Episode 29 - Scott Clears Away the Fog of Fake News About Himself Using Nothing But Words and Coffee
Date: 2018-06-18 | Duration: 1:05:08
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Transcript
[0:05] [Music] Bum-bum-bum-bum-bum. Do you have your delicious cup of coffee? I sure hope you do. Come on in here. It’s time for the Simultaneous Sip.
A few days ago, I was actually thinking to myself, “Man, things got boring. Nothing’s happening.” And then I wake up yesterday morning and I see a text from somebody saying, “What do you think of that about Kanye?” I thought to myself at 5:30 in the morning, why would I be thinking about Kanye right now at 5:30 in the morning? Then I checked my Twitter feed and I saw that Kanye West had retweeted my video.
[1:06] Kanye West had retweeted my video in which I was talking about him and Candace Owens at nine separate times with nine different clips out of it. Of course, that made the world blow up because it looked like worlds were colliding. Dogs were marrying cats, it was raining and on fire at the same time, it was daytime and night simultaneously. People didn’t seem to be happy about the fact—I mean, think about what made people angry. I hate to put it in these terms, but you’re going to see that this is exactly what happened. There was lots of noise and lots of complaints, but it really came down to this: the reason people were really unhappy is that Kanye West and I would just agree on something. It feels racial. I don’t know if it is, but it just feels racial.
[2:07] The fact that we would both have just a reasonable, well-explained reason for believing that the past should not influence our decisions so much in the present is a perfectly reasonable thing to think. But somehow it’s not okay if Kanye has that very ordinary thought at the same time that I do. Somehow the world is not okay with that. As I predicted, the Night of the Long Knives would come out for me and the fake news stories would be rampant. I was right, of course.
The internet is now full of stories about me which are largely false. You may have seen BuzzFeed calling me a “far-right men’s rights advocate.” Neither of those are true; both are fake news. Mediaite, Spin, the A.V. Club—probably several other publications came after me. I don’t know if they just Googled the other publications, whoever went first, but they all had the same bad set of stories. One of them, this guy Caleb Ecarma at Mediaite, who Dave Rubin refers to as “an embarrassment to journalism”—I love Dave and he definitely captured it right. Caleb Ecarma, whose forever name is Embarrassment to Journalism, or ETJ—we could just call him ETJ from now on—he printed several specific criticisms of me.
[3:10] He challenged me on Twitter to deny that any of these were true. Twitter is not a really good platform for a long conversation, so I just said that I would take it to Periscope—or as I like to call it, the home-field advantage.
[4:12] When I talk about it there, there’s nobody interrupting me and I can give you the full explanation. I’m going to give you the full list of things about me that are alleged to be true from Caleb Ecarma and Mediaite. You can decide yourself if he’s an embarrassment to journalism by seeing my response to his criticisms. When I’m done, you’ll either say, “My God, Scott, you certainly are right, you’re an embarrassment to Periscope,” or I think you might say ETJ is an embarrassment to journalism.
Here’s the number one thing which he says as a criticism of me: number one, regularly appeared on the conspiracy site Infowars.
[5:15] Technically correct. I have appeared on Infowars several times. Also technically correct, but left out, is that my stated policy is to go on any platform. I’ve been on CNN a number of times. I’ve been on MSNBC. I’ve been on pretty much every liberal platform. I was booked on one this morning—I was supposed to be on Yahoo News, but they had a scheduling problem. Is it true that I’ve regularly appeared on the conspiracy site Infowars? “Conspiracy site” is his word; I’m not going to argue whether that’s correct, but I have appeared on Infowars. If you only knew that, it would sound like, “Well, there’s proof he’s a far-right guy.” But if you knew what I say publicly often, and I demonstrate as obviously as possible, I appear on
[6:15] any major platform. Why would I appear on Infowars unless I agree with every single thing they’ve ever said? Here’s why—and I know this is not obvious to Caleb Ecarma because he’s an embarrassment to journalism—they invite me on Infowars to give my opinion to their followers and to them. Infowars does not invite me on the show to tell me what they’re thinking; they bring me on to tell them what I’m thinking. To the extent that you think I’m a good influence, even if you thought Infowars was a horrible blight on humanity, wouldn’t you want them to be subject to better influences, such as myself, who describes
[7:17] himself as far-left? Does Infowars have other people on the show who describe themselves as far-left? I know that they might, but that would be exactly what you’d want to see. Wouldn’t Caleb want to see people from another opinion on Infowars?
