Thanks to all of you who were able to join me live on Friday, and thank you to my paid subscribers for making this possible. We had a wide reaching discussion about the LA mayoral race and election integrity, and I answered 25 of your questions across politics, religion, culture, and more.
I recommend you read the monologue and scan through the questions and dig deeper into the questions over time. You may want to come back to this letter a couple times.
Let me know in the comments how you liked the live conversation, and if you want me to do more of these in the future.
Part I — Opening Monologue: The LA Race & How to Reason About Fraud
(0:00) So, I originally decided I wanted to do this because of the Spencer Pratt LA mayoral race. This is one of those topics that, first of all, is really near and dear to my heart — because right now I’m in Medellín, Colombia. It’s kind of a mouthful to say, Medellín, Colombia, but I’ve lived in LA for 12 years. Right now I’ve left, just for my own personal life fulfillment and to explore and to travel, and I plan on going back to LA. But frankly, if LA’s management doesn’t change, I don’t know that I will.
The reason I share that is because, emotionally, I am with a lot of you in my audience. Many people in my audience are right-leaning — I’m aware of that. Many are people who may have shifted from the left to feeling politically homeless. And many are fellow Angelenos who are also frustrated with the state of the state and the city.
(1:00) With all that said — as someone who put out multiple videos advocating for Spencer Pratt, believing that he’s the direction we need in order to bring more balance and rational, common-sense policy to California and to LA — what I’m noticing in the discussion around the LA electoral race is that people are not holding a very high standard for accusations.
To give you the analogy: if you go to a court of law, you can’t just accuse people of things and get it heard in court. You need a strong body of evidence to even get heard by the judge in the first place. Why is that? Because it takes a lot more energy to defend against a claim than it takes to make a claim. Unfortunately, in the court of public opinion, we don’t have such a high standard. It’s very easy to accuse people of things based on pretty much nothing. And I know this as someone who gets talked about online and has seen people make stuff up about me.
(2:03) What happens is people will often make a claim about something based on an emotion, or on the fact that they can’t explain it.
This is called making an argument from incredulity — it’s a philosophical term. An argument from incredulity basically looks like: “Hey, I don’t understand how something works, therefore something nefarious is going on.” Or: “I can’t explain this anomaly, therefore it must be evidence of malevolence.” Said in simpler terms: people get suspicious, and they use that suspicion as itself an argument.
I’m not doing this stream to tell you not to be suspicious. To be absolutely clear: there are anomalies in the LA electoral race. And just so it’s also said — there absolutely is fraud in the LA mayoral race. We pretty much know there’s fraud, because in almost any complex system (and election systems are some of the most complex out there, at a scale of millions of people), things are going to go wrong. People are going to cheat. There’s going to be fraud. So if you see a video of homeless people on Skid Row saying they were paid to vote for Karen Bass or Nithya Raman — yeah, I could believe that.
(3:17) The question here is not whether there’s fraud in the electoral system. The question is: what is the degree of fraud, and is it enough to swing an election? That’s the actual thing we’re having a discussion about. What’s happening in the public discourse is that people are taking a bunch of social media clips and screenshots of things that don’t make sense, out of context, and saying, “See, I knew it — the election is being stolen.”
(3:47) But I actually want to back up a little bit. How did we even get to the point where people are making this accusation in the first place? Well, June 2nd is LA’s election day — that’s when people go to the booths and vote in person. But that’s not the only time voting happens in LA, because people can sometimes submit mail-in ballots. In 2020, during COVID, the mail-in ballot system was expanded nationwide, including in LA. The rationalization, the justification, was that people don’t want to vote in person because of COVID, so we need to make it easier to vote by mail. I understand that rationale, but unfortunately it results in a system that isn’t as intuitively trustworthy.
