weapon that we're letting
the chinese use on our youth
and we're just like oh okay
yeah here you go
so
tick-tock has to be banned i think trump
might be willing to do it but he didn't
you know he didn't get it done i don't
know
what the
limitation is there
um
and uh
oh the big news is that the facebook and
tick tock
have band
controversial figure andrew taint
if you don't know who andrew taint is
you're lucky but he's like the
andrew dice clay
but
he's got more of a homoerotic
vibe to to his stuff he's not gay
but he presents himself in sort of a
homoerotic vibe
uh and
he got kicked off of facebook and uh
and
and instagram same company
for saying things which is fans say
are just the truth
now do you remember that i said a while
ago that no man could say what he's
actually thinking
like you couldn't survive
if a man just said whatever he was
thinking whenever he was thinking
now i'm not saying that i'm thinking
what he's thinking i'm just saying it's
a good example
of somebody who
is trying to say what he's actually
thinking in public
and he's he doesn't have a chance
yeah he got a big following do you know
why he got over 4 million followers
almost instantly
is it because males did disagreed with
him
no it's because they knew he was he was
self-immolating by saying things that
they sort of also believed or thought
were true or rang true
anyway
so uh
well so somebody's saying that uh that
cernovich likes him i don't know if he
likes him is the right phrase
but again
my right of a free association
is not just for me
yeah if somebody i i like or respect
wants to spend some time with somebody i
don't like or respect that's fine
because
cernovich like me
exerts his complete right to associate
with whoever he wants actually is one of
the things i like most about him in fact
he associated with me cernovich did
before before i had much of a following
on social media and i think that was
risky
so uh i'm never going to give somebody a
hard problem for who they spend time
with endorse
prefer
that's that's all just their decisions
um
all right
there we go
hello from nigeria
yeah we have to demand our freedom of
association
there are exceptions um
really
well there would be maybe exceptions for
what kind of time you spend with them
but not for a selfie
i don't have any exceptions for that
all right
there's some entertain taint uh
impersonator videos
all right well
uh
that's all i got for today
would you agree that this is uh probably
the best
live stream you're ever going to see
maybe in the history of all time
yeah
very close very close to the best thing
you'll ever see
all right
uh i did finish i did fix my
photoshop problem there was a setting
that changed
somehow on his own and the setting the
change seemed to have nothing to do with
the brush tool
the brush tool has lots of settings in
different places and you have to find
them all so it's just a terrible
interface problem
yeah so the computer works that's the
good news
and that's all for now i'll talk to you
later you do
