Episode 131 - North Korea, MAGA Hat-Grabbers and Mueller

Date: 2018-07-07 | Duration: 58:50

Topics

Drink throwing hat grabber’s future prospects Press elevating people to destruction levels for profit The press business model primes for confirmation bias Pompeo North Korea denuclearization talks progress Rudy Giuliani says Trump will talk to Mueller…if criminal evidence is shown Giant baby Trump balloon over London vs. Giant London Mayor balloon Elon Musk’s rescue idea for Thai cave kids #Walkaway guy (Brandon Straka) refused camera store service, took high road Proposed DNA test, identity politics and Elizabeth Warren’s brand Opinions based on reading another person’s mind are flawed by definition Jim Jordan allegations are attempt to “execute” him by the press Your political opinions are assigned to you…by the press and your culture

Transcript

[0:06]

Pom pom pom pom pom pom pom pom pom. Come on in, gather round. It’s Saturday, unless you’re watching this on replay, in which case it’s another day of the week, or maybe Saturday. Statistically speaking, it’s all possible. You know what else is possible? It’s possible that you are going to enjoy the simultaneous sip. Is it the best sip of the day, or just the best sip in all of human history? We don’t know, but what we do know is that when you enjoy the simultaneous sip, you’re having a good time. It’s a perfect way to start a day. Join me for the simultaneous sip. Oh, that’s good stuff.

Have you seen the update on the gentleman—and I use that term loosely—who grabbed the hat off of a teenager? The kid was wearing a

[1:08]

MAGA hat, and somebody in a burger place grabbed it off his head and threw a drink in his face. There was a really good phone picture of the guy doing it, and I said to myself at that moment: there’s a guy who’s going to get arrested and fired and have real trouble getting a job for the rest of his life. And what happened? He was arrested, and he was fired from his job, and he’s going to have a real problem getting a new job.

When you first saw that film, did you say to yourself, “My God, the Revolution is right around the corner,” because people like this can do things like that? Then the next thing you know, somebody else is going to try it, and one thing will lead to another, and pushing and pulling, and revolution. When I saw it, here’s what I saw:

[2:11]

There’s a guy who’s not going to do that again. And if anybody watched it, they’re not going to do anything to anybody in public either, because if you do something like that, you really can’t work after that, sort of ever. The person who threw a drink in a kid’s face, while that probably seemed like just a spur-of-the-moment thing in his life, and he was like, “I told my friends, you should see what I did in that burger joint; I grabbed his hat, I threw the drink in his face”—but the guy who threw the drink, his life just took a really bad turn, and it might take a while for it to turn back, if it ever does.

Here’s what I think: I think that our system has a really good set of controls, and the fact that we have cameras everywhere is a really big part of that. The fact is that we can essentially solve every crime now if we

[3:14]

want to. I think the odds of civil war are still a lot closer to zero than any other number, and you can thank the system for that.

Now let’s talk about a prediction that I made a long time ago. This is an old book. What year did this come out? 1997, maybe? Something like that. Just looking at the date: 1997. In 1997, I made a bunch of humorous/semi-serious predictions, and one of those predictions was as follows: I predicted that the media—the press—would start killing celebrities to generate news.

[4:22]

Think about it. When you saw the spate of suicides—first, we have three “doorknob” suicides of famous people. There was Robin Williams, hung himself on a doorknob; I think Kate Spade did; and then Anthony Bourdain. Would the second two have hung themselves on the doorknob if the press had not reported on the first one? Maybe. Probably not. Could you say that the press killed at least two celebrities? Well, not for sure. Can’t say that with any certainty. But watch the news and correct me if I’m wrong: the news is ruining one career after

[5:24]

another now. Of course, it has the help of the political sides who are feeding in information, but isn’t it true that the press is ruining one life after another to generate news?

There are lots of things that they could just ignore. Somebody said some dumbass thing. Is that news? No. It’s only news if they decide it’s news. If they don’t report it, it’s just one of these seven billion people on earth who said a dumbass thing. How often do people say dumbass things? Pretty much consistently, all the time. So the press decides that they will elevate somebody to destruction level for their profit. Somebody said photographers killed Princess Di; you could argue that’s the case. Look now, if you will, at the trouble that the media is creating for Trump supporters.

