Episode 169 Scott Adams: Blight Authority, Antigua, Police Shootings, InfoWars

Date: 2018-08-07 | Duration: 47:57

Topics

InfoWars banned from Apple, YouTube, Facebook What unknown violation justified this action? BLM disrupted wedding of LEO involved in Sacramento teen shooting Harassment of Candace and Charlie at restaurant My “Q” puzzle, Q followers and their brand Antifa costumes…why are masks legally allowed? Why isn’t Antifa listed as a domestic terrorist organization? Blight Authority collecting ideas for use of cleared land Go to http://BlightAuthority.com Dealing with online haters Don Jr. meeting: Alan Dershowitz says… it’s NEVER illegal to simply consume information President Trump calling people dumb, crazy or weak

Transcript

[0:08]

Pom pom pom pom pom pom. Hey everybody, come on in. Hey Reg, He’s A Seer, hey JP. It’s time. It’s time for Coffee with Scott Adams. It’s one of your top-one sips of the day, and it’s good to be in the top one. Winning feels good. Grab your mug, your jug, the vessel, your cup, your glass, your container filled with liquids of your choice—preferably coffee—and join me for the simultaneous sip.

Well, we’ve got a few things to talk about today. If you were watching Fox & Friends this morning, you probably saw Bill Pulte on there talking about Blight Authority and how we have a new forum up. I’ve been working with Bill to put up a place where we can collect

[1:11]

ideas for how to fix urban areas. Ideally, fix them and use some of the land that’s been cleared by the Blight Authority nonprofit organization. Bill Pulte is head of that. I’m going to have him on Periscope live tomorrow, so we’ll talk more about that tomorrow. But I wanted you to see the new website between now and then. If you have some ideas for what to do with the land that’s been cleared in these urban areas that were blighted, this would be the time to make suggestions. We’re just trying to find people who have ideas, people who have resources, put them all on one page, so to speak, and see if we could make some connections. Maybe get something going. Hard to know what comes out of it, but it’s a system, not a goal. If you have some ideas, just go there. BlightAuthority.com. You click the

[2:12]

forum and you can just add your ideas. It’s okay if they’re commercial. If you’re a vendor, you make a product and it makes sense in that world, just go ahead and put it there. We’d love to see it. More about that tomorrow. We’ll have Bill on here live and we’ll talk about that. Let’s talk about Infowars. As probably all of you know, Infowars got booted off of Apple’s App Store, got booted off of YouTube—that’s owned by Google—and got booted off of Facebook, effectively putting them out of business. Now, apparently there’s still an Infowars app, and I believe if you get the app you can watch all the Infowars you want, but they’re really in bad shape without those major platforms. Now, the question you might ask yourself is this:

[3:12]

Is it a coincidence that all three platforms acted at the same time? No, it’s not a coincidence. The only thing we don’t know is whether they had planned it in advance or after the first one went, the others said, “Oh, this is a good time to do it because we have cover.” There was safety in numbers and they colluded to take away the right or the freedom of speech for Infowars. Now, I waited a while to comment on this. The reason is I’m trying to use the 48-hour rule. If somebody says or does something that looks terrible, give them 48 hours to explain because it might not look the way you think it looks. For example, could these three companies that dropped Infowars have reasons

[4:15]

that I’m not aware of? Or do they have a good justification that if I saw it, I would say, “Oh, my first reaction was to stop reducing the platform for people you don’t agree with, but then maybe I would look at their reason and I would say, ‘Oh, well, I didn’t know they did this. That changes everything.‘” But isn’t that kind of missing in this story? Where’s the part where the major platforms that took Infowars off gave specific reasons and said this violated our Terms or not? And here’s what I’m starting to wonder, and here’s the scariest part about this. Obviously, the scariest part is they’re coming for Breitbart next and God knows what. So that’s the scary part. But what