Let me clarify what I mean when I say I’m left of Bernie. I would like to see universal healthcare; I think we can’t be a great country without it. I’d like to see free education and training for a lifetime. But I don’t think we can get there through taxes. Where I differ from Bernie and socialists is I don’t want to take it from the rich. I don’t want to tax. I think technology, better management, and being smarter can get us to those
[8:17] places, even if it takes a while. Those are the two examples where I’m far-left of Bernie, but without the impractical stuff. Some of you are saying “Libertarian,” but it is certainly not Libertarian to have the government helping us get to universal healthcare and free education and training. But that’s another topic. I’m just telling you where I stand on the spectrum.
Number two from Caleb Ecarma, the embarrassment to journalism: defended Holocaust deniers. He’s saying this is very clear criticism; he’s saying that I defended Holocaust deniers. Never. Not once. Nothing slightly like that. Never. Here is an actual journalist in public saying that I personally have
[9:17] “defended Holocaust deniers.” I’ve never done anything like that. In the article that he’s referring to, I say in clear language: “No serious person denies the Holocaust.” I can’t get more clear than that.
In that same article, I talked about—this was before I was using the word persuasion in a lot of my blogging, but this was related to the topic before I had branded it that way—I was questioning one very narrow thing, which is: how exact is the count of the number of people who died in the Holocaust? The point of it was, we act like it’s exact, but what are the odds that something that would be that hard to measure, you’d have a really good number for? But it doesn’t really matter, does it? When we talk about World War II itself, people say we don’t know how many people died in World War II. It might be somewhere between
[10:20] 50 and 60 million. Knowing that it’s somewhere in that range doesn’t make anybody a World War II denier because they don’t know the exact number. Somebody’s saying “please stop” because I think you know that it’s impossible to talk about this topic without sounding like a Holocaust denier. But I’ll say as clearly as possible: I’m not one. I would not support anybody who was one. It’s clearly a fact. But it is also a fact that when you see a large organization or group trying to get an exact count of something that is that hard to count, it’s probably an estimation, which doesn’t change anything.
Number three: my critic says that I believe the Seth Rich conspiracy. That’s a vague statement because what is the conspiracy? Is it a
[11:24] conspiracy? Let me tell you what I do believe, just to be clear on this. If you’re talking about the Seth Rich conspiracy, you’re talking about everything from: he took the data, gave it to WikiLeaks, and then Hillary Clinton put a hit on him and had him murdered. I do not believe Hillary Clinton put a hit on Seth Rich. I haven’t seen any evidence of that.
I do believe—here’s the part I do believe—that the two competing stories for what happened: one is the “Russia did it/Guccifer,” etc. explanation, and the other is the “Seth Rich had a thumb drive, got the data, and gave it to WikiLeaks” story that’s out there. What I believe is that one of those stories fits the facts which we have been given much better than the
[12:24] other. The “Russia did it” story unfortunately requires us to believe our intelligence agencies were unbiased, honest, and accurate, and they’re not really credible at the moment. The sources that say it was Guccifer and they did it are, by their nature, no longer credible. Now, that’s different from being wrong. They could be right, but they’re not credible because there are too many things in the news at the moment that would question their credibility. WikiLeaks, however, has a long record of being credible. You could hate them or love them, but at least they’ve been credible. Assange has hinted in a way that makes it clear he wants you to believe it—that Seth was a source for WikiLeaks. That doesn’t make it true.
[13:25] We can’t know what really happened, nor could we ever know. We can only know what other people told us happened, and we have questionable credibility in a lot of cases. If you compared Assange’s clear indication that Seth Rich was a source—and WikiLeaks has a long record of not being wrong—that supports one story, that it was Seth Rich. The other version is that Russia did it, and all the people involved with that are low credibility. We have two stories: one has tremendously low credibility, one has so far A-plus credibility.