[6:27]

Does it seem to you that the hysteria that’s drummed up would have happened—and this is a terribly important question—do you think that the current level of hysteria could have happened without the press being the lead hysteria-mongers? In other words, if the press had never done anything but report factually, and once on each story, just report it once—would we have anything like we have in this country where the entire country is being pulled apart and God knows what could happen? Not a chance.

Take any example. Let’s say the President is talking about Charlottesville, and the President says, “There are bad people on both sides.” You could have reported that as, “My God, what does he mean?” So we asked him

[7:28]

if he was saying that the Nazi guys are good people. Then the President says, “No, I didn’t mean that. I meant both sides of the statue debate,” because the event essentially came off of a pro-statue, anti-statue debate. I was saying that there are good people who like statues and there are good people who want them taken away.

Had the news simply reported exactly what they knew with no speculation—what they knew was he initially said something that seemed ambiguous to people about “both sides.” Then they asked him, and then he clarified with a perfectly acceptable clarification, which is, “No, God no, I’m not talking about the Nazis being good people. Nobody says that.” Isn’t that the end of the story? No. The press decides, because their business model

[8:30]

requires it, that they’re going to whip this up and make it the best example, the kingpin of all the confirmation bias. So when you see something else that doesn’t look right, you say to yourself, “Well, if I saw this one thing and it was the only thing I saw about the President, I wouldn’t conclude that that was necessarily racist. But now that they’ve told me that this Charlottesville thing was racist, I’ve got to look at this other thing in a new light.” Pretty soon you have this cascade of confirmation bias, which is what we have now.

The cleverness of this is that anybody reasonable will say, “Scott, LOL. Are you

[9:33]

saying that all this evidence from all of these different sources is all confirmation bias? That’s what you’re saying? LOL.” Well, let me explain it to you: that’s exactly what I’m saying. The way confirmation bias works—and confirmation bias is literally the most common thing in our existence; that might actually be true, usually I exaggerate, but confirmation bias might be the greatest driver of our entire perception of reality. Most things are probably inventions in our mind, at least things about politics. If you are convinced that you’ve seen one or two examples of a phenomenon, then yes, you will imagine that those one or two are proof of the 500 other things

[10:36]

that otherwise would have seemed like nothing. The most normal situation is that once you get primed for a confirmation bias, there’s lots of evidence. That’s normal, even if it’s nothing.

There are two situations in which you would have lots of evidence for something. One is if it’s true; you’d have lots of evidence for something that’s true, potentially. The other is if it’s completely untrue. Both of those situations will generate what seems to you like lots of evidence. They’re identical. Once you understand that because you have lots of evidence for a thing, it actually doesn’t mean

[11:38]

anything, you don’t quite understand how your world is working.

All right, that’s enough lament. There’s a North Korea story. Mike Pompeo came back, met for the third time with North Korean people this time. This is the important part of the story: he was not scheduled to meet with Kim Jong-un. He was meeting with his generals or his staff to talk about the details of denuclearization. When he came back, Pompeo said it was productive on a whole number of complicated areas. I believe he denied that there was an Elton John CD in any of this. I think the Elton John CD story might turn out to be completely fake. Put a pin on that; we’ll find out later if that was real. It sounded like it might not be real from the start, but it

[12:40]

could have been real. If it was a prank by someone who was trying to create a rumor, they did a really good job, because your perfect prank is something that’s very unusual but you’re still willing to believe it anyway. Did it seem realistic that he would give him an Elton John CD? Well, it seemed weird in a wonderful way. Weird, but totally believable. So whether it turns out that he did or he didn’t, it’s a good story either way. If he did, I believe it and it would be funny and probably useful. If he didn’t, it’s a great prank.