[5:15]

would be the rationalization for the big platforms—Apple, Google through YouTube, and Facebook? What do you think that they said internally for why they banned Infowars and not someone else? Now, I’m sure that they said, “Oh, it’s about Pizzagate, it’s about Sandy Hook, etc.” But do they say to themselves, “We must ban this because it’s inaccurate,” or do they say, “We’re going to ban it because it’s intentionally inaccurate”? Do you see the difference? Can you be kicked off of the internet because you were wrong about something? Suppose you are honestly wrong. If you are wrong, can you be kicked off the internet even if the wrongness is a terrible wrongness, but it’s an honest

[6:16]

wrongness? Could you be kicked off because that feels different to me than trying to whip up problems by making stuff up. Here’s the question I put to you: Would the big platforms have banned Infowars for simply being inaccurate in their opinion and lots of people’s opinion? But do you think that’s all they were thinking, or does their justification require—wait for it, wait for it—mind-reading? Is the justification for kicking Infowars off their platforms that they believe, because they’ve read the minds of Alex Jones from a distance with their superpowers, that he means to do things that are provocative and dangerous and he knows he’s doing it,

[7:18]

and that he’s not trying to be accurate? I’m just putting the question out there because it seems to me if you could be banned for being inaccurate, well, there goes CNN, there goes Fox News, there goes every major platform. Because every major platform has had major inaccurate stories. Now, usually they correct them, and perhaps that’s the standard. They don’t always correct them, but maybe the big platforms said, “Well, it’s okay to be wrong, but once you learn you’re wrong, maybe you should do something about it. Take down your post, correct it,” or something like that. But I haven’t heard that. Have you heard that? I haven’t heard any reason like that. So in the absence of a clarification—and technically they would have another 24 hours to clarify—but if 48 hours go by and the big

[8:18]

platforms do not clarify why Alex Jones was kicked off and someone else is not, you must assume—I won’t say must, but it would be quite reasonable and I would say rational to assume—that their reason is based on mind-reading. Actual, literal imagining that they know what another person is thinking who is a stranger to them and they have likely never had a conversation with them. If you’re getting banned for what people with big platforms imagine you’re thinking, if that was the basis for the ban, that’s a big problem. If it’s something else, I’m open to argument.

[9:19]

All right, so my current mode on Infowars is: the big platforms have a lot of explaining to do. I give them 24 more hours. If 48 hours go by and they don’t care to explain, I’m going to take a far more radical opinion on their ethics and their value in society and, more importantly or more rationally, whether they should be regulated. Now, if the government just needs to regulate them, I would be happy to put the full weight of my persuasion on that case. I prefer not having the government get involved in anything if it’s practical. But given that these big companies have a stranglehold on communication and commerce in the United States, they’re not like any other business. They’re just

[10:20]

not. So if we need to make them regulated, that’s the next big thing I’ll work on. Let’s talk about police shootings. Police shootings are always in the news. Black Lives Matter again is in the news for—apparently they found one of the policemen who was involved in the Sacramento unarmed shooting situation with an African American teenager. I think it was a teenager. The body cams and the evidence show he was unarmed, but he did have something in his hand. It was dark, he wasn’t responding, and there were reports of something going on dangerous that he was accused of. We don’t know the full situation there, but Black Lives Matter found that one of the police involved was getting married

[11:20]

and they actually intruded on his wedding—or I don’t know if it was the wedding, maybe it was the rehearsal or something. But that’s pretty aggressive. That’s pretty aggressive. I was thinking to myself, there are several paths that you could work on for fixing police shootings. Let’s say you think that’s a big problem. What are the ways you could work on it? You could work on it by punishing police, which largely would be enforcing the current law. So making sure that, let’s say, if there’s a falsified police report around some police violence with a suspect, maybe there’s more prosecution. You could make rule changes, so that could be good. I don’t know exactly what those would be, but that would be a path. You could maybe have more training for the police. That can only get you so far.