If you layer on top of that the fact that we don’t have voter ID in California, most people look at the system and say, “Well, how can this possibly be secure if you’re not even required to show ID when you go to the voting booth?” I think that’s a very rational concern, and it’s part of the reason I think we really need voter ID in California. Not because the system is fundamentally easy to defraud — I’ll talk about the safeguards they have in a second — but because it’s difficult for the system to be easy for the layman to trust. You bring ID to buy alcohol, you bring ID to go to a bar; how is it that you don’t need ID to vote in an election? It doesn’t intuitively instill a lot of trust in people.
(5:12) Now, in California — and I’m not saying this is a sufficient solution — it’s important to know they have other safeguards in the system. One of them (and this gets into some of the things people don’t understand but are calling evidence of fraud) is called vote curing. Vote curing is a process by which a bunch of people — I believe by hand, but maybe by machine too; I think a lot of it is actually done by hand — look at someone’s record of signatures on official government documents. They look at the signature you used when you signed up to vote. So let’s say I moved to California in 2014 and registered to vote in 2014. They’d look at the signature on my voter registration from 2014 and compare it against the signature on my ballot in 2026. If there’s a big discrepancy between the original and the new signature, they go through a curing process: they notify you as the voter — “Hey, there’s a discrepancy large enough that we’re not willing to accept your vote.” But you have, I think, three weeks to cure. “Cure” just means you have to reconcile the difference between the signature we have on file and the one you just gave us.
What does that mean? It means it’s actually pretty hard to introduce fraud into that part of the system. If I have a signature from ten years ago, even if someone’s trying to impersonate me, unless they know what my signature looks like — which is possible; someone could go through my mail and try to find evidence of my signature — they need to actually match my signature to the one I submitted to the county registrar years ago. So that’s one of the safeguards in place. Again, I’m not saying it’s necessary nor sufficient for safety or public trust. But I’m telling you this because people are taking the fact that certain voters in LA got notified that their ballot was not accepted as evidence of fraud. No — it’s not necessarily evidence of fraud. It’s actually a very normal part of the process that happens all the time. Does that make sense so far? Cool.
(7:34) The reason I’m saying this is because yesterday I saw a post go viral on X — millions of views, tens of thousands of likes — claiming that 18,000 votes, mostly or maybe even all for Spencer Pratt, were not accepted, as more evidence of fraud. No, that’s not what that means. What it means is that those votes didn’t have matching signatures and therefore need to be cured through the normal process. On top of that, the post said 18,000 votes were not accepted — I don’t know how they got that number. And in fact, the LA County Registrar on X (which is actually kind of cool) replied directly to that post saying, “No, these numbers are made up. We don’t even know where you got them.” Maybe those numbers are true, but the person didn’t even cite their source.
I’m mentioning this because on social media there is zero standard for making an accusation. You can find someone making claims about absolutely everything. And I, as someone who’s in the business of being a thought leader and an influencer, know how easy it is to selectively frame something to fit your narrative. It’s incredibly easy — because most people (and this is not a slight on any of us as individuals; it’s collective human behavior) are busy. These things are complicated. It’s overwhelming. We don’t like uncertainty; we want certainty. So rather than saying, “Hey, I genuinely don’t know — let me wait for an investigation,” we’d rather get information across our feed that makes us feel validated, that makes us feel like I’m right and they’re wrong and they’re evil and the Democrats (or “Demonrats,” as I call them) are stealing the election and I knew it. We’d rather get information that quickly fills the gap and confirms our bias than actually look for the proper information.
That was one of those posts — where literally the only information was a screenshot of someone whose ballot needed to be cured. There was no evidence that 18,000 such ballots existed, and no evidence those ballots were primarily for Spencer Pratt. I’m painting this as an example — not because the point is to address every single accusation; I can’t do that and I’m not here to do that — but to help you see how gaps in our understanding of complex systems can make things appear a lot more suspicious than they need to be, once we actually understand how the system works. So again: it is actually normal in California for votes to get rejected because the signatures don’t match, and that’s actually a feature of the system to prevent fraud. And if the signatures don’t match, the person who submitted the vote has an opportunity to fix it.
