Episode 1063 Scott Adams - Cognitive Dissonance in Trump Haters, Mask Science, Protests

hey everybody come on in gather around it's time for coffee with scott adams but you knew that that's why you're here for the best part of the day the part that makes everything better yeah now if you're new to this it doesn't take much all it takes is a copper bug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein a canteen jugger flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the dopamine hit of the day the unparalleled pleasure the thing that makes everything better including the coronavirus the economy racism protests you name it it's all better with one sip go my white blood cell count is climbing i can feel it well the biggest news in the world might be the rain in china because it's raining so hard that the so-called three gorges dam which uh is pretty big dam it's damn big might actually break which is a really big deal a super big deal so this would be a disaster uh on a level that would be hard to even calculate it looks like it might happen and one of the risks is that our the factories that make pharmaceuticals for this country are in the flood zone so there's a non-zero chance that the pharmaceutical industry will get wiped out this week so we got that to look forward to um but let's hope that doesn't happen i would guess that the chinese are working very hard to relocate anything that can be relocated so maybe they'll prepare in time let's see portland it's the 50th night of protests with fires and big visual things check out cnn.com to find all the stories and the pictures the fires the protesters nothing if you look at the right hand column on cnn.com those are the stories they don't want you to see so it's over there is just one line of text portland protesters no picture so it's pretty clear that that at least cnn doesn't want you to see those pictures but i don't think that even fox news is playing it up so i think there's some kind of agreement not to show these protests and i would love to know the real story behind that all right uh i announced today that i'm going to start blocking anybody who argues that the science has proven face masks won't help against the coronavirus okay so don't say you weren't warned you could you could have your opinion and you can tell other people but here's here's my reasoning um i'm not a scientist and i can't tell you definitively whether masks work or make things worse but i can tell you that if you're also not a scientist and you go on and say definitively the sciences proof and mass don't work i don't want you in my world now okay because that just hasn't happened this is not true if it's true that you've never seen the studies including yesterday in the wall street journal showing that face masks make a gigantic improvement if you've never seen those studies then why not i mean i've seen both the ones that say they work and the one they don't and i've seen lots of them lots of studies that say they don't work lots of studies to say they do if you haven't seen both you shouldn't have an opinion so i'm only blocking people who are not aware of half of the world i'm not i'm not blocking you because of your opinion i'm blocking you because it's been long enough right you know in the beginning it makes sense that you haven't been exposed to all the information but now there's no excuse at this point if you are not aware that major publications are reporting that face masks even the the casual kind do make a big difference even if they're wrong all right this is important even if they're wrong if you don't if you're not aware of it that's a problem all right so i just and i'm so bored by it uh i guess i'm bored that people think that if they send me yet one more study from the past to say it doesn't work that that will be the one study that that changes my mind and and makes me be irrational it just doesn't work that way all right so that was just my personal frustration probably had nothing to do with you so here's a question i've been asking just because the the answers are funny to me it goes like this after three and a half plus years of trump three and a half years i guess is right after three and a half years of trump we don't have to wonder what he'll do wrong because you've got three and a half years to look at it so i like asking people can you tell me what is the worst thing he's done wrong in your opinion and here's why it's so funny number one the answers are all over the place what if i taught you um that you should assume is true if there's one question and people are all on the same side saying oh trump is bad trump is bad so in that sense they're very unified unified trump is bad now give me your top reason or top three or four and you'll see their top three or four reasons are first of all different which is weird because they're all on the same side wouldn't they all have the for the same top reason or maybe the top three would be sort of similar but in a different order but wouldn't people have the same reasons and here's what's funny the top reason at the moment is of course going to be his coronavirus response but let me ask you this didn't people have exactly the same idea about getting rid of trump before the coronavirus even happened their their opinions of why trump should leave are identical now to what they were all they've done is changed the reasons whenever you see this situation where somebody keeps their point of view but the reason for it keeps changing it's not a real reason all right if they added new reasons then you'd have something it's like all my old reasons are true and i've added a few more but my top number one reason that hasn't changed it's always the same but i have added a few more things that would sound reasonable but if you're complaining that your number one thing is is coronavirus response even if it