[12:21]

If I was looking at that Sacramento example, I don’t know how training would have made any difference. It was just an ambiguous situation that, if you have enough ambiguous situations, people are going to get shot. What you don’t see is all the times that nobody got shot. It’s a very imperfect situation when you’re chasing people at night and they may or may not be armed; people are going to get shot. So we don’t know how bad that is because we don’t know how many people didn’t get shot in that context, and that actually matters. And then the other way would be to fix the urban areas because here’s my observation: the number of people being shot in my neighborhood by police—let’s say people who were not committing any violence at the

[13:22]

moment of the shooting—is about zero because I live in an upscale neighborhood. Economics is the biggest lever for reducing police shooting because in a nice neighborhood, if the economics are good, you just have fewer people committing crimes, fewer reasons for the police to be involved in anything, fewer opportunities to make mistakes. I would say that economics is probably the biggest lever to deal with any kind of police violence, etc. Still have to make sure you got your training right, make sure that you’re prosecuting when you need to, but I’ll tell you what is a complete waste of time. Here’s what’s a complete waste of time: a hundred percent of everything Black Lives Matter is doing. Completely unproductive. You can even

[14:23]

completely agree with their feeling or emotion, their position, their situation. You can have all the empathy you want. But it’s also good to have a strategy that doesn’t make things worse. Black Lives Matter kind of getting tough with police who are under the system now—the system is investigating these police officers. The system generally works, and the system will decide if this was just a tragic accident or something more sinister. I watched the video. To me, it looks like an accident. There’s no possible way in my view that these police officers didn’t believe they were in danger. It just looks like they did. Could they have handled it better? Of course. That’s what makes it a mistake. But I wasn’t there and it didn’t look

[15:24]

like a clean situation. So when Black Lives Matter goes after a police officer for something that’s still under investigation and is clearly ambiguous in terms of “would another person have made the same mistake or not in that same situation,” that is so unproductive. Totally unproductive. Imagine that same effort going into helping the urban area so that there’s just less crime and fewer police activities, etc. So that’s my feeling on that. Somebody mentioned did I see the video of Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk coming out of a restaurant? I believe they were having breakfast and they were surrounded by—I don’t think the people who were protesting were necessarily Antifa. I didn’t see anything indicating that. But it was people with the blue and red hair and bullhorns and no upper-body strength

[16:25]

talking about the men, and they were getting loud and obnoxious. If you watch the video, and it’s worth watching, the funniest thing about it is how unworried Candace was. You have to watch it just for that. Now, I don’t know how brave you are, but if you put me in a crowd of people who are yelling and very, very angry at me—so angry that violence is definitely an option—the odds of one of them getting violent or at least physical was very, very high, even with the police presence. We’ve seen lots of video where the police didn’t stop the violence. They responded to it, but they can’t stop it from happening. Watching Candace stand in the middle, walking right into the middle

[17:25]

of it and watching all these people yelling at her and just seeing her smile—it was pretty awesome. Charlie Kirk, of course, was also—I would make the same comment about Charlie Kirk, but he’s bigger than literally every person in the crowd, whereas Candace is not. So it’s a different level of courage going on there. That was fun to watch, the way she handled that. Let’s talk about Q. Some people are still trying to solve my puzzle. If they do, they’ll know the truth about Q. Nobody has quite solved it but a few people, and I’m just blown away by the intelligence of people who follow this issue. I want to be very clear because I think

[18:26]

somebody misunderstood what I said about the followers of Q. The followers of Q are probably on average way above average in intelligence. But intelligence doesn’t help you; it doesn’t protect you from confirmation bias, from cognitive dissonance. Those things are just unrelated. You could have all the intelligence in the world and you’re still just as susceptible to persuasion, but you might think you’re not. That could make it even worse. Somebody’s asking for a simultaneous sip and I will give it to you. You’re ready for the second simultaneous sip? Now, I get a little pushback on Twitter. A few people unfollowed me and they said that it was unlike me to criticize people who are Trump supporters and were also Q

[19:29]

supporters. I thought to myself: Did I do that? Because let me clarify. I think the people are probably above average in intelligence, so let’s put that out there. Compared to the average people, the Q followers are probably way above average is my guess. And one of the reasons that I responded with a puzzle is that smart people like puzzles. So don’t get me wrong. Smart-wise, you’re all good in my book. But that doesn’t mean you’re right on every topic. It doesn’t mean I’m right either. As smart as I like to think I am, I can often be wrong. But what I did say is that attending a Trump rally wearing your Q stuff makes you a soft target for