(10:22) Which leads me to my second point: why does it take so long in California to count votes? Again, I’m not saying it’s a proper system — I think we need voter ID, and especially given this election, I think the whole process needs to be a lot faster than a month. But part of the reason it takes so long is mail-in ballots. In California, even though election day is June 2nd, people have until June 2nd to actually send their mail. When someone sends their mail, the post office does something called postmarking. I don’t know if it’s the date they receive the mail or the date it’s sent, but basically it has to be postmarked by June 2nd. Which means — if we’re doing the math — if someone is a liberal, progressive, far-left college student from California currently studying at Harvard (and I knew plenty of those students), and they waited until the last minute to vote, because that’s what students do — they procrastinate — those votes are not coming in on June 2nd. They’re coming in days or even weeks after, but as long as they’re postmarked by June 2nd, they’re still valid.
So if you have a vote-curing process and a process by which people can submit a ballot that doesn’t arrive until after election day, you actually don’t get the full picture on June 2nd. That’s why things are a bit misleading.
I’m actually guilty of jumping to conclusions on election day. I got swept up in the hype. I was excited. I thought Spencer Pratt had secured top two. I even made a casual video on the street saying I was wrong — he did not secure top two. I was ignorant as to how this system worked. So I had the same question many people had: how can someone be in the lead at first and then fall behind later?
[Aside: the lighting’s not very good here, so as pretty as the background is, we’re going to switch it up so you can see me. There — see my face? Good. So I’m not shrouded in shadows. Election fraud and integrity, without me being in shadow too.]
So I didn’t even understand how the system worked — and I’m someone who lived in California for 12 to 13 years. But when I researched it, I concluded: okay, I think the system is needlessly complex. I understand why people don’t trust it. But no, it’s not dead simple to defraud — it actually requires a significant amount of work. And if you factor in that mail-in ballots disproportionately favor progressives — and not just progressives, but the far left — think about who a democratic-socialist message resonates with (Nithya Raman is a democratic socialist). It resonates with young college students, especially the kind going out of state for an Ivy League education at a liberal arts school; or renters who aren’t voting on election day because they find it difficult to take time off work; or in-state students who think going to a polling booth on election day is lame, so they’ll just vote by mail if they vote at all. Those are the kinds of people who vote by mail.
The kind of people who vote on election day are, in California at least, generally a bit better off — often homeowners, retirees, or self-employed people who find it easier to go to the booth and who feel it’s their civic duty. Layer on that the fact that a lot of Spencer Pratt’s voters are anti-establishment people who feel really frustrated. Think about Spencer Pratt’s whole story: the guy lost his home and his parents’ home. He’s angry. He’s part of a resistance movement. The people who resonate with that are the kind who go vote on election day. So that’s when you’d expect the highest concentration of Pratt voters — election day, June 2nd, in person. Obviously not all of them, but the point is: the composition of voters on election day is different from the composition of voters after election day. As a general rule, the further away you get from election day, the further to the left you get.
Honestly, in hindsight, maybe it’d be better if they didn’t even release results until after they’ve counted all the ballots — so there’s not this whiplash. Because I get it. People got whiplash. I got whiplash too. People get excited, then really disappointed, then they look for answers, then they say “fraud.”
(15:30) A second thing: I think people — maybe especially outside California — have an image of California being very liberal, and LA certainly is, but I don’t think people quite understand just how liberal it is. I really started to understand that when I went through my own political identity shift in 2024. I was a default Democrat. It was kind of like demographics was destiny: I’m Black, I was born in New York, I worked in tech, I lived in California — odds are I was going to vote Democrat. Then I went through my own awakening, or maturation, whatever you want to call it, and 2024 was the first year I voted Republican. That is very socially risky in LA. Even to this day, you don’t advertise that you voted for Trump. In fact, there was a story going around — and maybe this isn’t true, so feel free to fact-check me — where I think an old guy wearing a MAGA hat got assaulted, possibly in California, and tragically he died. That’s not normal, it’s obviously an extreme, but it shows you: California isn’t only very blue, it’s very anti-Trump — LA specifically, very anti-Trump. Only about 15% of registered voters in LA are registered Republicans. So it’s actually really surprising that Spencer Pratt was ahead at any point in the race.
