Episode 2291 Scott Adams: CWSA 11/13/23, Reframing The News So You Can Use It

Bom, bom, bom, bom. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. Do you think you can make this experience go up to another level? A level that nobody could even describe in human words? Even AI Has a problem with it. Yes, but all you need for that is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or style, a canteen, jug, or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill that vessel with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure. It's the dopamine of the day thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. Go. Oh, that's good. That's a good way to kick off the day. Well, in lesser news, I guess Biden's grin granddaughter has Secret Service protection. Which one is it? Doesn't matter. But his granddaughter and she was walking in Georgetown late on Sunday night. Or Naomi. Naomi Biden and her Secret Service detail saw that there was a carjacking in action, and apparently they fired three shots to break it up. Now, we don't know enough about this story to really know. Like, was that smart that they did that? Did that in any way protect Naomi? I doubt it. Was it something that they just decided they needed to do because it just needed to be done? Here's what I'm feeling. Despite the Daniel Penny thing and the fact that heroes keep getting arrested, I feel like there's going to be a wave of citizen involvement. I won't say vigilante, but citizen involvement, that's going to just skyrocket. Because it's one thing to know your government should be handling it, in which case it's easy to stay uninvolved. Then there's another phase where you hope they'll be involved. So you still don't get involved because, like, well, you know, they're not that reliable. But I hope the government will take care of this. And then there's the giving up phase, which we may be entering, where you realize that if you don't take care of crime on your own, you're going to lose your neighborhood. And I think that people are reaching. That giving up phase, the part where they say, you know what? If I don't take down this robber, I won't have stores in my neighborhood. So, you know, it's a bad idea. By the way, I don't recommend it. I do not recommend vigilantism. You probably get arrested. I'm just saying that people are going to do it because they're just fed up. So here's the story that appears in my head without any support. Right. I don't know that this is true. Here's what I feel with no evidence whatsoever that at least one of these Secret Service people was just sick of this shit and just, and just, you know, just started firing. Now I doubt they fired at a person. It was probably a warning shots kind of thing, I'm guessing, but I don't know. Might be some more evidence of this coming up. So soccer star Megan Rapinoe was in her final game of her career and three minutes in she got an injury that looked pretty bad. But her comment about it was, quote, I'm not a religious person or anything and if there was a God, this is proof that there isn't. This is effed up. So Megan Rapinoe thinks that she has proven there's no God because she got injured in her final game. Well, I don't think she meant that literally, but she might be an example of somebody who's career would look better if she never spoke again. That would be my PR advice. Hey Megan, I've got an idea. This will work for you. Never speak again. Just don't say anything. This will work out for you. That's my advice. Well, in the news we've got some Bill Burr and some Bill Barr. Do you know your Burrs from your bars? If I told you a story about Bill Barr, would you think it was Bill Burr? Would you get those two confused? Well, they're both in the news. As you know. You probably, you heard this story yesterday that Bill Burr, the comedian, stand up comedian, was with his wife at the UFC event where Trump came and there was a photo taken of Bill Burr's wife giving the double bird finger to Trump when he wasn't looking. And then I commented that, you know, it would, it's going to be, I would love to know the conversation when they got home and they find out it's a headline news and it's trending everywhere. Do you think that Bill ever said to his wife, you know, you just took 40% off our total income forever. Now, I don't know if that's actually the case, but it's never really a good idea to insult 40% of the people who would go to your shows, which is what happened. Now here's how I took it. You might have taken it as, hey, this is a political statement. It's a political world. Would I be concerned if somebody made a political statement about somebody? No, it wouldn't make me not go to their show. I mean, I watch Bill Maher, and I know he doesn't like President Trump. It doesn't bother me a bit, because you know what I also think? I don't think that Bill Maher would hate me personally. Like, it doesn't feel personal when he talks about it. It feels like it's political. It's not about the individuals, although some individual voters he might not love. But somehow my impression of this was that giving the finger to Trump in public feels like maybe I wouldn't be welcome in their home either. Did anybody have that feeling that if you ever had voted for Trump, for example, oh, here's a couple who would never invite me to dinner. Like, even if I worked with them, even if we were friends, I don't think I would ever be invited to their house. And so I said to myself, huh, I feel like that was personal. Like, even though it was about Trump, I don't know that it really is. Again, there's no logic to this. I'm just telling you how it felt. So that was my just feeling now. So I did this post about it on Axe, and I went to check the traffic on it today because it keeps popping up. It had 6.4 million views. Now, for context, I rarely get that many views on any kind of a post. That's a monster kind of view, which would suggest that other people felt it the same way I did, that it was more about his supporters, maybe than him, or at least that it was equally about them. So we'll see if that has any impact on his career. Probably not, because he's so popular, but it was interesting that so many people might have had the same feeling. That's just a guess. Well, there's an update on my experience trying to create an app called a GPT with AI. I'll say again, the interface for creating the app, you just talk to it and you tell it what you want it to do. It's the most wildly awesome experience if you've ever programmed anything. So in my younger days, I did a lot of programming, wrote a lot of code. Many of you don't know that, and I