[20:33]

the opposition. So if what you want to accomplish is making your own side look less credible, then you should wear your Q support on the outside and wear the hats and the t-shirts. But just know what you’re doing. Just know that the opposition media eats this for breakfast and will use it to make you look ridiculous and to make Trump supporters look ridiculous. We just saw that happen. I’m not speculating. I don’t have to speculate about it because you can just see it. So it is not an insult to the people to suggest that there’s a better way to manage the brand that they belong to. So don’t take it personally. As far as people, you’re awesome. Whether you’re right is the question that you’ll know if you solve my puzzle. I tweeted my puzzle yesterday; you can see it in my timeline. I asked the question

[21:35]

yesterday after watching some video of Antifa with their masks and their hoods. Dressing up like Nazis or more like ISIS. The Antifa costumes, if you will, are pretty much just the ISIS outfits. There might be—I’m no expert on the Middle East and Syria—but I’m thinking there are probably some extra ISIS outfits available now. So if you’re in Antifa and you’re looking to buy a new outfit for the next event, Syria has a whole bunch of them that they just don’t need. They ordered them, but it turns out there weren’t enough people to put in them anymore. You can get the new ones from Syria that ISIS made for themselves, but you can repurpose them. You can get a much better deal on a used one. So if you

[22:37]

want to get your Antifa costume used, Syria has a lot of those too. They might require a little laundering. A little bit of laundering might be necessary. You might have to sew up a bullet-hole, something like that. There might be some stabby holes, but no big deal. If you’re on a budget—and the Antifa people, I’m guessing, mostly work for Starbucks if they have jobs—they may need cheaper outfits. I think Syria would be a good source for that. But what I asked about was how could it be legal for them to wear their masks and demonstrate when they have a history of violence? The group has a well-demonstrated history of violence. And if a group with a history of violence shows up with masks and starts beating people

[23:39]

in public—like seriously beating them to hospitalize them—I said to myself, “Wait a minute, how are they not considered domestic terrorists?” Then some folks corrected me. As I said before, even smart people like me get things wrong, and here was one of them. Somebody said—a few people sent me links to stories about Antifa. U.S. security agencies label the group terrorists. But what’s interesting is that the two stories that I got were both British publications. I don’t know that there’s an American publication who has the story. I haven’t Googled it. That could be. But the two that people sent me were both British publications and I had never heard this. Have any of you heard, or did you know—how many of you knew that Antifa was technically a domestic terrorist organization?

[24:43]

Some of you actually knew it, some of you hadn’t. I’m actually impressed that a lot of you had heard it. So it looks like maybe half—looking at your comments—half knew, half didn’t. But that’s a pretty big thing. In terms of facts, that’s something we should all know. And then the other thing that occurs to me is if a domestic terrorist organization shows up in masks, why are they not all arrested? And why is there no law against—why is there no federal law against masked demonstrations? Once you—and maybe you have to have a dividing line that you can wear a mask unless you’ve been designated a domestic terrorist organization. There might be some ways you have to slice it so that Halloween is still legal. You don’t want Halloween to be illegal or the Gay Pride Parade to be illegal if people are wearing masks. You don’t want Mardi Gras to be illegal.

[25:45]

Right? So it shouldn’t be illegal just to have a mask. You should have something to do with the context. But in this tough-law world, why in the world is there no federal law that just says if you’re wearing a mask and you’re a terrorist organization, you’re going to jail? That seems like a gimme. That’s a layup, isn’t it? There must be some reason that we don’t do it, but I don’t know what it is. Whoever introduces such a bill will be my new hero. There are local ordinances about wearing masks, but because the Department of Homeland Security has designated this a cross-border national problem—it’s not limited to a state, it’s a federal thing because they cross borders, etc., and they’re organized and they’re a terrorist group—under those conditions,

[26:45]