Again, I’m not saying that fact defeats any claim of fraud, and I’ll continue to address specific claims. I’m pointing it out because your perception determines your reality. If Spencer hadn’t been leading, people would’ve said, “Well, California is just a liberal cesspool and far-left socialists are taking over the state” — which, by the way, is true. The democratic socialists actually are gaining ground in California. They’ve been quietly eating up legislative seats and local governments in cities and neighborhoods within LA. They’re very organized. I’m saying that descriptively. Normatively, I actually think that’s a big problem. But California hasn’t just been liberal — it’s getting more liberal, and is very anti-Trump.
(18:04) And depending on how you feel, you may or may not like this, but Spencer Pratt reminds a lot of people of Trump. Even if you look at the résumé, there are things in common: he was in television, had a reality TV show, and a lot of people associate Trump with reality TV and The Apprentice. They’re both boisterous. They both make big claims. They’re both very good marketers, very charismatic. They’re both white. They’re both aligned with the right. A lot of people associate Pratt with Trump. Trump even endorsed Pratt. So if you’re in an area that’s only 15% Republican — where we just went through this whole ICE thing a year ago, all this inflammation over the ICE raids, people really upset about it in California, with Gavin Newsom running the state and his full-time job basically being to resist Trump — the demographics just don’t favor Pratt here. It’s remarkable, and it actually gave me hope, that he received as much support as he did. From the perspective of demographics, it’s not surprising that he’s not advancing.
But again — when you see “it looks like he’s going to advance” and then all of a sudden he’s not, and you don’t understand the mechanics of how voting works in California, it can be really frustrating. And, understandably, given the bad marriage that America is in — where Democrats and Republicans can’t talk to each other, the left and right are calling each other evil, and it feels impossible to agree on anything these days — it’s understandable how people fill the gap.
(19:52) Now, the next thing I want to talk about — because this is one of the things people are using to fill the gap — is the situation with homelessness. Recently there have been videos going viral of homeless people on Skid Row saying they were paid, in some cases to vote for Karen Bass; one guy I watched said he was given a choice between Nithya Raman and Karen Bass. To be super clear: that needs to be investigated and prosecuted if true. Period. If there’s any fraud, it doesn’t matter if it’s one vote or a million votes — it needs to be investigated and prosecuted. I’m glad there are investigations being done. That’s a good thing. But it is not the same thing as tens or hundreds of thousands of votes being manipulated to swing an election.
(20:47) There’s a logical fallacy I want you all to be aware of that we’re all guilty of sometimes — called the base rate fallacy. A non-political example to make it clear: autonomous vehicles are available now. If you own a Tesla, maybe you’ve tried Full Self-Driving. I own a Cybertruck — I absolutely love the feature; I drive with Full Self-Driving 95% of the time. (This ad is not sponsored by Elon Musk.) When autonomous vehicles first started getting onto the market, people freaked out, saying things like, “What if it kills someone?” And here’s the truth: autonomous vehicles will kill people. That’s going to happen. The question is not will things go wrong — it’s how frequently will they go wrong, and is that more or less often than with a human driver? When there’s a story about someone getting killed by a human driver, it happens often enough that, tragic as it is, it probably won’t even make the news. But if it’s a Tesla on Full Self-Driving that kills someone, what do you think happens? It’s broadcast everywhere — because it has the most emotional content. People feel a lot more upset over a robot killing a person than a human killing a person, even though robots are much safer drivers than humans, and having everyone drive autonomously would save many, many lives.