My position on Seth Rich is, at least on the narrow question of whether he was the source for the data, there is
[14:26] just a stronger case for Seth Rich being involved. As for the murder part, there’s no evidence that Hillary was behind the murder. The timing is questionable, but there are a lot of things that would be questionable timing if you looked at them from a distance. That doesn’t mean anything. Where my critic says “he believes the Seth Rich conspiracy,” that makes it sound like I’m buying all the parts of it. It also presumes the answer by calling it a conspiracy; you’ve dismissed it without regard to the evidence. I could have easily said, “Well, Caleb, are you buying the ‘Russia did it’ conspiracy?” If you label it a conspiracy in your statement, you’re assuming the answer there.
Number four: claimed Hillary was “likely to trigger a
[15:28] race war and cause the uptick in domestic racial violence to win the election.” I’ve talked about that at length and, of course, that’s true. But it’s also something I believe he would agree with if he were not dishonest. When Hillary Clinton started describing Trump as a racist, people believed it. When she took all of the confirmation bias—there’s the time he awkwardly said this, there’s the dog whistle that I can hear that you can’t, there’s the time he did something thirty years ago—when she put it all together, she created this ultra-scary vision of Trump being a dangerous racist, and it did cause an immense amount of racial unrest. I too have criticized candidate Trump and now President Trump for not handling race relations well, but let’s be honest:
[16:28] the challenge for him is much higher than for other people because the quality of the opposition was first-rate. I wrote in my book, Win Bigly, that when the Clinton team started using the word “dark”—which I believe came from a cognitive scientist who said “dark” is a great word because it captures all of these racist, dangerous things—Hillary was intentionally whipping up racial feelings. The natural risk of that is that the bad racial feeling was turned into violence, and I think we did see violence.
His criticism is that I made a prediction that is unambiguously true. Would he disagree that there have been more racial tensions lately? The part he would disagree with is that Hillary Clinton was behind them. This is what I call
[17:30] the “one-variable thinker.” Anybody who thinks that there’s only one variable behind anything that happens is not really a serious thinker. You need all the variables to happen for anything really important to happen. In this case, the variable was that President Trump had to handle race relations stuff not as well as he could, and that happened. But the second thing that had to happen is that somebody had to package that as, “My God, it’s the biggest problem in the world, he’s a huge racist, he’s going to do terrible things.” Hillary did the heavy lifting of packaging that as a major problem. What Trump did was make mistakes that allowed that to happen. But if Trump had simply done what Trump did and the news media—this is an important point—if the news media and the Clinton campaign had simply noted what the
[18:33] President said without comment—in other words, without adding the persuasion to it—the public would say, “Well, that sounded like a weird way to say that, that bothers me a little bit. I’ll think about something else.” What President Trump does in terms of the way he speaks about race might have bothered us a little bit if other people hadn’t told us how bothered we should be. The part that Caleb doesn’t understand is the effectiveness of the criticism. The critics are very effective and they have created a package that is quite persuasive. You don’t get “Oh my God, Trump’s a huge racist” just by what he’s doing; you need other people to package it, explain it, and put a bow on it. Without that stuff, you don’t get the racial unrest or the violence.
Then he said—here is another quote. Before I read this one, let me give you some context. There was a time early in my blogging career when I used to try to intentionally say things that were provocative and would get people really wound up. But I would say them in a way, if I crafted them right, that they would be really wound up about something they agreed with. It’s a hard thing to do. I was trying to say something that people would completely agree with—all the parts of it and even the larger thought—but even while they’re agreeing with it, they would get really mad because I thought that would be, frankly, entertaining. I didn’t know that it would haunt me forever. I’m going to classify this as a rookie mistake. Here’s how this is expressed years later by Caleb
[20:35] Ecarma again, the embarrassment to journalism, who says he’s quoting me. Let me give this to you without the controversial wording and see if you agree with the thoughts. Then I’ll tell you how I worded it and watch how you go from “I agreed with everything you just said” to “My God, you’re offensive.” Watch how I do this.