wasn't good you have to ask yourself wait a minute have they just added a new reason to something that was just they'd already decided and now they're just adding reasons you know the oh my new my new top reason is this happens to be in the news this week but i i started collecting some of the answers because they're they're funny in a certain way they're funny in a certain way in that first of all it got more attention than i thought it would uh and this morning uh people who weighed in on this question included brian brian stelter selter stelter you know from cnn so brian stelter weighed in with with the critics uh also uh dave isikoff weighed in and matt negrin who apparently has taken over on the msnbc and msnbc show hardball so all three of these people are sort of weighing in on the side of the people saying hey yes here are all the things that trump has done wrong all right so here's the list of things that trump has done wrong now remember this is a big decision it's a big decision to get rid of a president or to vote for a new president so here are the reasons he downplayed the risk of the coronavirus to increase his odds of a china trade deal he downplayed the risk of the coronavirus to increase his odds of a china trade deal so the first thing wrong with this analysis is that he puts it in some kind of a personal sense because i'm pretty sure that the president negotiating with china was sort of intended for the benefit of the whole country it's really not just something he did for himself and it's just funny to hear anybody talking about that way no the china trade deal wasn't about the country that was just about himself okay all right let's let's take that a little further and he uses and this critic uses word downplaying the risk did the president downplay the risk or did he balance the risk was he balancing competing interests by saying well the economy is important a trade deal is important and coronavirus are important too but it's not a case of one of them is the only thing that matters it's balanced so isn't the president's job to balance the risks but for this critic if you balance the risk you can call it downplaying the risk and all he did was substitute a word for my word and turned a reasonable thing into an unreasonable sounding thing even though it's the same thing let me state these two things with just different words my wording is the president balanced the risks of the economy the trade deals which are part of the economy and the health he balanced them when i use the word balance that sounds true right because he wasn't saying one of them is the only important thing he never said the economy is the only thing he never said the coronavirus is the only thing he balanced them now did he balance him correctly well that's not really the complaint the complaint is he downplayed it all this critic did was replace my word balance with downplayed but nothing nothing was different it was still the same thing you can't you can't turn a good thing into a bad thing by changing one of the words that's not a thing but if you can imagine that this person is a professional writer for the atlantic maybe you understand what's going on here's the number two thing on the list of things that trump got wrong on the coronavirus he mocked the virus in february that's right he was mean to the virus he mocked it he mocked the virus what exactly did that cause do you remember when you were feeling good and then ow ow i've got a headache what's causing my headache and then you find out it's because the president mocked the virus that probably didn't happen right or you went out to start your car oh god my car isn't starting did the president mock the virus again there's no connecting tissue between the the biggest complaints about what what the president did and anything in the real world which is what makes it funny complete disconnect from the real world so that's the number two issue here's number three screwing up the european travel ban in march and then there was a detail given that uh there was a news article saying that by giving a two-day notice about the travel ban in europe it caused all the flights to load up and people quickly traveled to get ahead of the band and then and of course some of them had virus and brought it into the country now i ask you this what was the way he was supposed to do a travel ban do you think the people who quickly got on planes in that two-day window do you think that they were leaving the country that they lived in not knowing if they could get home or was it a case that people were simply going home because they knew they were going to be there for a while how exactly were you supposed to prevent people from going home how exactly was that going to work and moreover in what world are flights not already pretty much all booked have when before the coronavirus how often were you on a flight that wasn't pretty much fully booked it was kind of rare right so how much difference did two days make when the only difference was going from pretty much full to actually full and those people probably would have had to be repatriated to their countries anyway so i don't know that you could make a case that that could have been done better or differently i don't know what the better would look like if you don't say what would the alternative look like you haven't really criticized the very minimum for a criticism is to say you did x if you had done y you know and somebody else did y you could see that that was a better result but we don't have anything like that we just have people taking their best shot at stuff and maybe some of it was imperfect here's another one he sidelined the cdc in april what does that mean what does it mean to sideline the cdc was the cdc the ones who told us that well i won't go through the list but the cdc was not exactly bathed in glory during