What people do is commit the base rate fallacy: they look at the most inflammatory thing and use it as evidence of a broader trend, overestimating how often something is happening. That’s what I suspect — I don’t know, but I suspect — is happening with this homeless case. Look, it’s possible there are tens of thousands of homeless people who were all approached by Democrats or socialists and paid off for votes. It’s possible. But you need evidence — not just instance, but frequency. One instance of something happening when there are millions of people in a complex system is very far from evidence that the system itself is fundamentally bankrupt.
(23:29) I mention this because someone yesterday pinged me, in response to one of the things I was saying, and said, “Well, the Heritage Foundation found evidence of fraud.” For those who don’t know, the Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank — and California is liberal — so Heritage has a strong motivation to own the libs and find something wrong in the system. They did, I think, a decade-long study (and admittedly I have to double-check this, but I believe it’s roughly true) of voting fraud in California, and they found a few dozen to maybe low hundreds of cases. What I’m saying is: of course there are instances of fraud, and every single time they happen they need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law — not because “there’s only a little fraud so it doesn’t matter.” No — even the perception of fraud is a huge issue, which is again a reason you need voter ID. It’s not just the system being good; it’s people believing the system is good that matters.
That said — if you were in a court of law, you wouldn’t prosecute someone based on a video of a few homeless people saying they were paid off. You’d say, “Okay, this is evidence, but you need more corroborating evidence to demonstrate scale.” But on social media, we’re not doing that.
(24:50) This is the piece where I want to invite some self-reflection, because it’s easy to say we’re all committed to truth. And at some level, we all want the truth. But we also like to feel like we’re right. When you have a bad marriage where you’ve been fighting for years, and legitimately the other side has done things that are really hurtful, and you can’t explain something — “Oh, you were gone for a few hours, where were you? Were you cheating?” — that’s basically the situation America is in right now. The default is massive amounts of suspicion with low amounts of evidence. That is not a healthy way to conduct a democracy, my friends. It’s a really destructive way. And we’re watching it play out over and over. We could say it’s the media’s fault, or the politicians’ fault — but it’s our fault. It’s our fault when a post goes viral on X that says 18,000 votes were rejected, doesn’t mention how vote curing works, doesn’t cite any sources, and gets millions of views — while the LA County Registrar (which, by the way, has bipartisan watchdog commissions; they literally have Republicans watching people count votes and Democrats watching people count votes — that’s one of the safeguards) replies saying “these numbers are made up, we don’t even know where you got them,” and that reply only gets a few thousand views and a few hundred likes. That’s the situation we’re in.
I think people are now aware of all the issues with politicians, and aware of all the issues with the media. I think people are only becoming aware of all the issues with social media. Social media is so confusing. It is dumbing us down. It’s dividing us, creating so much confusion, giving us information in fragments with no gatekeeping. The benefit of no gatekeeping is that if the gatekeepers are hiding the truth, you can get the truth through social media. But along with the truth, you also get a lot of garbage. And that’s what I’m seeing around this — a lot of garbage and a lot of snippets people hold onto, saying, “Well, this confirms my existing belief, and it’s true, and if you think it’s not, well, you have to prove it to me.” No. The first thing we should do when we get any piece of information is prove it’s true to ourselves. That’s very time-consuming. It’s hard. I don’t expect all of you to do what I do — all day I’m talking to AI, double-checking things, checking primary sources to see if information I’m accepting into my mind is true. But this is my job. I like to think of it as a mission, not a job. Most people don’t have time to do that, and that’s okay. But the degree of confidence you have in something should be proportional to the amount of time you’ve actually spent investigating it. If you haven’t spent much time, that’s okay — but we all need to adopt some intellectual humility.
Because we’re scrolling a feed where it’s videos of naked girls dancing, then cats fighting, then more bikinis, then a crypto ad, then an ad about how evil the Democrats are, then an ad about how evil Trump is, then maybe a useful piece of information — all jumbled up. We’re mixing information with entertainment and calling ourselves informed. This is what I’ve been trying to say, and it’s why I wanted to do this livestream. Honestly, I got overwhelmed — like, I don’t even know how to address all these pieces of partial information people have.