actually loved it. Actually, if cartooning hadn't worked out, I would have loved being a programmer because the time went really quick. It was very engaging. I would be completely just sucked into the world of the program. It was like living inside a pinball machine. That's how I described it. I loved it. But this new experience of just talking an app into existence is, like, really actually thrilling. I don't know if I can quite express the feeling of talking an app into existence. It's wild because you watch it happen while you're talking. However, I had experienced this, some other people said they had, which is you will upload some information to the. To the AI, in this case the Chat GPT engine, and it will tell you it sees it and you can ask questions about it. Yes, it sees every part of it. It can tell you what's in it, so you know that it can see it. But that's the part you're talking to, not the app. So you say, okay, now you can see it. Make sure. Make sure your app can see it all the time. Whenever I ask a question, it says, totally gotcha. I'm definitely going to use this information and give it to you. When you ask a question, then you use the app that it created. Can you find this there? And it will say, no, I don't have that data. The part that makes the app says it totally has the data and the app can use it. Then you use it. It says, no, no, I have access to it. But here's the wild part. You can actually negotiate with the app. So I get angry at the app and I say, why do you say you can't see it when I know you can like talking to it like a human? And again, this isn't the build the app part, which actually is side by side on the screen. This is the app itself. So I get into it with the app and it starts giving me up the information. I actually had to cajole it to tell me information, and until I cajoled, was going to lie to me and say it didn't have it. Now, at first I thought it was like a bug, but once I realized that it does have the information and it knows it has the information, and yet it tells me it doesn't. I think it's lying to me. And so I. I wonder, could you ever build an app that you could depend on the answer? When I built an app that gave me two different answers on something that's purely objective, does this information exist in your database? It would say no, unless you asked it just right. You actually had to challenge it and tell it that you knew it had it, and then it would give it to you. Crazy. I don't know what this implies for building these GPT apps, but it's a wild experience. I recommend it, by the way, if you have any interest in this field. It's just, you're seeing the future. It's easy to imagine that that's a Bug that will get fixed because it's very specific. It's acting like it doesn't see the data. That feels quite fixable. Other people are having the same experience apparently, but wow. Anyway, I'd like to test my BS detector. You remember I told you there's a story that allegedly an Arabic version of Mein Kampf was found in a Palestinian child's bedroom? Now, do you remember what I said about that? That's a little bit too on the nose. That doesn't feel real. That was my take on it today. Glenn Greenwald was calling it out as coming from a source, which is a narrative own wild propaganda site. So it did not come from a real source. It came from a source that is well known for simply making shit up. So I think my BS detector was accurate in this case. Not 100% sure, but the source was so wildly ridiculous. It's probably bs. Tim Scott has dropped down of the race for president. Now, some of you are going to say, tim Scott, who's he? I didn't know he was in the race. Well, that's probably why you have to drop out, because he didn't really make an impression. In the end, he turned into an npc. Because the NPC part was actually impressive for a while, because in the early days, he would start out with his inspirational story about how anybody could make it in America. You know, like a real classic, classic American success story kind of thing. And to many Republicans, he looked like the antidote to the racial wokeness. It's like, oh, yeah, that's it. You did all the right things and then you got a good outcome. And indeed, we see over and over again that pretty much everybody who does all the right things gets a pretty good outcome. So it was a great story, but turned out he didn't have much else. I mean, he had policies, but they didn't stand out as, oh, Tim Scott's got this wild policy. We better talk about him. His policies were also generically Republican, that in the end, all he had was his story. And then it became, I hate to say it, but it started to get pathetic that the best he could do is go back to the story. It's a good story, a great story, really a great American story, but didn't have enough. Just didn't have the juice. So I think he made the right choice to get out. Who's getting in? So you remember the Qanon shaman, Jacob Chansley, who wore the bison hat and got arrested and he was in jail for a long time for January 6th. He is going to run for Congress as a Libertarian in Arizona. Hello. Now, if he's a Libertarian, that means he's running against a Republican, right? As well as a Democrat? I assume so. I don't, you know, I don't know what his odds are, but he is the Nelson Mandela of our time. I'm just saying that so people can get mad. That was intentionally stated to make you angry. What? There's no way you can compare him to Nelson Mandela. I know, that's why it's funny. He's a poor man's Nelson Mandela. But I do like the idea of if you get locked up for reasons which the public seems to think are inadequate, that you can use that to launch a campaign. Honestly, I would vote for him. Like, not a joke. If I were in Arizona, I'd probably vote for him over a Republican, honestly, because I didn't see any Republicans get anybody out of jail. Did you? Did you see the Republicans fighting very hard to get January 6th out of jail? Fuck him. If I were him, I'd say, fuck him. I'm going to run as a Libertarian, and I would vote for him because I don't know what his qualities are for the job. But it's sort of a statement, right? If you're going to lock somebody up, you better get it right. You know, it's sort of one of those, if you come for the king, he's not exactly the king, but if you come for him and you miss, you might get yourself new congressperson. So I guess I love the justice and just, I don't know, every part of that story I like is just. It's kind of classically, wonderfully American. So I guess that's what I like about it. The Wall Street Journal has this big article about black voters, you