All right, so how do you interpret the fact that North Korea said that they were disappointed and that maybe the meeting was a mistake because Pompeo

[13:42]

keeps asking for complete denuclearization without some kind of tit-for-tat—“give us something and we’ll give you something”? The North Koreans presented it as more of a bad thing than a good thing, a step backwards sort of thing. Pompeo said it was productive. How do you process that?

The obvious is that at this point in the negotiations—and when I say “this point,” this point could last a year. I’m talking about the point where they’re talking about the details. During that year, there should be a whole bunch of almost-walk-aways, or “we change our mind,” or somebody suddenly adds a new demand that’s just crazy. Somebody walks away for a few weeks before they come back.

[14:43]

The most logical explanation is that everything is completely normal; there’s no real story here except that negotiations are ongoing. Of course North Korea isn’t getting exactly what they want. What were the odds that North Korea was going to get exactly what they wanted without giving something up? Zero. What were the odds that we would get exactly what we want without giving something up? Zero. But both sides understand that nobody will buy a continued conflict. I think the gravity in the arc of history is all moving in the same direction toward a good result, but you should expect people will express their concerns during the process.

There’s a story about Rudy Giuliani, who is making a demand that the only way

[15:45]

Trump will have a conversation and be interviewed by the Mueller team is if Mueller can show evidence that Trump has committed a crime. That’s pretty good. I thought to myself, “That’s so good, why did it take so long for them to come up with that play?” That’s like the best play. Giuliani has been quite forthcoming about the fact that a big part of his job is public opinion.

Remember that there are sort of two plays going on. One play—and I mean this in the sports sense—is the anti-Trumpers and

[16:46]

Mueller’s team, who may or may not be anti-Trumpers, we don’t know, trying to do something legally or to find out if there’s something that needs to be done legally. But there’s also the political part where the President could be impeached under the right set of circumstances. Giuliani is fighting a battle on two fronts: one is the legal battle, but the other is public opinion. If public opinion is deeply against impeachment, it becomes hard for Congress to do it no matter how much they want to; they can’t get elected if they go too far.

Giuliani is working public opinion and the legal side at the same time. This latest play of “He’d be happy to talk to you”—remember what I always tell you: if you’re ever in a situation where you’re being asked in public, “Will you talk to the investigators?”—let’s say you’ve been

[17:47]

accused of something—whether you did it or not, your first answer always, always should be: “Hell yeah! I’ll be talking to those investigators. I want to. Can we do it today? Can we do it right now? I’ll do it in public. I won’t even have my lawyer there, that’s how innocent I am. Oh, what? My lawyer’s saying I shouldn’t do that?” That’s the only way you should ever handle this situation. It’s the way Rock handled it, it’s the way Trump handled it, because they have good lawyers. There is no other way to handle this situation. Plan B is just freakin’ stupid.

You have Plan A, which is brilliant. You say you would love to do it, but “Oh damn it, my lawyer tells me I can’t.” That’s an A-plus. Every other

[18:48]

plan that’s not that, I fail. This is as binary as you can get. So Giuliani and Trump are doing it the right way, showing a complete willingness to talk should Mueller present a reason to the public. Should Mueller present some evidence that the President committed some kind of a crime, he’d be happy to talk. Will Mueller present some evidence of that? Probably.

Even if he had evidence of something, I’m guessing that the way the process works—none of us are experts on the law, but it might be that this request is

[19:48]

unreasonable because it could be that this is a normal procedure to talk to somebody even who has not been accused of a specific crime. Talking to that person is essential to finding out if there is a crime. That might be one of the big things that creates paths to other people to talk to and leads to follow up on. So I don’t know what the real process should look like in a normal situation, but when the public hears this—“Yeah, I’d be happy to talk to you. Absolutely. Just show me some evidence, there’s a reason”—BAM. From the public opinion perspective, it’s solid gold. It’s one of the most solid

[20:48]

legal things I’ve ever seen. As soon as you hear it, you say to yourself, “Why did that take so long? Why wasn’t that strategy there before?”