(28:51) Which brings me to another thing. People are going around saying there’s a statistical impossibility around Spencer Pratt not advancing. Specifically, they’re talking about a screenshot from an Associated Press news feed that showed Nithya Raman and Karen Bass getting all of the vote and Spencer Pratt getting none. That screenshot has gone viral. You know what screenshot is not going viral? The screenshot of the same feed 60 seconds later, with an updated count for that same batch of votes, that actually showed Spencer Pratt getting over 21,000 of the votes in that batch — actually the plurality of that batch. So in that batch he got more votes, and what happened was a mistake in the reporting, updated 60 seconds later.
(29:48) I’m not here to call people out or name names, because this is a collective problem. But do you think the influencers who took that first screenshot and said “this is evidence of the election being stolen” showed you the second clip? No. Let me clue you in on something about making a living off social media: you don’t have an incentive to tell the truth. It sucks to say, but it’s true. You don’t have an incentive to lay out complex, nuanced thoughts. You don’t have an incentive to make something that takes 30 minutes to read. You have an incentive to make something that takes three seconds to read, that confirms what people already think — even if it’s not true — and evokes an emotional reaction, because emotional reactions are what get shared. Emotional reactions get views. Views get money and sponsors and clout and status and invites to parties with other influencers and cool stuff. That’s how this industry works. I’m sorry to say it. And you should take no one’s word at face value — including my own.
Me, I take a long time to make my videos. It took me like five hours to make a three-minute video. Frankly, it’s exhausting. That’s part of why I’m starting to write more — I can’t keep up with the pace of this stuff. But the alternative is for me to do less work and have quicker takes that aren’t as well researched and just feed into a tribe, because that would make me more money. It would. I’m no special person — I like money, I like the things money buys me in life. The reason I don’t do it isn’t because I’m some special good person. It’s because I would hate myself if I knew I was putting out work beneath my standard. That’s why I don’t do it. Everyone has a different standard, and no one’s standard is truly transparent to us. People are complex. I’m not saying there are evil influencers lying to you intentionally. Life is hard. Life is confusing. Everyone’s trying to do what they think is right and make it by.
(31:55) But one of the things we really lost when we lost trust in mainstream media — and again, it’s partially the mainstream media’s fault, but we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater — is credentialing and peer review and group fact-checking, the kinds of things that happen in organizations because people have accountability. It’s not just some guy with an anime avatar posting stuff. People have jobs and careers and have to stake their reputation on it. Does mainstream media get things wrong sometimes? Yeah. Does it straight up lie sometimes? Yeah. Does it selectively frame stuff all the time? Yes. But at least mainstream media can be sued for libel and slander. How do you do that with some anonymous person posting from Bangladesh behind an anime avatar? How do you even know the account you’re hearing from is in America, or even who they say they are?
I’m not saying this to make you feel like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe anything ever.” I think the solution is for us all to have more intellectual humility and open-mindedness — and to start from the assumption (back to the argument from incredulity) that if you don’t understand something, it doesn’t mean something bad is happening. It means you need to first try to understand why it’s happening. And then, if even the best explanation doesn’t explain it, you do investigations, you get more evidence, and eventually you get to the point of, “Okay, now we know something is being done, and we know it’s at a scale that flips an election.” But personally, I haven’t seen that. I get a lot of links and videos from people. One three-minute video of people talking to homeless people on Skid Row is not proof that tens of thousands of votes were flipped. It’s the beginning of an investigation, an inquiry that we should do. That’s how we need to think about this. We need to all be judicious. It’s a shared responsibility.