know, moving a little bit more toward Trump. But just hold this in your mind. It's the Wall Street Journal. Okay? Hold that in your mind first. So it's one of the most, you know, capable, trusted news publications. Keep in mind that it's 2023, and in 2023, the Wall Street Journal has an article which makes the claim that the fine people hoax was not a hoax. I mean, they don't say that. They just refer to the president calling people on both sides of fine people like it was a fact in the Wall Street Journal, in a major article, feature article in 2023 in the Wall Street Journal. Now, this was. Katharine Lucey wrote this. And so I was so curious how you could be so either wrong or unethical. I didn't know what was going on. So I checked her background. She used to work for the AP during the 2016 election. If you work for the AP during the 2016 election, you were brainwashed into thinking that the Fine People hoax wasn't a hoax. Because I think the AP reported that it was real. And then she goes to the Washington. I'm sorry, she goes to the Wall Street Journal, writes a feature article. And the editors of the Wall Street Journal don't catch that. It was a pretty important part of the story. I mean, it was important context of the larger story. What's going on here? Because that's not an opinion. That's a well established fact that it didn't happen in 2017. You could be maybe excused for not knowing that the fake news was fake, but it's 2013. You're telling me that nobody who read this article before it got published was aware that they were perpetrating one of the biggest lies of American politics? Wall Street Journal doesn't know that. Really? What do you think is going on? I actually don't know. Do you think that both the writer and whoever edited it couldn't catch it? And do you think that after it was published they didn't get enough pushback to immediately correct it? I'm actually puzzled. Here's it. I'd like to challenge you with this challenge. Can you find me if the Wall Street Journal has ever reported factually that define people hoax was a hoax? Because I'll bet they have. I feel like I have a memory that the Wall Street Journal is one of the few that correctly said that didn't happen. So I'm wondering if their reporting is now two opposites. Is that what happened? Whereas the Wall Street Journal always imagined that it happened? Have they always reported it wrong? I'd love to know what's going on there. Anyway, here's a little test for your relatives. For Thanksgiving before the holidays, I like to give you something to say to your relatives that or on the left that will get them all worked up just to ruin all of your family relations. For fun, here's the test for cognitive distance. You want to ask if they agree with the following logic, so you tell them it's a logic question. Do you agree with the following logic that Attorney General Bill Barr and other advisors told Trump the 2020 election was fair and therefore Trump knew the election was not rigged? So ask them if they agree with that. If they agree with that, that's cognitive dissonance. Now some of you are saying, but why is it why is that cognitive dissonance, if you're saying that you're having cognitive dissonance? Because everybody who doesn't have cognitive dissonance knows immediately what's wrong with it. And here's the important part. It's not because some people are good at logic and some people are not. This is something everybody knows. Let me give you an example. If you can't find your phone and the only place you look is in your bedroom, can you conclude that no phone exists? Everybody knows that. That would not be logical. There's nobody who needs a logic lesson to know that if the only place you looked and you didn't find it, you could not conclude that it does not exist anywhere else on earth. We all know that. Now, there's a special case where, if I ask you, is there milk in the refrigerator and you looked and there was one container and you look and it's empty. And then you look really carefully in the rest of the refrigerator and there's no other milk. Yes. In that very weird, specific case, you can know there's no milk in the refrigerator. That's a very special case. But an election with 50 different states and however many precincts, hundreds, thousands, I don't even know who could possibly know that all of the code of all the, the election machines, every person who could have done something, didn't. It's not knowable, and everybody knows that. But you will get Democrats to act like they don't know it. That's cognitive dissonance. So the pretending you don't understand. The point is that now if instead of addressing this, you know, the moment you say, okay, that's cognitive dissonance, they say, and you've all heard it, the courts found nothing wrong with the election. That's exactly the same point. The courts don't check everything. And the people who took things to the court also can't check everything. So what the court saw was this tiny little sliver of a grain of sand on the beach. That's all they saw. So if they saw one grain of sand on the beach, can they conclude anything about all beaches in the world? Probably not. So you will find out that after you point out that somebody's in cognitive dissonance for believing they know something doesn't exist because they didn't look for it very well, they will get angry. And then what do they do? First they get angry. What's the next thing that happens? They changed the subject. But, but, but Trump did something else bad find people hoax. But, but, but he said drink Bleach, the drinking bleach hoax. Right. It. And it will always go that way or it will turn into name calling. I've experienced this. Well, I guess you get your news from QAnon and I'll say this has nothing to do with QAnon. And also I was debunking QAnon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you get your all your news from Fox News. To which I say, no, I don't. I consciously and publicly look at all the news sources left and right and I criticize them all. Yeah, but Trump critic, Trump said that a guy with a disability in his arm, he mocked him in public. No, he didn't. Look at the compilation clips that the right never sees where he's been using the same gesture for ordinary everyday people with no disabilities forever, which they have never seen. Anyways, that's your fun for Thanksgiving. Washington, D.C. is having trouble getting enough social workers and they've got some kind of a diversity problem here because I guess there's some kind of test you can take to qualify as a social worker. And 76% of white test takers passed, but only 33% of