Here are the things he’s quoting. I’ll reword them into a way that I think you’ll agree with. Adults do not treat children the way they treat other adults. That’s not controversial, is it? The way you treat a six-year-old should be different than you would treat an adult. Okay, so that’s the first thing that he’s saying is horrible. The second thing he finds quite horrible—and I’ll
[21:37] tell you how these are related—I said that a normal, nice human being would not treat someone who had a serious mental problem the same as someone who didn’t. If somebody was suffering from a very major mental disability, you would not get in an argument with them, for example, because there’s nothing to be gained from that. You would agree with that, right? If you’re a nice, regular human being, you’re not going to get in an argument with somebody who is mentally incapable and you know it. There’s no debate there at all. The third thing I said is that men will hesitate to argue with women with the same enthusiasm that they would argue with other men. The
[22:39] thinking behind this is that men typically will argue with each other almost like a sport. You see this on Twitter every day. When men are debating men, we see it almost like a sport. Then people will join my team on Twitter and say, “Yeah, here comes one of my teammates to make a good point.” We tend to see that as almost a sport. However, when it goes across gender, sometimes it changes. My statement, which became the controversial part, is that men will hesitate to get in the same kind of an argument about anything substantive with women because the penalty is higher. Here’s the controversial statement: men on average believe that the penalty for
[23:42] arguing with a woman about anything important is higher than the penalty for arguing with another man. Probably all men would agree with that. It would be hard to find a man who would disagree with that. As a generality, men will pull their punches—let me erase “pull their punches” because I don’t want to make this sound like physical abuse, because that’s not the topic. Men, when they’re arguing with women, will hold back. If you talk to men and just ask them, they will agree. But the trick is, it probably has to be a man asking another man, because if a woman asks a man if he holds back when arguing
[24:43] with a woman, do you know what he’s going to say? Whatever you want. He’s probably not going to give an honest answer. So those are three things I said which I believe everyone would agree with: you don’t talk to a child the way you talk to an adult; you don’t deal with someone who has a severe mental handicap the way you would deal with somebody else; and men are hesitant to argue with full force against women because there’s a bigger penalty they feel.
Those things you don’t disagree with. But here’s the background: I tried to say things back then because I thought it was entertaining to say things that people would agree with but say it in a way that would make them angry at the same time. I’m going to take those three things you just agreed with and I’m going to put them in the offensive form.
[25:44] I took those three things I just said—how men treat children, the mentally handicapped, and women—and then I provocatively put them in the same sentence to make everybody angry. I said that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently: it’s just easier this way for everyone. Think about how offensive that is. People take offensiveness and they say, “Okay, if you’re offensive, then you’re also a misogynist, you’re also a bigot.” Those are really different things. I’m definitely offensive, but in this case, I was offensive intentionally and I thought it was obvious why. When I wrote it, I thought everybody would know that I’m putting these three things that don’t belong together in the same sentence because when you read it, it’s going to be really
[26:46] offensive, but you won’t disagree with any of it. And you didn’t, because I just went through it; you agreed with all the points. It’s just that when you put it together, it makes you think that somehow I’ve conflated children, handicapped people, and women, even though I clearly didn’t. This was Caleb’s other point. His question was, how do you possibly defend these things? And of course, that’s what I just did.
Having heard these, let’s run through the list: Number one: I regularly appear on Infowars. True, but out of context. I regularly appear on all the shows—CNN, etc.—because I like talking to audiences, especially those that don’t agree with me. So the first one is fake news by leaving out the context. Second one: defended Holocaust deniers. Just 100% false. That was just fake news.
[27:47] The first two are just fake news. Number three: believes in the Seth Rich conspiracy. Not true, because the Seth Rich conspiracy implies a clear implication all the way from Hillary Clinton ordered a hit, etc. Whereas I have a nuanced feeling that I don’t know anything about what Hillary may or may not have done—there’s no evidence I’ve seen that would suggest she ordered a hit—but there are two competing thoughts. Number four: claimed Hillary was likely to trigger a race war and caused an uptick in domestic racial violence. We all witnessed that. That was a correct prediction. I don’t even know why it’s on the list of criticisms when it’s objectively, clearly true. And then the last one I just went through, where I was intentionally being
[28:47] offensive. I thought people would realize it was supposed to be funny. But here’s the funny part: the thing that offended people about my statement that men hold back when they argue with women is that I said the pushback would be too violent—there would be too much of a cost to argue with women. And what happened when I said that? In pushing back, Caleb just made my point. My point is you can’t talk about this sort of thing without getting in too much trouble. Do you know what would have happened if I had said this sort of thing about men? My point was that you can argue with men with low risk, but arguing with women is a higher risk. Do you know what would have happened if I’d said the same offensive things about men? You don’t have to wonder, because the same blog post had offensive things
[29:51] about men in it. Why did he pull those out? It was actually an offensive post about men—that was the main context of the post. He pulled out the one thing that was offensive to someone else. He proved my point anyway.