It could be that they had to wait long enough that even the public was giving up on them finding anything. At this point, even the anti-Trumpers are thinking, “Let’s just sort of get this behind us because it didn’t work out the way we were hoping. We’re onto another manufactured problem.” As long as the public thinks that it’s a reasonable proposition—and it sounds totally reasonable, by the way. What could be more reasonable than, “Yeah, I’ll talk to the prosecutors. Am I accused of something specific? If I’m not, why in the hell would I go into a perjury trap?” A perjury trap meaning a conversation in which you might perjure yourself and

[21:51]

create a new crime even if there was no underlying crime. You’re creating a crime out of no crime by going into the interview.

I didn’t know enough about the law to know if what you just said is brilliant or not, but it sounded pretty good to me. Mueller has not only not specified a specific crime, but he doesn’t even have a theory of a crime that might have been committed. It’s less than even having evidence; he doesn’t even have a theory of how there could be evidence, apparently.

All right, what else is happening? Does it feel like a slow news time? Have you ever noticed this? If you

[22:53]

really want to understand the degree to which the press is controlling us, think about this: why is it that there is consistently less news on weekends and vacations? Have you noticed that there is just less news when there are weekends and vacations? It’s because the press is also on vacation, or it’s their day off. I don’t think that news stops on weekends. It feels to me like our sense of when news happens coincides exactly to when the press is working. If it’s the work week, there’s plenty of news, and if it’s the weekend, there’s less of it. Maybe it’s because the government isn’t doing as much, but I’ve got a feeling the

[23:55]

press is essentially manufacturing the news and has been for a long time. The political news is largely manufactured based on real facts.

Now, I’m loving the story about the guy who got approval to float a giant baby Trump balloon over London when Trump is visiting, which is sort of hilarious. I don’t hate it at all when the other side does something that’s just funny. But then apparently there was some GoFundMe to raise money to create a Mayor of London big baby float, and it’s already got a ton of money donated. So there might be competing giant baby floats. Baby Khan—yes, Sadiq Khan. I first have the name

[24:55]

right—a Baby Khan balloon. Let me tell you, if that’s the level that this goes to, if we’re competing based on giant baby politician floats, we’re in a good place.

I saw something alarming. I’d heard reports that there are some Republicans running who are literally Nazis or somehow aligned with Nazi ideology. I thought to myself, “Literally Nazis? What are you talking about?” That sounded like another press thing. But apparently, there’s some California guy who’s running for some seat and made it into the finals. He hasn’t been elected, but he’s actually

[25:55]

a Holocaust denier. I thought, “What? There’s a Holocaust denier running in California of all places?” I saw the California Republican Party did probably the smartest thing I’ve seen: they issued a joint disavowal. They disavowed jointly with some Jewish organization. In other words, instead of the Republican Party just disavowing their own candidate—and I won’t call him their own candidate, because they disavowed him, but he’s a guy who calls himself a Republican because you can just call yourself whatever you want—they did it

[26:56]

in a joint statement with some Jewish protection group so that it was like the perfect disavowal. If they had just disavowed on their own, people would say, “Yeah, maybe you’re just saying that,” but disavowing with a group that has the maximum credibility on the topic? Perfect. If you’re going to disavow, that’s the way to do it. That’s some good disavowing there.

All right, so I think we’ve covered it. The press is trying to kill us all to generate news. I’m not even exaggerating a bit. Well, let’s talk about the Thai cave. You may have seen the story about the soccer team trapped in the caves in Thailand. Because of the architecture of the caves, they’re a mile and a half in, and some of it is completely

[27:58]

flooded now. It’s muddy water, and even a professional diver has died trying to bring them stuff and get out. It’s super dangerous.

Somebody asked Elon Musk if he could help, and my first thought was: Elon Musk, I get it, he’s very smart and he’s got these companies and he’s an engineer, but really, don’t we have enough smart people? The Boring Company can bore into things, but I thought to myself, it’s a big world. Thailand has lots of experts, the entire world is focusing on it. Don’t we have enough people who have ideas and know how to do stuff? Do we really need Elon Musk to do this—like every problem is just Elon Musk’s problem?