(34:01) One of the things about modernity is we have more freedom than ever. You have the entire corpus of human knowledge at your fingertips immediately. People can order food from everywhere on the planet on Postmates and have it at their door in 20 minutes. People can hop on a dating app, swipe, and be connected in minutes with someone who might become their future spouse or just a companion. We have so much freedom — and that means we also need responsibility, because freedom without responsibility is chaos. That’s what we’re experiencing right now: chaos in our information landscape. We’re all confused, and we need to admit that. Because if we start by admitting it, we can actually start to have conversations and tap into the real network that matters — the human network. That’s how people used to make sense of things: by talking to human beings, eye to eye, hand to hand, and creating a shared sense of reality. But we don’t have that. We have a loneliness epidemic in America. People aren’t talking to each other in person; instead they’re talking online, more allied with their tribe online than with their neighbor — they don’t even know who their neighbor is.
(35:15) So I just want us to be more self-reflective about where we’re getting emotionally overcharged when we actually don’t have a strong argument yet — we just have a feeling. It’s okay; everyone has feelings. I told you how I was excited about Spencer Pratt and now I’m disappointed. But the more upset we are, the more skeptical we should be of our own position, because our minds are constantly being assaulted by people vying for influence and attention over us. So stay on guard. Richard Feynman, a physicist, once said: “The first thing you need to understand is that you must not allow yourself to be fooled — and you are the easiest person to fool.” I like to say: you’re the easiest person for you to fool. If we proceeded from that, we’d start with a lot more humility and a lot less anger, and we could actually solve problems a lot more quickly — because problems are just not getting solved in this country right now, and it’s really frustrating.
(36:19) So — did I answer everything? Give me a second; I feel like there might be more claims I want to address before I move off this point. What did we cover? We covered the blue shift — that’s what they call it in politics: the trend of LA mail-in ballots favoring progressives. We talked about why Spencer Pratt had more votes on election day and then lost share afterward. We talked about the vote-curing process and the signatures — that no, they’re not just throwing out votes; if the registration signature doesn’t match the signature at time of voting, those votes get sent back to the voter, who has a chance to cure and submit a proper signature. We talked about people selectively taking screenshots and not giving you context.
Oh — and voter ID. I want to reiterate this, because I think it’s kind of the crux of a lot of people’s argument, and I get it, but it’s not a complete argument: the absence of voter ID does not mean there are no safeguards. It means there are other safeguards, which you still might not think are sufficient, but which are more opaque, more complicated, and harder to trust. I understand that — but it does not release us of our responsibility to understand what those safeguards are if we’re going to make accusations.
(37:46) And here, I want to steelman the argument for fraud. If people are going to say there’s fraud, the claim would be that between election day, June 2nd, and roughly a week after (because within that one-week period is when Spencer Pratt started losing his lead), somehow the Democratic establishment and/or the Democratic Socialists of America garnered tens of thousands of fraudulent votes, got them through the system, got them past bipartisan watchdogs, and somehow got them postmarked by June 2nd — which would mean they needed one or more corrupt post offices to postmark those votes by June 2nd. Or, if you think homeless people were involved, they would’ve needed to get tens of thousands of votes from homeless people, postmark them by June 2nd, and submit them so they’d be counted after June 2nd — after they knew Spencer Pratt already had a lead.
That would be the argument — but hopefully you can see there are a bunch of vulnerabilities in it. One: if you were going to corrupt the election and you know everything needs to be postmarked by June 2nd, how exactly do you get the votes after June 2nd rather than before? If you have an operation sophisticated enough to get tens of thousands of votes between June 2nd and June 9th, wouldn’t you need to get them all before? In which case, why would Spencer Pratt ever even appear to be leading? Low-probability events happen all the time, because there are billions of people on the planet, trillions of interactions every day, and lots of entropy in the universe. But part of thinking clearly is being able to consider a multitude of options and assign probabilities. And the probability that there was massive fraud, executed in a way that had Spencer Pratt appear to be leading and then got overtaken within days after he established his lead — that probability is really, really low. Extraordinary claims like that require extraordinary proof. None of what I’ve seen so far is extraordinary proof. It’s proof that there should be some inquiry — and I’m always down for inquiry — but no, it’s not proof that we should hold onto a narrative that this is definitely fraud.