this and what does it mean to sideline them i don't know what that means refusing to advocate for mass in may or june what difference would that have made what difference would it make because trump has never said masks don't work and he has allowed his experts to tell you that they do work so trump allows his experts to tell you they work and then he sort of leaves it to the states because that's the system of government we have if he had done more than what he did would he not be called a dictator right now because he's forcing the states to do things and the states didn't want to do it i don't know if he had that option did he have that option um i would agree that he could say more about masks but he's not he's not stopping his experts from telling you you should wear them have you ever seen that there's nothing like that he's letting the science talk and then he's telling you what he's doing could he do a better job of modeling behavior i would say yes but i don't know that you could necessarily say you'd notice the difference in what people did and then something about blocking testing funding in july i don't know what that was but it sounds like fake news it sounds like when you hear somebody blocked of funding and then you dig down it's usually something more along the lines of it was supposed to be in another bill or this bill had some things in it that didn't belong or or you know we were going to do it a different way or something like that this is probably fake news i never even heard of that one but i don't think that we have a testing i don't think we have a funding limit on testing do we i've never heard that before anyway uh here's some other things that that are complaints he turned america from a shining hill of hope to a laughingstock do you do you feel that when you wake up do you wake up in the morning you're like oh i just realized again i'm not on a shining hill of hope i did not wake up in a shiny hill of hope my country is a laughingstock what because justin trudeau was giggling at that that one meeting that time does justin trudeau not take our phone calls anymore if we call bulgaria and say bulgaria we want to do a trade deal do they say no you are not a shiny hill of hope you are laughing stock now i will not do a trade deal with you does that happen because i don't think any of this translates into anything real and here's another one uh oh so somebody else i get was this matt negrin who said right no one remembers why he was impeached somebody said that to me i don't know who it was so one of the things you'll notice is that when you ask what trump is doing wrong like what or what has he done wrong you'll get sarcasm instead of reasons so here's a perfect example right no one remembers why he was impeached do you know what my first response to that was why did he get impeached something about ukraine or something the phone call and then i and i say to myself oh the thing that was so unimportant it barely barely held onto my memory and was completely political and was ridiculous and didn't matter anyway even if everything that had been claimed about the president were true what impact none there's really none that i can think of so anyway it's hilarious to ask people to name specifics oh then one of the examples was 11 unemployment rate to which i thought really somebody is criticizing president trump over the current unemployment rate that's like somebody who has never followed the news or something i don't even understand that so everybody who says sweden i might start but start blocking people who mentioned sweden because sweden is just different and we don't know why exactly so sweden is just different we don't know exactly why so if you're making a point with sweden you're not making a point that is really a point all you're saying is there's a country what about estonia i don't know what about estonia we don't know why it worked why it didn't what they exactly did we don't know sweden is no longer an interesting question they're just too many things different uh let me ask you this how many how many countries that regularly supplement with fish oil which has vitamin d are having a bad outcome sweden has heard immunity somebody says no it doesn't i doubt that's true i doubt it's true that they have heard immunity and i doubt they're even close could be i won't say that there's zero chance but it could be so here's a viewpoint that i want to share with you somebody shared with this with me sincerely and because it was sincere i wanted to share with you and see if you feel the same and it goes like this that the wearing of masks while it might have a medical benefit or it might not so this is somebody who's you know at least open to it being beneficial but the larger point is that wearing mass could lead to the breakdown of society and the collapse of the country so the point of view if i can i hope i can express it right because it was worthy of mention so the point of view is that if we're forced to wear masks we lose the thing that connects us as human beings and once you've lost that thing that connects you as humans because covering this much of the face really disconnects you from people that once you do that the social cohesion of the country will be diminished and there and the risk of complete civil war becomes bigger than it would have been now it doesn't mean that it's guaranteed to be a civil war because you wore mass that's not the claim the claim is that the odds of a civil war go up enough by wearing masks that that's a mortal risk and it's enough of a reason not to wear masks what would you say would you would you agree with that statement that wearing masks loses our humanity and our connection to each other sufficiently so that it could cause it would be one factor that might make it more likely for a revolution which would be gigantic expense i would