[28:59]

Then I saw the chain of tweets where somebody asked Elon and he started thinking about it. Elon Musk comes up with the following idea that almost makes me mad because it’s so much better than everybody else’s idea. He said you should put an inflatable tube into the entire length of the thing. I don’t know how long it takes to make a big inflatable tube, but then, like a bouncy house where you just have a blower blow in one end, the air pressure makes it increase. That would create a mile-and-a-half-long dry tube that goes through the water so that the kids could crawl through a dry tube and it would stay dry and open as long as the air blower

[30:00]

was blowing.

Whether or not there’s enough pressure—would it stay pressurized, would it be strong enough, would it work for all the twists and turns, could you make it fast enough? There are many questions about that. But here’s the thing that really made me angry: Why the heck does Elon Musk have to be the only person who can solve a problem in the entire world? Sometimes it seems like that, and then that bastard, Elon Musk, comes up with the best idea. I don’t know if this is going to be the idea that fixes it all, but you’ve got to admit, of the other ideas you’ve heard, it was the best one. Somebody says he wasn’t the first, but he might be the only one who could

[31:02]

actually make it happen.

Sounds a little jealous, Scott? Absolutely. If you’re not jealous of Elon Musk, who the hell are you jealous of? I wanted to think that Elon Musk was like us. Like, oh, he’s smarter, he’s more successful, but basically he’s a human, you’re a human, I’m a human, we’re basically similar people. And then he does that and I think, “Damn it, you’re not like us. You’re better than us.” He’s just smarter. He’s human, but he’s like a better version. Not only is he willing to work on this problem, but he had the better idea. It’s too early to say that his idea will

[32:03]

be practical, but all of the ideas are impractical in different ways. His idea on paper sounds great.

I was seeing Christina’s trip to the Trump International; she said the hotel was amazing, she really enjoyed it. Can we get him on your chat? Probably not. There are some people that I would not contact just because I have an assumption that they’ve got better things to do. There are people who might actually respond to me if I asked them, but I think to myself, “Yeah, that person has better things to do.” I think until he’s at least saved the Thai soccer team, he has better things to do.

Can we get the Walkaway guy? Maybe he’d be interesting.

[33:05]

Brandon Straka—Brandon is his name, right? The Walkaway guy. What was interesting about that is you probably saw a tweet in which the Walkaway guy—if you don’t know what that is, it is an ex-Democrat, a gay man, which seems to be important in this particular story. He has walked away and he’s encouraging other people to walk away from the Democrats. He went to buy some camera equipment and was reportedly denied service by at least the first person he talked to for being recognized as the Walkaway guy.

Brandon did not mention the name of the camera store, but he said he left there shaking. He was actually shaking that such a thing could happen. I totally get

[34:07]

that because, first of all, if you’ve never been famous and then you suddenly become famous, it’s a big transition. Your whole world gets a little turned upside down. I have a little bit of experience with that. It’s disconcerting to go from not famous to famous in a fairly rapid way. But then to have a problem like a social problem because of it is a pretty big punch in the gut.

He walked away shaken by the experience as he described it, but I tweeted that he may have been thinking about it differently because the people who should be shaking are the owners of the camera store, and certainly that employee. When he walked out

[35:09]

refused service, here’s the other way to look at the story. One way is, “My God, I’m a victim,” which I think is essentially how he felt. I suggested that the opposite had just happened—that store had handed him their own future. All he had to do—and by the way, he didn’t do this and I don’t recommend that he does it—all he had to do is make a Yelp review and just describe honestly what happened, and that would be the end of that business.

While it might be that he didn’t get to buy a camera that day because of this one employee—and apparently the rest of the store was not on that same page—he took the high road and he decided not to

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do the boycott thing, not try to put them out of business. I applaud him for that. In my mind, his brand went up two levels by not trying to put that little camera company out of business. I thought that was exactly the right thing to do. But my point was that how he processes it and how he feels about it could have been backwards. When you’re in the situation, you feel the way you feel. After he processes it a little bit, he may come around to thinking that he had all the power. All of the power was with him because he had an entire nation—at least forty percent of a nation, however many Trump supporters—that would have put that company out

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of business. He just had to ask. Think about that. He just had to ask. “Hey, I think this company should be out of business,” and it would be done. They’d lose 40% of their business right away.