I hope this is not too self-serving. I called my shots ahead of this. I told you yesterday that people would be coming after me with lots of made-up stories and that they would be remarkable and they might even sound real when you heard them. Don’t you think that anybody who read these points out of context without my explanation would believe them? You don’t have to wonder about it because every major publication except Billboard—I think Billboard is the only one who got the facts right—but that would make something like seven out of
[30:52] eight major publications got everything about me wrong. They called me a “men’s rights activist” because I once made fun of men’s rights activists. That’s it. I once made fun of them, and so therefore I am one. And they call me “far-right” when I’m closer to far-left. If you’re wondering how prevalent fake news is, look no further than this example where you just saw a whole page of it just about me right in front of you. I told you it was going to happen, and then it happened, and it’s pretty easy to demonstrate that it’s fake.
“They are afraid of you, Scott.” Well, are they afraid of me? This latest blow-up, I don’t think was
[31:53] about me. Here’s what I think it was: I think it was about Kanye, and I think it was about people telling him he couldn’t leave his “thought bucket.” The problem with telling Kanye he can’t leave his thought bucket is that his entire message is, “Hey, you people, you’re stuck in a thought bucket.” Every time they criticize Kanye for leaving his thought bucket, they are validating his entire point and they’re bringing him one step closer to the presidency whether they like it or not.
Let me give you some persuasion advice. It’s become very popular for people on the right to say that the Democrats are doing some kind of—what do they call it? There are a few phrases they use—but keeping the black voters on
[32:53] the “Democratic plantation.” I find those—the plantation—I would abandon that as a phrase that you want to use if you’re trying to be persuasive. I think it’s working against you. Here’s what you don’t want to say if the other side already thinks you’re a bunch of racists: plantation. If you believe that people are rational, then your analogy about how it’s analogous to slavery—but it’s a slavery of the mind—I get the concept, and the analogy is not that bad. But here’s the problem: people are not smart. They don’t follow logic exactly. We’re not a logical species. All of us—not just
[33:54] other people, all of us. We’re not rational. So we don’t follow that concept very well. We get it, but it’s not persuasive. Analogies are not persuasive. But association is persuasive. People didn’t like the association of Kanye agreeing with Candace Owens, agreeing with conservatives, etc. It was an association problem. When the people on the right say, “Hey, you Democrats, you’re trying to keep African Americans on the plantation,” what you’ve really done is associated yourself with slavery. You’ve worsened your own reputation and you have not influenced the other side. Every time somebody on the right uses that analogy of the plantation or slavery, you are making
[34:57] things not just a little worse, but a lot worse. In terms of persuasion mistakes, that would be close to a 10 out of 10. You want to leave that language behind. Look at the language that Kanye uses for a good example: “break free of the mental prison.” Even “prison” made me a little uncomfortable because there’s a racial disparity in prisons, so I didn’t like that, but it’s so visual I was willing to put up with it.
Somebody asked, “What about if you are black, can you talk about the plantation?” You can with less risk than if somebody on the right uses the same words. That’s true. I would still not do it
[35:58] because it’s about the past. We just need to release on the analogies. Just release on the past. Let’s just deal with what we have right now, and what we have right now gives us a set of opportunities and a set of problems. Why can’t we deal with them? Why do we even need to talk about the past?
Let me tell you the other dumbest thing that the right does. I don’t think there’s anything that makes me more angry at the people on the right than what I’m going to say right now, because it’s just such a bad way to think about the world. Somebody will say, “Hey, those KKK people are all Trump supporters.” You saw the KKK had all of 27 people gathered and, of course, it was national news. Part of
[37:01] the news was Howard Dean saying, “These are Trump supporters, Trump’s base.” People on the right like to respond to that by showing the history that the KKK is really a Democratic invention—that if you go back far enough in time, the KKK was more Democrats. Whether or not that’s true—I think it is true—it doesn’t freaking matter. It just doesn’t matter. It’s just the past. Stop arguing about the past because if you go back far enough, there was a caveman who hit another caveman on the head with a stick. It doesn’t freaking matter. It’s not here. Those Democrats who were in the KKK? All dead. Well, maybe not all of them. It just doesn’t matter. It’s just the past. If it’s true that there are some KKK here today marching, well
[38:04] that matters. It doesn’t matter much because there were 27 of them in a country of 300 million. You just gotta let go of the past.