say i don't buy into this at all not even a little bit but i wanted to see if anybody else felt that it feels like the smallest risk in the world but i wanted to see if anybody had a a feeling that oh there's some people who are agreeing so somebody's saying yes i agree true empathy block others saying good grief uh no agree agree so so some people have some sympathy for that view now i don't know that uh that is something that could be tested but just because something can be expressed in words as a risk doesn't mean you should consider it a risk so i'm typically on the view of well you know there's no there's no such thing as zero risk you should at least put some odds on it but that would not extend to something that is so obviously not a risk that maybe you don't need to do the math oh well there's enough of you who think there's something to it let me ask you this do you feel any different i know the people i care about tend to be the people that i see without masks anyway the people i would care about would be my family you know people were close to me i just don't have that feeling i just don't think it's a thing but some of you do so we'll leave it there that's all we can say charles barkley had a public statement on video that was a real echoing what kareem abdul-jabbar said which is uh he was encouraging black people to not be anti-semitic because it works so much against your self-interest because obviously does and and barclay says this directly we can't be prejudiced if we're asking white people to respect us and he says i don't understand how you beat hatred with more hatred so i'm completely on board with charles barkley but listening to him and also to kareem abdul-jabbar it it reminds me that the black community doesn't have a strong leader it's really noticeable isn't it that the black community has lots of concerns that are legitimate but they don't have sort of this one leader you know and you'd think it would be obama but he's kind of you know retired if you will but when i hear somebody like barclay or uh korean abdul jabbar talk out in such a pretty productive way i mean i think this is exactly the most productive way that you could talk i asked myself why can't we get more charles barkley he feel to me he feels like he's really good for the country i'd like to see him have more leadership role there's a new new controversy about roger stone so the controversy is this is the allegation and you can put your own odds of whether this is true and maybe by now we know because i've i turned off my computer a few minutes ago but the allegation is that he was doing a interview with a uh a black disc jockey whose name i don't remember and that allegedly roger stone said when he thought that nobody was listening uh i don't want to argue with this negro now that is allegedly what he said when he thought nobody was hearing on the phone but it was allegedly clearly heard and so when i heard that story i said wow i've got to hear this for myself i've got to hear this for myself so i clicked on the articles i'm looking for the the link where i can listen to it myself and it's not there so i go okay okay maybe there's some reason the new york times doesn't have the link so i go i google it i kinda gotta hear this for myself because it just that doesn't it sounds like the kind of thing that maybe didn't happen you know what i mean so i gotta hear from myself so i go from article to article to article including something by the disc jockey himself with a tweet and i'm looking for the link have has anybody heard it has anybody heard the actual audio because i don't know if we're gonna hear it don't they record all radio shows you think somebody recorded that right so here is my question to you although it is reported it is very clearly said on that audio just remember all the times things have been clear on audio and video and just weren't true so you should have a really big dose of skepticism coming into that story and i would i would encourage this if you don't ever hear it with your own ears it didn't happen if you do hear it with your own ears and other people who are not crazy you say i'm listening to it too and i don't hear it it probably didn't happen so i don't know will we ever hear that video it if it turns out to be a yanni and laurel thing where if you're thinking that you can hear it but if you're not thinking it you can't hear it probably didn't happen it was my guess probably not all right but i wouldn't say for sure nothing for sure there was an amazing campaign video that apparently was not made by the campaign in which a linkin park song was heard and the and i tweeted it because it was just one of the best campaign ads even though the campaign apparently didn't make it because it showed the contrast so there was lots of contrast between the the sparkling bright capitalism that the president promotes versus versus the uh you know the cities falling apart under the democrats it was a great contrast play but it got yanked because that copyright problem which is no surprise all right um oh here's some more things that on the list of things that the president has already done wrong all right treason pandering to putin what was the treason exactly treason who saw treason that sounds imaginary pandering to putin what's the difference between being nice to dictators while you're you know you're attacking them with cyber cyber attacks and you're you're banning their banning their what what are they doing sanctioning them etc anybody who says that the president is pandering to putin is sort of the lowest level of understanding of your environment it's sort of the lowest level because if you don't understand the saying nice things to the dictator while you're negotiating with them while you're trying to make something work is just smarter it's just smarter to be polite to them and you show