I am anti-boycott. I say this all the time. There probably are some situations where a boycott makes sense, but as a normal course of business, it’s a terrible, terrible idea. It doesn’t make the world a better place. I don’t like it when people boycott my own stuff. My income, as most of you know, is down 30 or 40 percent from what it had been before I started talking about Trump stuff. I don’t like it when it happened to me. I don’t think it was fair. I don’t think it helped the world in any way. I feel the same about doing it to anybody else. I’m totally on brand about not doing the boycott.

[38:21]

Somebody says, “I boycott Planned Parenthood.” Yeah, there are some situations—abortion is a ten on everybody’s list of big items, so certainly there are situations where you could argue that you’re doing the right thing. But they’re rare and they should only be in the most extreme cases.

Elizabeth Warren’s DNA: the interesting thing about President Trump making his humorous offer to pay a million dollars to charity if Elizabeth Warren has her DNA tested to see if she has a Native American ancestor is that the DNA test won’t tell you that. She’s never going to take the DNA test because she could actually be descended from Native Americans and it not appear on the DNA. I didn’t realize this until this is sort of a

[39:22]

new realization for me about how DNA works. I didn’t get that you could have an actual Native American great-great-great-great whatever and you could still technically have zero identification in your DNA. It has to do with the fact that you don’t get everything in the same percentage from your parents. Everybody’s grabbing pieces from the DNA of a parent and they’re not grabbing all the pieces. You could end up, just by chance, that that part of your DNA just got left behind.

Does it matter if she is or isn’t a Native American? I think on the list of issues, it’s the smallest one, but it plays against her brand. If you’re in the party of identity

[40:23]

politics and everything you talk about is identity politics, and you’re accused of stealing somebody’s identity to get more power—which is what she was accused of—does it prove she’s a liar? Let me defend Elizabeth Warren here. The most likely explanation is that she had a parent who said, “Yes, you have Native American blood,” and she believed it. That’s not lying.

It turns out I believed I was Native American as well until this year when I had a DNA test. My family story was very much influenced by my Native American blood, which I don’t have any. Again, I don’t know if the reason I don’t have any is chance or

[41:23]

I actually don’t have any Native American relatives. I learned during that process that apparently it was very common for people in my age range that their family claimed some Native American blood because it was kind of cool or trendy. Apparently, that’s a thing—people claiming they have Native American blood when they don’t. It’s a really big thing that personally I can vouch for because my whole family grew up thinking we were Native American in some substantial part. Not true.

Did Elizabeth Warren lie about being Native American? I would say the odds of it being a lie—in the sense that you knew it wasn’t true when you said it anyway—the odds of that being the case are probably zero. That doesn’t seem like something that you would lie about when there’s a far

[42:26]

better explanation that she just believed it was true. She lied for political purposes? It’s not a lie if you thought it was true. You get that, right? And how do any of us know what she thought?

You’re making a mistake, and I like to be consistent on this. You see me criticize people all the time on Twitter for having what I call the “mind reader illusion.” The mind reader illusion is that your point of view depends entirely upon you knowing what somebody is thinking. We imagine that we can do that. We can’t do that. Nobody can read anybody’s mind. So if you say, “Oh, she knew it was not true when she said it anyway for political purposes,” there is literally no evidence for that. There is no evidence that she willingly, knowingly lied. None. There is your

[43:27]

belief that you can imagine you know what she’s thinking and that she did it for that reason, but that’s you. You’re talking about your own flaw—that you imagine you can read minds. That’s your flaw. That’s not Elizabeth Warren’s flaw. What Elizabeth Warren did or did not know is sort of unknowable. That’s exactly what we know.