black test takers did. And weirdly, Asian American test takers were in between, which you don't normally see in these objective tests. But the belief is that what's happening here is that it's letting too many white people get into the jobs. And this what they say, de diversifying the field. In other words, it's a field they want, like everything else, to be diversified. But when you have a test that white people are passing at a three times or more, the level of black people, you're working, you're going in the opposite direction. And now you might ask yourself, and then the claim is that the test itself is racially biased. So they're not saying that the black applicants have less qualifications. They're saying that it's a test that if you gave it to any white person, any black person, on average, not any person, but on average, there would be a racial bias built into the questions so massive that has like a tripling effect of who passes and who fails. I mean, really big effect. So what's your first question? What's your first question? Can you give me an example of one of those questions? Right. Well, it turns out that they're private and it makes sense because it's a test. You can't give people the questions because then they know the answers before they took the test. So they can't tell you the questions. They can only tell you that They've secretly seen the questions and they think that they might be biased. Do you buy that? Is that a strong argument? The things we can't show you are biased. Well, remember there used to be the same argument about the SATs. Do you remember that years ago people said the SATs, the questions are biased? And I remember saying the same thing. Can you give me an example of a biased math question or a biased any other kind of question? And they actually had an example that persuaded me. Now, I don't know how many of these there are, but I'm going to give you the same example. And I remember hearing it and thinking, I'll be damned. They do actually have an example that's completely racially biased. Here's the example I heard. Now, I'm not going to claim that from this one example you can say much, but what if there are more examples? I was surprised there was even one example. And I'm going to give it to you. But what if there are more? Here's the example. The question was something like match this word to the one that goes with it. And the word was cup. And the options were table, saucer and then some third one like plate. The white applicants or the white test takers were more likely to say cup and saucer because they're literally a pair, cup and saucer. But if you were from a low income house, what are the odds you'd ever seen a saucer? So it turns out that a lot of the low income people didn't even know what a fucking saucer was. Is that their fault? Is there something wrong with them that they'd never heard of a saucer? No, actually you would need to be at a certain economic level before you'd ever seen one. You'd never seen one. So it's not even a word in your vocabulary. And I thought to myself, that's actually a good point. Do you agree with that one? Do you agree with that one point? Well, here is what I would say. What did the poor white people do? Did the poor white people say table? So I don't know the answer to that question. But in both cases I was surprised that there could be a question that might, that might actually have some racial bias to it. That was a better example than I was expecting. So I'm not going to say because I don't know that this test is unbiased and there's something wrong with the test takers. I don't know that. But we got questions. We got questions. All right, here's some. Maybe Good news. But this is good news I've been reading about for, I don't know, my entire life, and it's never been true yet. So here's the thing. That's never been true even once, but it gets reported once a month, forever. There's a gigantic breakthrough in cancer treatment. Now, I get the cancer people have actually made amazing strides in a number of different cancers. So there's been quite a bit of progress. But the major breakthrough, the one that gets all the cancers. Yeah, we're always hearing that that's a week away. Never is. No, no. But this one is interesting. More interesting than most. So scientists at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer center in Sacramento, they think they found this thing called the CD95 receptor that can program a cancer cell to die. In other words, there might be a common element to all cancers. That's a kill switch. Now, all the other treatments have not looked for a kill switch. They've looked for a weakness. I mean, this is my non scientist explanation. They've looked for weaknesses they could exploit, but they never found a kill switch. Like if you just tweak this thing, boom, just turns off. Now they don't have any, apparently they don't have any treatments that will turn it off, but. But they think that's potentially possible. Now, the reason I'm telling you this story at all, because it falls into the category of things that they get real excited about because it cured a mouse and then it just doesn't work in a person. I mean, you've seen that a billion times, which is typical. Most of the mouse studies do not actually translate into humans. But it's better than not doing a mouse study. If it fails in the mouse study, you're probably done. But the humans just don't work like mice enough to think it's going to work because it worked in a mouse. But here's my question. If you were to look at, let's say, the machinery of cancer, if you treat the cancer cell like it's a really complicated machine, if you're a human being and you're trying to figure out the machine, how many decades did it take us to find that there's this CD95 receptor? Like it took forever and it might have even been an accident. I don't know, maybe they just stumbled on it. But how many complications are there in a cell, a cancer cell, if you imagine it like a machine? Because it is kind of a biological machine with parts, it may be too complicated that any human could even know how to get their head around it. But what about AI? Do you think AI could look at a bunch of cancer cells in a bunch of different situations and then use its advanced pattern recognition and maybe the visual kind, as opposed to the word kind, could it determine the mechanism that makes the machine work simply by seeing lots of examples of a cancer cell working? So you put it in lots of different situations and watch how it works. You see what changes and maybe you look for a pattern, I don't know. But I wonder if pattern