I’m no expert. Get me Alan Dershowitz to comment on this so I know what I’m talking about. But it feels like the federal government could just pass a law saying you can’t wear those. Somebody said that there was a Klan law, that the Klan can’t wear their masks, but I don’t know if that’s local or federal. Then the other thing is I’m just wondering why you can’t kill a terrorist. If ISIS showed up wearing their masks and, let’s say hypothetically, you knew they were ISIS and you knew that they came to a place to do some ISIS stuff and they were actual terrorists, could you kill them? I don’t know. What’s the law on that? Do they have to actually be actively engaged, or is it good enough that they’re known terrorists doing

[27:46]

in a terrorist place to do terrorist things? Would that be enough to kill? I don’t know what’s the law on that. It’s probably not legal to kill people until you watch them do a crime. Now, isn’t the most amazing thing about all of this that there has not yet been somebody on the right who unholstered? Can you believe the level of restraint that you’re seeing from the Trump supporters? It’s hard to even express how unlikely it is that such a large body of people—talking about Trump supporters—could be so harassed and injured and attacked, and that this is the biggest group of gun owners in the world, probably

[28:47]

anywhere except maybe Afghanistan. And out of all those gun owners being attacked on a fairly regular basis, none of them have unholstered. Think about that. Nobody has gunned down an Antifa person with a firearm. Anyway, there have been scuffles, but nobody’s used a firearm. I think there’s a lesson there. There’s some kind of lesson about the legal owners of guns who are the least likely to use them. So I’m impressed by that. Somebody said that Antifa took credit for harassing Candace Owens, so I’ll assume that you’re right about that. Looks right now—yes, Republicans are pro-law,

[29:49]

but they also have an opportunity to defend themselves. Depending on where they are, I suppose they may or may not be able to carry, so that could be most of the question. All right, so those are my questions for the day: Why is Antifa not all arrested as domestic terrorists, especially when you have a law-and-order president? What’s up with that? I think that for police shootings, the best way to attack that is by making the urban areas better, making the economy better. Go to BlightAuthority.com to see the website that Bill Pulte and I helped put together to collect ideas for making the inner cities better places, collect resources, connect people. We’ll talk more about that tomorrow when Bill’s on. What else has happened? Anybody have any more questions?

[30:53]

People are calling Candace Owens a Nazi and crazy stuff. By the way, here’s an update on my—as you know, I engaged in an experiment to start labeling all of my haters on Twitter as Nazis when it was appropriate. Not just randomly, not just somebody who disagrees with what I’m saying, but when people come after me personally and it’s just a personal attack on social media, I brand them a Nazi and then I block them. And I say that, and I don’t know about your experience, but I would say the amount of hate that I have to consume every day on social media using this new method is probably down 90%. I’ve probably reduced the amount of hate that I get to see by 90%. And I also think, although I have no way to prove it,

[31:54]

that if you come in and you show some hate and you think you’re on the side of the angels—because the people who come in to hate against Trump supporters, they believe that they’re sort of up here, that they’re holy and moral and ethical, and the Trump supporter is down here, and that it’s totally appropriate for them to come in and spew hate. But when you label a hater a Nazi and then block them immediately, what does that do to their psychology? I think it makes a difference. Everything I know about how people work tells me that it probably makes them think twice about what they just did, and almost nothing else would do that. If you just fight back and say, “No, you’re misinterpreting,” they will just keep misinterpreting. If you say, “Well, have I made my point?” and clarify, they will just fail to hear your clarification and they’ll just hate you more. So there’s nothing you can do engaging.

[32:55]

I found that engaging was as close as you can get to a waste of time with the haters. I’m not talking about people who have a factual claim that’s different from yours, people who don’t like your idea. I’m not talking about that. I let all them have their say. All right, just looking at your comments. “Cyber censorship is the same as nudging.” Yeah. You reminded me of—I’m watching online the conversation about whether the—and by the way, the fact that the news has been covering the Don Jr. meeting from whenever the hell that was with the lawyer. It’s a meeting that was supposed to be about something but wasn’t. That’s the worst

