nance. If you can't do it and you change the subject or you start going off on the person, you probably do, right?

So if I said to you, okay, and I'll just use Sam as my experiment. I'll say all right Sam, you've made a claim that the Trump University thing is worse than anything Biden has done or is even accused of doing. I'm going to take your point of view and I'm going to argue it. Right? Here's my argument. Trump did something with Trump University which shows that he cannot be trusted. And somebody who would do something so blatant should never be president. And therefore that gives us cause to doubt anything else he ever does, because that example gives us a clear pattern of his personality and his priorities. Did I do it? Did I take his point of view and argue it in a way that shows I understand the argument?

Now I'm not saying you need to agree with the argument. That's not the point. I'm not trying to convince you. I'm just saying can I take that argument and argue it? Did I succeed? Right now I had a problem with Trump University too. But remember what Trump promised us. Do you remember his promise? I'm no angel. I'm gonna do for you what I've been doing for myself, which is maybe break some rules and make stuff work. That's what he said. And when I supported him I thought, wow, he's going to be expensive. He's going to break a whole bunch of stuff. But he might do some things that can't be done otherwise. So I've always characterized Trump as being someone who can't do easy things such as staying out of trouble, but he can do some impossible things such as the Abraham Accords and shaking hands with Kim Jong-un until that problem basically went away. Right?

So there's some things he can do that just other people couldn't do. And that's what I was buying. I thought that's what I was buying. And I thought it'd be expensive because I thought there would be some division in the country and I thought it'd be expensive. So I got what I thought I was buying: an imperfect person who had a set of skills that were right for the times in some very specific ways.

Now do you think that Sam Harris could take my argument and argue it back to me? I don't know. But that would be the test. If he could take my argument and present it in a full throat, then I would say to him, okay, all right, well that looks like you've looked at all the facts and maybe our priorities are different, but I see where you're coming from. But his current argument that the Trump University thing is worse than maybe colluding with Ukraine or being victim of potentially blackmail of Ukraine or something like that, that's on its surface it looks like cognitive dissonance to this audience I'm sure. But I don't think you can be sure the cognitive dissonance is not on your end. Can you? How do you know it's not on your end? By definition you don't know.

I would propose this test and see if you can do it. See if you can make an argument that agrees with Sam Harris even though you don't believe it. See if you can make the argument. If you can, then maybe you're looking at it objectively. If you can't, there's no chance you're being objective. No chance. Right now of course there are some people whose arguments are just so crazy you can't even make an argument on their side. But I don't think that's the case with Sam. I think Sam shows you his work and I can reproduce it. Yeah, the character of this person is such it's been demonstrated by these past things which we have some confirmation of. Why would you trust such a person in such an important job? It's a very easy argument to make.

All right, so there's a good test for you. See if you can argue the other side. And all this stuff about his big fake enemies. Now here's, I think this is sort of related to this. So I asked, I did a little Twitter poll. And I said that I predicted that Republicans would be hunted if Biden got elected. I predicted that in 2020. And I asked people if they thought that that prediction had been realized. And 80 percent of the people who answered, who are probably mostly right-leaning, said that indeed it appears to them Republicans are being hunted in a variety of different ways from January 6 on.

Now Phil Bump, who I believe writes for Washington Post, he wanted to mock me. And there were two tweets with two separate but related predictions. One was that you'd be hunted. But the related tweet in the same thread said that there's a good chance you would be dead in a year if Biden got elected. Now the trouble is with a prediction like that, there's a good chance. What do you interpret as a good chance of being dead? Go. What is the minimum percentage of the chance that you would say fits a good chance? Some would say 51 percent. Some would say 10. Some say 50, 25, 50, 50.

Now remember this is a good chance of being dead. If you talk about the chances of being dead, any percentage seems like too much, doesn't it? So in this context I was thinking more like five or ten percent chance of being dead. You know, two percent, something like that. And what did Biden do as soon as he got elected? It took a little longer than a year, but the next thing you know we're talking about nuclear war with Russia. That was all Biden. Biden actually got us into a serious conversation about nuclear war with a nuclear superpower. Now I don't think it was that close, but it was close enough to talk about it. So when I say there was a good chance, I was thinking five percent. It would be ridiculous to think that you are most likely going to be dead in the year. What is it about anybody on the left who would believe that I thought that? Would anybody interpret it as I thought there was a greater than 50 chance that you individually would be dead in a year because of who got elected? Who would believe that I would actually predict that? But it's provocative enough to say that there's a good chance, five percent. Yeah. So open borders, fentanyl deaths. Yeah, correct. But I was thinking in terms of civil war as well.

So Phil decides to be my personal critic and he's got an argument he wants you to see. But to me it looks like cognitive dissonance. That's what it looks like. And here's my guide for identifying an NPC. Now I've been using the NPC thing as sort of a metaphor. Is that the right word? Is it a metaphor for the simulation? That some people are just scenery. And I don't mean that literally. I mean it could be true literally, but I don't mean it literally. What I mean is that there are a certain number of people who will only say the most obvious thing that you say in a situation.

For example, if I were to tweet I believe that we'll never make it to Venus or something, whatever it is, some sciency thing, what is the most obvious thing that somebody would tweet? The most obvious thing would be, oh, the Dilbert guy disagrees with science. That'd be the most obvious thing, right? So that would be an NPC kind of approach. The other thing is a