recognition could get you to understanding the machinery of a cell if you could see enough parts of it working. Too complicated for a human, but too complicated for, I don't know, a Quantum computer with A.I. i don't know. So just something to think about. All right, how about that 2024 election? So Rasmussen did a poll says 53% of likely voters think the economy has gotten worse under Biden. Well, 30% say the economy has gotten better. How in the world can you get reelected if more than half of the people think the economy got worse under you? Now, of course, everything's unfair because the pandemic just changed all the economics of things. So you can't really give him credit for the increase in employment because that was going to happen naturally. You can't really fault him for the economy not being as good as it was before the pandemic. There are pretty good reasons for that. But in terms of how people react and vote, how in the world can he get elected when more than half of the country thinks he made the economy worse or he didn't make it better? Well, yeah, I'd be worried about those, worried about election integrity. But related to this and also Rasmussen, if you don't follow the Rasmussen account, they're very active in running down all the various allegations about 2020 and what evidence there is that has not been debunked. And it is a whole different world. When you look at their claims, which, by the way, are always backed with documents, everything Rasmussens has said about the election, they print the document, they point to the paragraph that matters. To their point, you can see yourself. So there, there are still a bunch of things going on. I'm kind of lost in it. But I'll tell you this, this world of we almost have the Kraken is completely different from the other world. In the other world that everything's been debunked and it's just done. Do you know the story about the. I've told this a bunch of times. There's an allegation that there's a locked closet with 150,000 ballots that are fake ballots and that the courts wouldn't open the thing. But it went to a higher court and they said, yes, you got to open it up. But the lower court is dawdling. But if they could open up that door, you could see that the ballots were or were not fake. But then I read the Atlanta Constitution, it says, oh, that's an old claim. And they've already looked at all the ballots and the ballots were fine. Those two things can't be the same. They've either looked at all these question of ballots and found no problem, which is in the newspaper, or the court is doing something that doesn't make any sense, which is trying to look for those same ballots that have already been checked in a room. Is it exactly 150,000 in both cases? But it's two different cases. I don't understand what's going on. I cannot figure out how to combine those two realities even by explaining that one has the wrong information and one has the right information. They are just so different worlds right now. And I don't know what to make of it. So I'll tell you my general advice. For every specific claim, the odds of it being true are vanishingly small. But there's a lot of activity going on. The odds of all of it being untrue. Well, here I would go back to my general statement that every one of our American institutions has shown itself to be corrupt just recently. It's not even historical. But in the last just few years, you found everything from the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, the fda, the cdc, the World Health Organization, if you go outside of America, am I right? We found everything from science to Congress. Every bit of it is corrupt in really, really substantial ways. So what are the odds that the elections in all 50 states were pristine? Close to zero. Now, that doesn't mean that there was enough fraud to change the result. I have no information about that to support that theory, but there's a lot going on there in a sketchy domain. So I'm going to say the claims are still alive, but I could not put any kind of likelihood on them based on the facts. I will default to my three act play model of prediction. And the third act model says that even though the evidence is unclear, that reality is going to start solidifying toward finding a Kraken right before the election. And it turns out that at least one of these cases, I think the Georgia one, something substantial might be decided in the world of the 2020 election before Trump has his trial about whether his claims about the election, he knew they were fake. So the timing is now, as I predicted, the timing is now lined up correctly that we'll know something about the election of 2020. It may be perfectly fine. We might find that out, but the timing is lined up so we find that out before Trump is called into account for anything he did because of his belief that there was fraud. It's looking too perfect at the moment. Aaron says to me, yeah, you're too smart for a QAnon, but you'd readily vote for the LARP Q Shaman in Arizona peasants we live in. Yes, I would. Was there a point you had to make? I see the anger and the sarcasm, but I don't see the point. You're just saying what I said, that I would vote for him, and I don't believe QAnon. Is there a problem with that? Is there some conflict with that? I didn't say that he'd be a great congressperson. Did you hear something I didn't say? I didn't say that he would do policies that I love. I never said that. Yeah, drunk in the morning, I think. All right. Also, in the erasmusen universe, there are some Wisconsin election machines and there's a document that shows a claim that somebody was going to make sure that they kept the important ones connected to the Internet with a secret connection. Now, that one actually looks too on the nose for me, that it's in writing, that looks like a real document, and that somebody was going to keep secret Internet connections to some machines. That's just too on the nose. If I had to guess, and it would only be a guess, it might be true that there was really a techie who said, we'll keep these important ones connected to the Internet. But that doesn't mean that they connected them to the Internet to cheat. It could be they connected to them to the Internet for some kind of test that was temporary. I don't know. I don't know. So I don't know. I don't even know how to score this one for its likelihood. There's just so much going on in this election domain. But again, remember, at least 90% of everything you hear about these elections will be debunked. You can guarantee that even if there's anything true, most will be bs. All right, Greta