I don’t want you to leave this video thinking, “Kaizen has the answer, and he gave it to us.” No. I want to invite you to reflect and be precise with the arguments. If you’re saying it’s fraud, describe exactly how it happened, describe the degree of difficulty of pulling that off, and then assign a probability. Let’s just think more rigorously. Would this standard of reasoning hold up in a court? Would it even hold up in a Supreme Court with a conservative-leaning panel? No, it wouldn’t. But maybe more evidence comes out, and if it does, I’m happy to update my view. That’s what intellectual humility and honesty require. I don’t have all the answers; we don’t have all the information; let’s wait until we have more. In the meantime, let’s not become so attached to one point of view, suspicious in a way that just validates the suspicion we had in the beginning.
(41:13) I also want to talk bigger-picture about why people are at this point. The public’s trust has been betrayed time and time again. We were told people weren’t getting censored on social media for conservative viewpoints — they were. We were told the Hunter Biden laptop story wasn’t being suppressed — it was. We were told the COVID Wuhan lab-leak theory was just a bunch of conspiracy theories by crazies — it wasn’t. Time and again, public trust has been breached. And just like in a relationship, if someone keeps lying to you, you adopt a posture of suspicion — not because it means they’re always lying, but because you want to protect yourself; you don’t want to get hurt again. It’s a very normal human reaction. But we have to think in terms of probabilities, and recognize that just because a low-probability event happened in the past doesn’t mean a specific low-probability event is going to happen in the future.
(42:29) Okay, guys. I think that’s it. We’ve ripped for like 45 minutes on this topic. Maybe you’re exhausted hearing about it. Frankly, I don’t want to talk about this topic again. I’m disappointed Spencer Pratt lost. I’m frustrated that LA — the city can burn and still people would vote for not just Karen Bass, but someone even more far to the left of her. I’m not surprised. I don’t even know if I’m going to go back to California, honestly. Certainly don’t want to buy property there. Maybe I’ll go back as a renter. But despite all that, I think we still have to be principled in our analysis, and I just want to invite you into a different way of thinking about this.
Part II — Audience Q&A
(43:09) Okay, let’s get to some of the questions. Some of you are paid subscribers, and I appreciate you for your support — I want to get to as many questions as I can before I have to log off. We’re going to give it about another 30 to 45 minutes. It’s really hot outside; I’m sweating. But let’s do this. I wanted a pretty backdrop, not my bedroom in this rental, so let’s do this outside and do it live.
We’ll start with the earliest questions first, to reward those who submitted early. And I’m sorry I don’t have the names of the people who submitted questions — I actually don’t know if people want their names associated with a question. Maybe it’s for the best, because in politics people can get attacked for any random thing. I certainly know that, and I don’t want to expose viewers to that. So I don’t have your names, but I appreciate you asking, and if you asked a question, that means you’re a paid subscriber, and I appreciate the support.
From here, I answer 25 questions from paid subscribers, including:
What are the bedrock set of behaviors to which an individual in, say, the United States must conform — or else be seen as an enemy of civilization?
How do parents respond effectively when their kids come home from high school and college and accuse them of ruining the world — racism and capitalism?
What’s your take on gun control? I know this is a radioactive topic and I’m looking for validation from a clear thinker.
Will reparations help make things more equitable?
Where are you currently on your faith journey? Do you wholeheartedly believe in the story of the resurrection of Jesus? Have you read the book “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist”?
For many reasons, I believe that in the end we cannot share this country with people who hate its very existence and refuse to see anything good in it. Consequently, I believe some sort of secession movement will take hold in the end, as most of us do not want to go down with the ship the left will inevitably create. Do you think this is inevitable?
Why is there no appreciable progress on an immigration policy that will make sense? Or are we just ignorant about the policy in place, and that’s okay?