You don’t want to be judged by that standard, do you? Do you want to be judged by the standard that you’re guilty if someone thinks they can read your mind? It’s not a standard I want to apply to anyone else, but I certainly wouldn’t want that being applied to me because it is applied to me every single day. Literally, there’s not one day that goes by in my life—because I’m a public character—in which someone, usually lots of people on Twitter, imagine they can read my mind and then they criticize me for their own

[44:29]

imagination. Numerous times a day. It’s not a standard you should apply to other people. It isn’t reasonable, rational, or useful. You should just not do it.

Jim Jordan: Jim Jordan, as you know, has been one of the President’s most effective supporters. He’s good on television, he’s been quite a bulldog. I think that he was actually called “the Bulldog” when he was a wrestler in college. There’s some allegation that he knew about some handsy behavior many years ago at some college wrestling situation. Again, I don’t have any information about what Jim Jordan did or did not know or did or did not do, but

[45:32]

here’s what we do know: in 1997, I said that the media would start killing celebrities to generate news. What are you watching? You’re watching the media, the news, the press trying to execute Jim Jordan for news. That’s it. That’s why you’re watching. You’re watching the press taking one person at a time and executing them in front of the public.

Half of the public is like, “Yay, you got one of theirs!” And then the next person the press takes out might be from a different side of the press. They’re bringing out different people for execution, and then the other side brings out somebody on your side, and you’re like, “Oh wait a minute, that’s one of mine! That’s not entertaining.”

[46:32]

I’m going to go watch the network that’s theirs, executing your side. And then you go over to your side and you go, “Hey, look what they found on that one! Yeah, they’re executing another citizen. I’m so happy!”

If there’s one thing I could teach you, it’s that your opinions are assigned to you. Your opinions are not your opinions. It feels like it. It feels like you have an opinion, it feels like it came out of your head, it feels like you looked at the evidence—you’re an open-minded, reasonable guy and you came to a conclusion based on the evidence—but that’s not what’s happening. The media—at least in politics—the press

[47:33]

is assigning you your opinion. Period.

Do you think that can’t be proven scientifically? You’d be wrong. It would be easy to prove that the press assigns your opinion. All you’d have to do is find somebody who had only been exposed to the facts and not the opinions. The news these days has morphed into almost 80% opinion, 20% news. Is that fair—that what used to be more like 80% news and 20% opinion has reversed? It’s mostly 80% opinion. Even when they cover the facts, they cover them with the opinion spin on

[48:37]

it. They leave out the context that doesn’t help their case, etc. So I’d say 80–85% opinion.

“You’re talking about normies, not us.” Everybody believes they’re the exception to the rule. We all think, “I feel sorry for those poor bastards who are so fooled by their biased news source. If only they would read the right news, they would not be so biased.” And of course, the other people are looking at them and saying exactly the same thing. Until you understand that people are saying exactly the same thing about you, and it looks to them exactly the same as you see of them, you’re lost in a lower level of understanding of your environment.

The press assigns your opinion to you; you don’t pick it. Now, you do pick your general inclination. People do largely have more control over whether they’re a Republican, conservative, liberal, or Democrat. But once you’ve chosen, then

[49:39]

your opinions are assigned to you based on which one you’ve chosen. And even your original inclinations are probably more from your culture than from yourself.

Have you noticed that people tend to have the same opinion as their parents and the place they live? What percentage of people do you think adopt the politics of their parents eventually? Let’s say by the time they’re 40. How many people have adopted essentially the same general politics as their parents? Eighty percent? Ninety percent? It’s way more than half. There are plenty of stories of people who bucked and went the opposite way, but I think it’s in the 75 to 90 percent range. If

[50:42]

85 or 90 percent have the same opinion as their parents, does that mean your opinion is really your opinion? Is it really your opinion in a context in which almost everybody ends up just agreeing with whatever their parents and their culture told them to believe?