[33:56]

claim they have against the president right now. So the worst thing that the biggest enemies of the president have is the claim that the president’s son went to a meeting that didn’t turn out to be anything because they thought there was some information. I’m watching CNN try to find a way to criticize this. So what they’ve settled on is to say that the president has changed his story. I guess originally he said, “Of course you go to that meeting, everybody gathers information,” and then later there was some letter he wrote talking about how it was about adoption, and then more recently he’s clarified again that anybody goes to a meeting, anybody would attend a meeting if it’s about getting information. Now, I sort of was hoping that my opinion on this was compatible with the law and the Constitution, but I don’t really know because I’m not a lawyer. So I was waiting for Alan Dershowitz to weigh in

[34:58]

on this question. And the thing that I believed to be true, but without the benefit of any legal knowledge whatsoever, was that it could never be illegal to consume information no matter the source unless you’re the one stealing it. If you’re the one who stole the information, then it’s the stealing that’s the problem. But being exposed to information no matter the source—other countries, etc.—it seemed to me could never be illegal. Alan Dershowitz clarified, I think last night or the night before, that constitutionally I was correct. Although the critics of the president are making a case that information has value and you can never receive something of value, that was never intended to be about information, and the

[35:59]

Constitution would be quite clear that that would be an exception to the receiving value situation because that standard just wouldn’t work. If everybody’s information had value, well, let me give it to you this way: If there were a Supreme Court ruling that said information had value, then do you have to start paying taxes on it? If you go to a business meeting and somebody gives you some information—let’s say you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve got a startup, and you have a meeting with somebody to get some help, just some free information, and it’s useful, good information—do you have to claim that on your taxes? No, you don’t. Because the Constitution doesn’t say that’s value in the way that physical things or services are. There would be a tax on my

[37:01]

Periscopes, right? So the strongest case that I’m seeing the enemies of Trump make are about a meeting that has nothing to do with anything and couldn’t possibly be illegal under any scenario. And nothing happened anyway. So even under the hypothetical example where something would have happened, it still wouldn’t be illegal. So it’s two full levels away from being illegal. One: if it happened and there was real information about Hillary and it really came from Russians, it’s still totally legal. But it didn’t happen, so it’s two full levels away from being illegal. That’s as far as you can get from being illegal. Let me give you another example that would be like that. I know you love analogies. I just picked up my coffee cup and I’m not going to jail. Do you know why?

[38:07]

It’s not illegal. It’s not illegal if you accuse me of thinking about hitting you over the head and killing you with my coffee cup but I don’t do it. Not illegal. All right, then CNN also was trying to make the case—Anderson Cooper’s show, caught a little of that last night—making the case that the president keeps saying that African American people are dumb because he called Maxine Waters “low IQ” and he called Don Lemon and LeBron James “dumb.” So Anderson Cooper’s saying, “Hey, isn’t this a clear pattern of his dog-whistle racism?” And I was watching even—oh, I hope I don’t forget his name—Cornel West.

[39:08]

Cornel West, African American writer, intellectual, professor, was on the show presumably to take the case against President Trump because he’s an anti-Trumper. And Anderson points out, “Hey, he keeps saying these things about black people,” and even Cornel West—much to his credit—said he basically insults everybody, which is just true. So Cornel West’s reputation in my book just went up a level for being honest. He didn’t need to be. That was a situation where he could have just joined the gang and said, “Yeah, what’s this pattern?” And I thought to myself, I was thinking about this a little bit more: Does the president use this insult more than others in

[40:11]

for one community? And I thought if you were to look at all the insults that the president uses, they tend to fit into categories. There’s the insult that you’re stupid, which is used on Mika Brzezinski and lots of other people. There’s “you’re crazy” or “you’re weak” in some way. Those are the ones, right? Crazy, stupid, and weak. He used to make fun of people’s appearances, but that was somewhat pre-running or pre-presidency. He definitely made fun of people’s appearances when he was running for office. I don’t think he’s done it as president, but maybe yes. But if you think about it, his go-tos for all of his insults are “you’re crazy,” “you’re stupid,” or “you’re some version of weak,”