Thunberg. So you all know her famous climate science advocate was at an event and another climate protester, who you would think would be on her side, came on stage and took the mic away from her because she kept talking about Gaza. And he was like, we're here to talk about climate. This is not for you to talk about Gaza. So that was fun. So watching the climate people hate on each other. Cornel west making news. So despite the fact that Cornel west says directly that he loves all of his Jewish brothers and sisters, he still calls the situation over there an occupation. Here's what I call word thinking. Oh, wow. So word thinking thinks you can win the argument if you get people to agree with your word. So that's what this is. So Cornel west is not engaged in anything like reason or debate. He's trying to win by getting you to think that his use of a word is the way you should use it too. So he says that Israel is. There's an occupation. What does that mean? Is Gaza occupied? Well, at the moment it is, but was Gaza occupied when Israel pulled out? Does he mean that? And what does occupied mean? If you have a society in which some people like how it's going and some don't, it's like everybody's occupied. Right. So that word occupation is doing way too much lifting. And he's getting all the pushback you would imagine. So, yeah, a lot of pushback on that. Now, he also uses apartheid. So those. Those would be the two most say disputed words in this situation. But the biggest problem he makes is trying to conflate all this stuff. I'm going to say it again. I judged the October 7 event like it was the beginning of history. It wasn't. And things that happened before matter, but not to this, not to this. The actual attack on October 7th requires a strong response that has nothing to do with anything that ever came before. So I refuse to act like that the history had anything to do with anything. And I ask you this question. Given that the Palestinians have a tremendous amount of support, more support than you thought. Right. A lot of you were surprised. Wow. A lot of Palestinian support that you didn't know about. Now, given that they have so much support, which means that their public relations has been successful to some extent, don't you think they can use that level of support to really highlight the specific complaints that Cornel west would call occupation or apartheid, what would be an example? And if they could give an example, could they give a specific solution? So one of the cases might be our water rights were taken over by Israeli farmers, something like that, Some ordinary thing like that. But what was the alternative? You need to know a little bit about that. Was there a legitimate claim Was the water not being used, but it could be used productively over here? Was there any court case about it? I mean, there's a lot to know before you can say if something's an occupation or simply the way things made sense at the time. So the dog not barking here, and I'll say it a million times, is if there's really a Palestinian set of complaints that would go under the title an occupation and an apartheid, give us examples, give us real examples. And then maybe it would look to us like, oh, wow, they actually have some real political complaints here. Maybe we should take this seriously. But if, on the back of Hamas's incredible terrorist attack, you're trying to push this vague notion that there's badness going on with no examples, it doesn't sound like anything useful, and it makes the entire Palestinian narrative look like it's not real. Would you agree that the fact that these allegedly legitimate complaints are completely ignored, while there seems to be a little bit too much, let's say, too much understanding of why something like the Hamas situation could occur, maybe that's giving that a little bit too much, too much credibility. Then I'll remind my audience that I'm not trying to be objective about the Israel and Gaza situation. So unlike some other topics where I'm really trying to make an effort to show both sides, before I give you an opinion, I'm not going to do that in this case. Not at all. I'm backing the team that wouldn't kill me if they had a chance. Is that fair? I'm telling you this directly. The Jews aren't going to kill me if they had an opportunity, right? But Hamas, they would kill me if they had an opportunity. So it's not like there's, you know, I don't recognize two sides. There's my side, people who would even protect me. You know, it would be easy to imagine, you know, the Jewish population being protective of American population if the opportunity came up easily. But I don't see Hamas protecting me if the opportunity came up. So I'm just taking. I'm not even looking at it politically. I'm just taking sides with the. With the group that's on my side. That's it. So don't ask me to consider the history. I don't care. I don't care about any of their history. I care about backing the side that's on my side. That's it. All right. Vivek has an interesting idea for firing government employees because he wants to reduce the number of employees. He said this is really clever. So listen to this. So Vivek says the number one obstacle to stop Trump from firing the bureaucrats, the civil service people, is because they had too much protection. So if you fired a bunch of civil servants, you could expect that some gigantic number of them would file suits and say, the only reason you got rid of me is because I'm black or gay or whatever it is. Then, even if it's not true, maybe in some cases it would be true, but in any case, you'd have too many lawsuits. So it just isn't practical. Here's Vivek's idea. Fire 50% of federal bureaucrats immediately using any neutral metric. For example, if your Social Security number ends in an odd number, you're fired because nobody can say that discrimination was involved because there's randomness to who has what Social Security numbers. Now, is that a good idea or a bad idea? I actually can't tell, but here's what I like about it. It's outside the box. He just picked. Well, he just picked up the box and just shook the piss out of it. How much do I like the box shakers? Oh, I like them. I like my box shakers. Yeah, shake that freaking box there, Vivek. Now, I put this in the category of brainstorming, and the concept I've taught you a million times, which is sometimes the bad idea will get you closer to the good idea because it shakes up the way you're thinking about it. This is such a radical departure from the way government has ever done anything that it suddenly opens up your brain. You go, wait a minute, wait a minute. If