How do you respond to this lie? It’s not a lie; it’s literally true that there are several categories of people who would be called racists, and they are more likely to be Republicans. Let me explain the complicated reason why. Some people like immigration toughness for economic reasons; some of them like it because it means fewer brown people. It’s not hard to understand that the racists have a preference. Why wouldn’t racists have preferences? They were either going to like the Democrats or the Republicans. They were
[39:04] going to like one or the other. It just doesn’t matter why they like it. They like it for a different reason. Absurd oversimplification. It also doesn’t matter that other people agree with you for different reasons. That’s not an important fact. If I think the world is round because I learned it in school and you think the world is round because you figured it out because you sailed a ship and the horizon disappeared, it doesn’t matter. We got to the same place; we can both fly a plane around the world. That was the worst analogy ever—a good example of why you shouldn’t use analogies. “Immigrants are not just brown.” Somebody says that is true. What are all the
[40:11] racist Republicans hiding? I don’t understand the question. And by the way, is it my imagination, or did the great alleged racist Republicans look at Kanye West and say, “Maybe he’s there”? Is there any racist Republican who doesn’t love what Candace Owens is saying? I think Candace and Kanye both put the lie to the racial framing that all Republicans are racist because look how easy it was—look how amazingly easy it was for Republicans to embrace the ideas of both of these people without embracing everything that they were about. Nobody said we love everything that Kanye’s ever done in all of his personal life. Republicans simply
[41:11] said, “I like this idea. I like this thing he said.” Why can’t you like the good stuff?
Let me ask you this: if an African American ran for president on the Republican side—let’s say after Trump’s second term—if an African American Republican got into the primaries, is there anybody here—because most of you are conservatives, probably 95% watching this—is there anybody watching this who would not vote for a qualified African American Republican candidate who had normal Republican views? You are
[42:13] anonymous. Is there anybody here who would fail to vote for them because they’re black? I think I’m seeing 100% agreement that the Republican Party would absolutely get behind an African American president. I believe that’s always been the case. How many hours have I spent interacting with the base? The most Republican of the Republican, the most conservative of the conservative—more Republican than conservative if you look at the people I’ve interacted with.
Here’s another little mind-blower for you: for about 48 hours, Republicans
[43:16] were going crazy talking about Kanye and about Candace. I never heard anybody make a racist remark about either one of them, did you? And I’m talking about Twitter. Twitter is the place where all racist remarks go to live. I didn’t hear a single Republican make a derogatory racial remark about either of those people. Why? Because they like their ideas. Boom. End of story. I think it broke some brains. It broke some brains that the Republican Party is far more idea-based than race-based. I think the people on the left have learned to see the world through the filter of gender and race, and it’s hard for them to
[44:17] imagine that Republicans—at least the majority, not counting the racist minority—the generic Republican is pretty idea-based, not race-based. People from the left were pretty angry that there could be any kind of a meeting of the minds on ideas. Tom Arnold… you saw some horrible things on the left, but I don’t think I saw one negative thing about Kanye’s ideas. There were people who said he’s not a serious politician, and I would agree with that. Yet he’s also young.
Here’s what I’d say about Kanye: if you say he’ll never
[45:21] be president because he doesn’t have the experience or the background or doesn’t know enough about politics, that’s probably all true. If you say he can’t acquire that stuff in eight years, you are really wrong. In eight years, he could be the most qualified person in the pack if he wants to. He would just have to want to and focus on it.
Would you say it’s true that President Trump’s presidency makes a Kanye West presidency more likely? It does, doesn’t it? Don’t you think the fact that President Trump became president makes it far more likely that Kanye would be considered a serious candidate and that people would say, “Yeah, he could do a good job”? You have to see at least one non-politician get in there and
[46:24] do something that people liked.