[41:13]

including low-energy. You can kind of go through the list of all the people he’s insulted as president and they’re all in there. Now suppose—and it’s also true that the president responds to his famous critics with aggressive responses. Now, given that Don Lemon interviewed LeBron and that LeBron was anti-Trump and made it known, which of the three insults could the president use against LeBron? Could he say that LeBron is weak or low energy? No. If there’s anything that LeBron James is not, it’s weak and low-energy. In fact, he’s literally famous for his work ethic, right? So as an insult, that wouldn’t be any good. It worked great for Jeb Bush,

[42:14]

it’ll work great for Obama’s foreign policy stuff—you could say that stuff is weak—but it wouldn’t work. Could he say the way he says that Bernie and, in a sense, he calls Elizabeth Warren kind of crazy? Would “crazy,” his second of three major insults, have worked well? LeBron, again—you could criticize him on lots of things, I suppose—but he’s not crazy. There’s nothing about him that would suggest crazy, so that would be not a good attack. So all that’s left is stupid. Would LeBron James fit the stupid label well enough in terms of making it a good insult? Well, I don’t believe he went to college. In fact, check me on this, I think that he jumped immediately from high school, right? Didn’t he go from high school to

[43:15]

the majors? Which doesn’t make you stupid; I want to be as clear as possible. I’m just talking about if you’re going to insult somebody and you want it to be a little sticky, you want it to be at least sort of in the ballpark of something that somebody’s confirmation bias would support. LeBron—somebody just said poor verbal skills, yes. LeBron has poor grammar, so when he speaks in public he misuses his words fairly regularly. That doesn’t make him stupid either. That could be just the influences and he doesn’t care and it just doesn’t matter. So there’s no reason to think that LeBron is stupid, although I would say his decision to not engage with the president—if you just look at that decision, that looks a little stupid to me. But lots of smart people do things that I don’t think are a good idea. So that doesn’t make LeBron stupid. But

[44:16]

as an insult, stupid was the only one that had a chance because people could say, “Oh yeah, he doesn’t use the right words, he didn’t go to college, he opposes even meeting with the president,” which would obviously be more productive. Meeting with the president would be far more productive than insulting him, so that’s just stupid. And then he was talking to Don Lemon, so the president got a twofer on that because he thinks Don Lemon is dumb. A lot of people who are not fans of Don Lemon—mostly Trump supporters—would agree. Now, I’m not saying that’s true. If you were to test Don Lemon’s IQ, I’m sure it would be very high. He’s got a high-end job, very successful, his grammar is perfect. There’s no reason to think he’s dumb. But if you watch his show, it’s so biased that you end up wondering what the hell is wrong here.

[45:17]

Does he believe what he’s saying? So although I’m not saying any of those people involved in this story are dumb—because I don’t have evidence that would support that—as an insult, it was the only one available. So if you say to yourself, “Oh, he’s always using the dumb insult on African American people,” first of all, it doesn’t pass the sniff test because he uses “dumb” against lots and lots of people of all types. And secondly, he only uses three insults as president, and the other two didn’t fit. That’s it. That’s the whole story.

Somebody’s saying they’re both dumb. I’m not saying that they’re smart. I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just saying that if you were to measure their IQs, they’d probably be fine. I’m sure that they would be impressive IQs. But television is littered with people with high IQs that

[46:18]

are saying things that look stupid to us. That’s a slightly different thing. Somebody says somebody has met both Lemon and LeBron and both are smart. I think that’s probably true. I doubt you could be as good as LeBron at a sport that does require more than athleticism—I doubt you could do as well as he does without being pretty smart. So my guess is he’s pretty smart. I’m sure Don Lemon has a high-end education and did just fine in school, so I would not call him dumb by any stretch of the imagination. We just think his opinions on TV look dumb. That’s slightly different. All right, I’m going to come back on in an hour to talk about cryptocurrencies and give

[47:21]

you a little tutorial on wallets and exchanges and give you an update on my startup. So if you see me come back in an hour and you’d like a little update on my startup, which is kind of exciting right now, and you want to learn more about “what’s a wallet?” or “what’s an exchange?” and “how could you get into crypto?” then I’ll give you a little tutorial. I’ll try to keep it simple and useful, tell you exactly what you would need to do. So that’ll be a little bit later and I will talk to you later.