you can go that far out of the ordinary, maybe you could go out of the ordinary another way. Maybe I've got a better idea to go outside the ordinary. So this is yet another case of Vivek making the country a better place without yet being elected. Just the fact that he put this into the public mind is frickin awesome. You could end up not liking it. There might be an argument against it. I'm sure there is, but wow. I mean, he's making us smarter before he's elected. The fact that you now have this in your head as one of the things that you could offer as an idea in a similar situation. He just made you smarter. Like, who else does that? He kind of owns that thing where he's making things. Well, RFK Jr. Too, I would say. I think RFK Jr. Is a patriot for making the process better by participating. All right, I saw a D.C. drano post, Reuters is reporting that MasterCard is now linking their bonuses of their employees to ESG goals. Or as D.C. drano points out, they will get a bonus for avoiding hiring white men. Just think about that. Your employees will get a bonus for how effectively they discriminate against white men in the real world. That's like a real thing. They use different words to describe it, but there's no other way to see it. How's that still okay? Even BlackRock has backed off from pushing ESG because they said it was just poison. You know, too many people just see it as poison. And. And somebody's handling your money. The people you know, the people who help you handle your money, got this going on. Well, I'll tell you, I would never use MasterCard if I had an option. So I would just use something else. If you have an option. I wouldn't use it. All right. I saw a provocative post today. But it's provocative. It may be a slightly different way than you're going to take it. So there was some data that showed that since 1959. So this is basically my lifetime. I was born in 57. So basically my lifetime, this is a data that is alleged to be true, that the number of black people killed by white people during my lifetime murdered just murdered 53,000. In my lifetime, white people have murdered 53,000 fricking black people. Murdered them. At the same time, Black people killed 156,000 white people. Now, of course, your brain is saying, wait, there are far fewer black people in the world, but they killed three times as many white people as the reverse. So there's going to be a racial element to your thinking when I tell you this. But here's what you should be thinking. Like, just forget the race part for a minute. We Americans killed 200,000 of each other in my lifetime. Not accidentally, not accidentally in my lifetime, Americans killed 200 fucking thousand other Americans intentionally. That just, like, makes my brain explode. But I'm still in favor of second Amendment, just in case you wondered. So I guess that's the cost of. Of, you know, gun ownership. And if you ask me, is it worth it? Yes. Yes. It's not easy, but nothing is. All right. How would you like me to reprogram Alex Soros, who now runs the George Soros funding operation? How would you like me to reprogram him so that he no longer is destroying America? Would you like to give me that challenge? Anybody? Anybody? Challenge accepted. I've already done it. So this morning, Alex Soros did a post on X in which he said this. And so this was just nine hours, well, probably 10 hours ago. He said, for all those saying that they won't vote for Biden because of Gaza, please realize you will be complicit in Trump being able to do all of this. And then the. All of this is a link to his Trump's immigration proposals, which were quite Draconian. Rounding up 4 million people and putting them temporarily into some kind of camps until they can be repatriated to the original countries. Now, I'm not going to argue whether Trump had a good or bad plan at the moment. That's a separate conversation. I think he'll end up negotiating it down like he did the first time, you know, not deporting 25 million people like he said he would. But it's a good, you know, opening offer, probably works during the primaries, you know, makes them a little stronger, etc. So what do you think of that? Is that, is that a reasonable statement from Alexander Soros to say that if you won't vote for Biden because of Gaza, you should realize that what you're getting is these Trump immigration policies? Is that a good point? Well, kind of, yeah. I mean, at least the cause and effect is solid, right? If you get Trump, if the reason you voted for Trump was because of Gaza, you're going to get all the Trump stuff. That's true. However, Alex Soros did open up a persuasion channel, which I don't think he knew he was doing. And when he opened that channel, I said to myself, that's what I've been waiting for. That's exactly what I've been waiting for. I didn't know what I was waiting for, but I knew it needed to be an opening. And this opening just came. So I, quote, tweeted him or quote, posted him, and I said this to Alexander Soros. I said, you are the reason Trump will get elected, Alex. Open borders, crime in cities. That's what I hear from voters on the right. I doubt Trump would be competitive. I doubt Trump would be competitive in 2024 without you. The left and right live in different bubbles, so you might not be aware of this. And we're done. Now, this is why I told you if I had a million followers, I could change the world. Generally speaking, if you use the X platform at all, if somebody, quote, treat, quote, tweets you and that person has a million followers, you're going to notice it. Would you say that's fair? I mean, he's a political actor, probably follows social media, at least cursory but even if he doesn't follow it himself, it's the sort of thing somebody would mention to him right now when I said to Alex Soros, alex, you are specifically the reason Trump will be elected. Is that fair? I think it's fair because the things that are the tiebreakers with what would be a close election is crime in cities and immigration. And especially in the context of the Gaza situation, it gives you a higher level of concern about our own immigration situation. Now, if Alex Soros saw that, and I think there's a good chance he will, is he going to disagree with my point? Do you think that he doesn't know that what will elect Trump is the open borders that his family supports and funds, and then the prosecutors allowing too much crime in the cities? Do you think he doesn't know that? Well, if he didn't, and I think it's possible, because the bubbles are so extreme, he may have never talked to anybody on the right. You know, it's possible that