Ben Shapiro is super skeptical of Kanye. Skepticism is exactly the right position. I make it a habit not to disagree with some specific people like Dershowitz or Ben Shapiro. Generally, my first reaction is: if I feel like I’m going to disagree, I immediately change my opinion to their opinion so I sound smarter. So you should be skeptical today that Kanye West could be president; that would be entirely appropriate.
[47:25] But if you think he can’t get to that place where he would be a valid candidate and make a difference, I say the evidence suggests otherwise. His mastery of the talent stack, his mastery of persuasion, his understanding of people, the way he’s tapped into the zeitgeist, the way he understands everything from product design to music writing, producing, the promotional part of it, the live events—every part of what Kanye has mastered is in the world of persuasion. Design is persuasion. The way he packages himself is all persuasion. It’s not an accident that we’re talking about him instead of someone else. That’s all persuasion. That level of talent is so broad and fits all the right types of persuasion. If you think he can’t get there if he wants it,
[48:28] you should not be skeptical about that. He can get there if he wants it. Would he win? Would he make a difference? Would he be a good president? We can’t know those things, but certainly he has the capability.
I need to start doing some podcasts with other people again. I was waiting for something to happen and I think it’s almost happened. Is anything else happening that’s important? Let’s talk about North Korea. I’ll give you a bonus North Korea thing. I’ve also told you that the most
[49:29] credible voice I hear talking about North Korea is Gordon Chang. Whenever he’s got an article or an interview, I go to it like a bullet because everything he says is reasonable and well-informed. What he was saying is that there’s a concern—and I don’t know what level of risk to put on that—that North Korea is only pretending to play nice with South Korea so that they can do something like a reunification which will end up with North Korea in charge of South Korea. Personally, I see that risk as close to zero. There’s nothing that is zero, but that’s pretty close to zero. There are roughly twice as many South Koreans as North Koreans and any kind of reunification is going to be a democratically inspired system.
[50:31] South Korea is not going to vote North Korea into power when they have literally double the number of citizens. The South Koreans also have all of the money. In any kind of a popularity contest, they’re going to have persuasion. Once they open up communication and people in the North get to have news for the first time, there really isn’t any chance that Kim Jong Un is going to be the leader of a unified North Korea. I don’t want to say there’s zero chance, but if that’s what we’re worrying about, that’s a pretty good place to be. Imagine we went from worrying that North Korea could launch a nuclear weapon at me in California and blow me up within days—that’s what
[51:31] we were worrying about a few months ago. Today, one of the things we’re worried about is that 51 million South Koreans would lose out to 24 million North Koreans in a democratic process that would take a long time to work out. I just don’t see that as a risk right now. I suppose it’s possible you could make some kind of accidental weird mistake crafting your constitution that gave the North way more power than it should have for the size of its citizenship. Maybe it would be something dumb like giving one vote—well, if they came up with something like an Electoral College that artificially gave North
[52:31] Korea as much power as South Korea, I suppose it could happen, but I don’t see them making that kind of a mistake. “They aren’t going to be united.” I am predicting that they will be united, but I have recommended what I call the “hundred-year plan” so that the current people will be dead before the hard decisions have to be made and society will have decades to just get used to it. But in the short term, they can have lots of communication and lots of cooperation.
“Iran says zero negotiations if we pull out.”
[53:32] Iran is talking tough. I’m going to have to confess that of all of the topics that are in the headlines, probably the one that I understand the least is the Iran nuclear deal. I feel like I need to bring myself up to speed on some of the key points to form an opinion, because I don’t yet have an opinion on whether the deal we have is a good one or a bad one. I read the criticisms and I understand that there are lots of smart people who say this deal is horrible, and I don’t discount that, but I also haven’t seen the reasons consolidated in a place where I can see the pro and the con. But I will tell you this: there’s almost no chance that we can’t improve on the deal. So if what Trump is saying is
[54:34] three-quarters of a deal isn’t good enough, and we should take it to something that really could last and make a difference, I would listen to that conversation. I’d be a bit curious, how many of you think the Iran deal is unambiguously bad? Give me your opinions. How many think the current Iran deal is so bad that we should walk away? I think all of you are going to say that. Now, I worry that what we’re seeing is just team sport, because I can’t believe that most of you understand the Iran deal well enough to have an informed opinion.