Is it a coincidence that if you’re born in Saudi Arabia, you’ll probably be Islamic? It’s not really a coincidence. Does everybody in a Muslim-majority country wake up and say, “Let me look at the facts. Let me study the science here and I’ll make up an opinion on my religious beliefs. I want to be objective about this”? That happens to basically nobody. Almost nobody bucks the majority religion. So your initial life

[51:44]

opinions are assigned to you by your culture, your parents, and your situation. And then when you’re trying to get your political opinions, you’re leaning one way or the other, which is also based on culture. The culture is probably making you liberal or conservative, and then the press does the rest. When we think that we have independent opinions, that’s almost certainly an illusion.

How can you avoid having your opinion assigned to you? Number one: you could reject the religion of your parents. That’s hard, because you probably think they had the right religion. I’m not saying it’s practical. Now, I have rejected the religion of my parents. I had an advantage because I didn’t know what my parents believed. My parents—I know this is hard to

[52:44]

believe—never told the three of us kids their religious beliefs. I still don’t know. They had us—we were all required to go to a Methodist Church, which was literally just down the hill from us; we could walk to it. So we were educated as Methodists, essentially generic Christians.

When I was 11 years old—I tell this story a lot—I was in Sunday school where they were indoctrinating us in the ways of the Bible. I came home from a class about Jonah being swallowed by the giant whale or the giant fish. He lived in the

[53:44]

fish’s belly for I don’t know how many days until he was spit back onto the shore and he was just fine. I heard that story and I came home and I called a meeting with my mother, literally. I said, “I’ve got to talk to you.” I’m 11 years old. I said, “This whole Bible story stuff—I’m not buying it. I’m not going to go to Sunday school anymore because I’m just not buying into this.” And my mother, to her everlasting credit, do you know what she said? “Okay.”

She just said, “Okay.” You tried, you did it for years, you formed an opinion based on the evidence that you collected. She didn’t say this explicitly, but I know her well enough to know what she was thinking. Not a mind reader, but I do

[54:46]

know my own mother. I made a case which was sufficient for her to back in, and she was like, “Okay, case closed. You have done all you needed to do.”

Of course, I’ve made it a point since then to expose myself to all the other major religions, to dig in just deeply enough that I get a sense for them—what’s different, what’s the same, what’s good, what’s not. I didn’t close myself off to that. In my opinion, if you can at least break free from your parents’ religion, one of two things is possible: you’ve either rejected the one true religion (which is bad), or you’ve allowed some mental freedom that would allow you to come to something closer to an independent opinion.

Secondly, I

[55:46]

don’t really identify with a political group. I don’t vote, and I do that intentionally because I don’t want to be biased by my “team.” I don’t have a religious team—I rejected my parents’ religion, whatever it was—and I rejected both of the political parties. In theory, if everything we know about team behavior, confirmation bias, and cognitive dissonance is true, I should have a little bit more independent thought than the average person because of those two factors.

But if you were born into a certain religion and a certain set of politics and then you’re 40 years old and you say, “I used my good judgment and common sense. I looked at all the options and

[56:47]

coincidence—my parents got it right! I got it right just the way my parents got it right!”—you could be right. Your parents might be the ones who got the right religion and the right politics, but there’s no way to tell.

“You’ve reframed it to make yourself look independent.” Well, the facts that I’m telling you are the actual facts. The fact of walking away from my parental religion is just a fact; that’s not a reframe. And the fact that I’m not Republican or Democrat and haven’t identified with any of them—I think at one point I might have been registered, but I don’t even know what I was registered at years ago, probably Independent, but I’m not sure. Those factors would make somebody more independent in their thinking, but I

[57:48]

can’t tell you that I’m independent and still be consistent with everything I know.

Everybody feels like they have independent thought. We all feel like we made our own decisions. I feel like I made my own decisions, you feel like it. I’m just telling you that if your decisions match your team, your credibility is lower than somebody whose opinion doesn’t match their team.

Take Brandon, of the Walkaway hashtag. Somebody who does Walkaway, or Candace Owens for example—sometimes if you’ve changed teams, I think that’s probably a sign that you might be using some independent thought, but not necessarily. There may be other factors at work.

All right, that’s enough for now. I’m going to sign off and I hope you have a great Saturday.