in years he hasn't had a serious conversation with anybody who is capable of describing a reasonable Republican opinion about things. Probably. Probably never. But I kept my comment and look at the technique as well. So you see, in the first sentence, I use his first name. Now, often when people do that, they're doing it in sort of a mocking, aggressive way. So people will say to me, well, Scotty, here's what you forgot. You know, it's usually when you use somebody's first name and you don't know them, it's a little bit of a nephew, right? But I didn't use it that way. So I used it in the way that you would talk to a friend. So I said, you are the reason Trump will get elected, Alex. So I wanted to make sure that he didn't see this as an attack, because I don't mean it that way. I mean it as persuasion based on the real world and not in any way propaganda and not in any way an attack. I honestly believe this is my actual belief, with no ambiguity in it whatsoever, that there couldn't be any way that Alex Soros knows the impact of his actions. Would you agree with that? And I think that that's not his fault. I think that we all live in such a bubble that, you know, I don't know the impact of my actions either, because I only see what happens in my bubble. It's perfectly natural to not see the impact of your actions. That wouldn't be surprising at all, and especially if you're surrounded with people telling you everything. You do is awesome. All right, so, and then I make a claim, which is checkable, that the open borders and the crime in the cities are big levers for Trump. Now, that's checkable, wouldn't you say? There are polls and people tell you what they care about. You could look at a poll of Republican opinion and just see what's near the top, and then see if you were the cause of the things near the top. And the answer is yes, immigration and crime would be near the top, and they very much would be him. Now, I've said before that I would be surprised if George Soros, all of his views and opinions are completely adopted by his son. Now, while George Soros is alive, and presumably he could maybe still take power away from his son if he needed to. Probably they'll be in lockstep. But soon after the father passes, I would expect Alex Soros, because he's not the same person, to have some freedom that maybe he doesn't have at the moment. And I can't believe that he would look at the result of his actions up to this point with his father and say, that worked out if he had access to the same information that you and I have. So I think he's persuadable. I do not believe the. The Elon Musk idea that George Soros hates humanity and that that somehow explains what Alex Soros is doing. That doesn't make sense to me. Because if George Soros hates humanity because he went through the Holocaust, but his son was probably raised in a totally privileged situation, nowhere near anything like that, why would they both have the same opinion? I mean, even though it comes from your father, and that's very influential, there are more cases where people reject their father than accept it. So it doesn't quite make sense that the son is acting the way the father does. So my theory is that there's an information problem, there's just a gap in information, and that I filled it in for him and I kept it short and respectful. Right? I tried to keep it respectful. Well, let me ask you, did it come off as respectful? Because if it wasn't respectful, then it failed. I'll read it again. Is this respectful? You are the reason Trump will get reelected, Alex. Open borders, crime in cities. That's what I hear from voters on the right. I doubt Trump would be competitive in 2024 without you. The left and right live in different bubbles, so you might not be aware of this. Is that respectful? Because I do mean it to be respectful. I have no reason to believe that Alex Soros is a bad guy. I don't. The evidence suggests that the father is his own entity, and we don't know what will happen when his influence wanes. So, interestingly, one person, Alex Soros, has really the leverage to determine who the next president is and also to save the country. Alex Soros can save the country. That's not an exaggeration, is it? Imagine if that just one change, if he just said, okay, I'm going to have to prioritize the defense of innocent people. That's all it would take. Maybe we pushed too hard. We still want lots of immigration, but we don't want to do it this way. Gigantic. You have one person who absolutely has control over the outcome. And I would ask him be. Be a citizen of the world. Right? Just be a good citizen. Just. Just. Just take the time to see what the Republicans are thinking and saying. Just take the time. Just. Just open up your bubble a little bit. And I think everything works out if you just open up your bubble. Is that too optimistic? Sure, yeah. Yeah. One of the things I like to bring you is optimism. Is optimism always a good prediction? Hell, no. Optimism can be a pretty bad prediction a lot of times. But overall, I think we humans will figure stuff out. And I do think that Alex Soros is young enough and smart enough that if he can escape from his bubble, that the world would be immensely better. I mean, really big difference if he turned his power just a little bit. He could still have immigration, by the way, if what he wants is freer immigration. I actually like that a lot. I think the world would be a better place if you could just pick up and move anywhere there was a job as long as you were documented and legal and you obeyed the laws. I think we can make that work, actually. In fact, it would probably work in America better than it would work in other places, so long as we also had some filter for making sure we're getting the good immigrants, the ones who want to work and don't want to do crime. So there's a version of the Soros image of the world that actually does work for Republicans. I know it's hard to believe, but there is a version that works, and he could find it. If that's his mission, if he wants to do that. You're saying he's disqualified himself? Well, I would agree at the moment that his credibility is not where you'd like it to be. But remember, we do not see him as an independent actor yet. He might become one. That would be the optimism. But not yet. And it's not that unusual that people pivot from where their parents were. So, yeah, I do have some optimism about that. I absolutely do. All right, ladies and gentlemen, this is what I've got for you today on YouTube. Thanks for joining, and as always, you're awesome, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.