[55:35] Here’s a new question. Stop answering the question of whether you like the deal. Here’s the next question: do you feel that you personally understand the Iran deal, all of its ramifications, the ins and outs, well enough to have an informed opinion? Raise your hand if you have an informed opinion. There’s a little delay here. Somebody’s saying “nope, nope, nope.”
[56:40] A couple of yeses. You saw what happened here. When I said, “Do you think the Iran deal is a bad deal?” it was close to 100% agreement. When I asked the same crowd, “Do you think you understand the Iran deal enough to really know?” 75% of you said you don’t understand it. That’s a pretty good indication that people have lined up by team, meaning that—somebody just said, “I trust Trump and if he says it’s bad, then it’s bad.” That’s not unreasonable. If your opinion is that the people you trust to know what a good deal looks like say it’s not a good deal, that’s not unreasonable. But I was just curious how many of you felt you independently understood the situation well enough.
[57:42] I am influenced by the fact that President Trump says it’s a bad deal, but I would put this spin on it: he would say it’s a bad deal even if he thought it was a pretty good deal that could be a little bit better. When Trump says it’s the “worst deal in the world,” you have to mentally adjust for hyperbole. Does that really mean it’s the worst deal in the world, or does that mean it’s got a few things he needs to fix? Saying it’s the worst thing in the world and we’re going to walk away is a way to fix those few things. Wasn’t it the long-range missiles that are somewhat the issue? You have to worry about how the experts are phrasing it because they’re trying to persuade. They’re both trying to persuade Iran and they’re trying to persuade the
[58:42] public. You’re not really getting—nor should you get—an objective, accurate impression of the Iran deal. That is not a criticism. If President Trump does not give you an objective, accurate impression of the Iran deal, that is not a problem. It’s really not his job to inform us accurately if doing so is bad for the country. It’s America First. The President doesn’t work for Iran; he works for America. When he describes a problem, his description is not intended to be accurate; it is intended to get the best result for America. If you trusted him that this deal is the worst thing you’ve ever seen, keep in mind he wasn’t really talking to you; he was talking to Iran and he’s negotiating.
[59:44] My guess is that we’ve got a 75% good deal and that the 25% we don’t have is pretty important. It would be completely reasonable for people like Bolton and Trump to say, “Now we’re walking away, it’s the worst deal in the world.” Keep in mind that there’s a positioning thing going on here that conceals some of the objective facts. I’ll tell you one thing for
[1:00:49] sure: if Iran as a public government preference is still saying “let’s end Israel,” then I would say there’s no such thing as a good nuclear deal if it leaves out anything. The only deal with Iran that would be a good one, in the context of them actively trying to end Israel, is 100%. You got to stop doing all of it. You can’t leave 10% on the table if that 10% is trying to destroy a neighboring country with long-range missiles. You
[1:01:50] kind of have to go for 100% certainty on your deals of what you’re not allowing because of the way they’re talking. Imagine if Iran had completely changed its opinion on Israel and said, “Alright, we give up, Israel’s there, we’re going to recognize you and support you.” Would you then be okay with the Iran deal? Let’s say they stopped funding Hezbollah, they stopped being anti-Israel, and they recognized Israel’s right to exist. Would you then still have a problem with them
[1:02:51] having long-range missiles? Probably yes, because they might have problems with Saudi Arabia or somebody else, but you would certainly look at it differently. As long as Iran is talking against Israel, there’s no such thing as a deal that’s good enough. But remember: the Golden Age is when we realize that most of our problems are psychological. The problem with Iran and Israel is entirely psychological and, therefore, I believe that President Trump is maybe the first president who ever had at least a chance of making something good happen there. We’ve never had the right team in place; now we do. We’ll see what happens.
“Is there any other way to support me other than Patreon?”
[1:03:53] Thanks for asking. My Patreon account got pretty active yesterday after the Kanye tweets. But I have books: Win Bigly. If you would like to support me, buying my books would be great. And if you are an investor in the ICO/IPO space, my startup WhenHub has an offering of what we call WHEN tokens. It’s a cryptocurrency and you can buy them right now at interface.whenhub.com. That would actually be, if you wanted to know what would directly help me the most, it would be that: interface.whenhub.com.
[1:04:59] I will talk to all of you tomorrow, if not later today. We’ll see how the news goes. Bye for now.