them a little extra consideration while you're also being tough with them if you don't understand that that's the best way to go you're not you're not much of an observer here are the other complaints nepotism corruption and profiteering what would be some examples of things that hurt you because of any of these imagined things what was it that hurt you i can't think of anything nothing's hurt me uh destruction of institutions of democracy which ones what would be the institutions of democracy that the president destroyed have you noticed that all these complaints about the president are these weird generic hallucinations that don't even have any connection i think the institution was the news do you think the president destroyed the news business is he the one that did that because it looks like the news destroyed itself with their own business model i don't see how you could see it any other way anyway uh hillary's selling our plutonium to russia what's that called that's called just doing business if you believe that that hillary sold our valuable plutonium to russia then you did not understand what happened so first of all the plutonium mines were in the united states if the united states needed plutonium and the plutonium is in the united states in the mine would we care who owned it no we wouldn't care who owned it we just say oh okay you russians you have to sell us all your plutonium now you can't sell it to other countries the fact that they changed ownership didn't mean anything didn't make any difference because they're still in our country if they didn't sell it to us we just say all right you can't have it anymore we'll just take you back there was never any risk and our allies canada and australia they produce that stuff what was was australia going to stop selling us plutonium or whatever we need was canada going to stop selling it to us there was never a shortage that was always a fake just a fake fox news story uh was it not pluto named uranium sorry i don't know my plutonium is for my uranium so erase everything i said about plutonium and put in uranium so thank you for that correction with many exclamation marks uranium uranium uranium i hear you all right uh who do you want to moderate the debates i don't think it matters i don't think the moderators make any difference uh she sold the plutonium for her personal interest well she may have had a personal interest but not that it matters uh if china owns 35 of america no problem i don't know what you're talking about uh she took huge bribes when you say bribes you mean that the clinton foundation got some money possibly so but the problem is not the selling of the uranium the problem would be the taking of the bribe wouldn't it if if that's demonstrated to be true um the point is she got rich from the transaction uh i believe that the clinton foundation may have made some money that's different all right uh russia ukrainian just looking at your comments i don't have much to say today all right don't know your ass from your amium that's that's pretty funny uh imagine buying a psychology book from a guy who got a ba in economics in 1979 as expert well if i ever called myself an expert i don't believe i have and have i ever recommended any form of persuasion that is not fairly routinely known by science to be persuasive i don't believe i have so reporting on something and being an expert are different the the people who call me an expert on persuasion that's their opinion that's not mine i'm just reporting what the what the experts say works and what my experience says works that's all i've ever called it if i ever call myself an expert on persuasion you should criticize me about that i wouldn't call myself that please interview tony heller on heard immunity i don't think i will here's here's some things that i won't do so you should stop asking if you asked me to interview one expert on a topic in which i've done some deep diving and i have some information i might do it so for example when i talked about climate change with michael shellenberger and and also bjorn lomborg that was a topic i've done my own reading on enough that i knew i could ask the right questions but if i would have some other expert on an expert on i don't know some other thing if i don't also know enough to ask the right questions then i would be doing a disservice to you because having one expert blather is worse than having no expert so let me give you the order of of understanding your best situation would be two experts who have opposing views who have enough time to talk and maybe there's a strong moderator that can keep them on the right page that would be the best way to get information to experts battling it out within a time limit the next best in terms of understanding your world would be no experts so the second best situation from having two experts on different sides is no experts that's your second best situation your worst situation is one expert because that one expert just like one attorney will convince you that they make sense any expert can convince you of anything if you're not an expert in that field so if i were to bring on one expert i would be giving you disinformation because any time one expert is presented and there's nobody there to ask the right questions that's misinformation now it doesn't mean that it's always misinformation but it does mean you should put the lowest level of credibility on it which effectively makes it no information at all and since there's at least a good chance that is misleading or the expert is wrong there's a good chance of misleading people with no chance whatsoever of giving people credible information so anytime you say can you put this expert on to talk about let's say herd immunity what do i know about herd immunity nothing some people say it's 10 to 20 percent some people say it's 60 to 70 percent that's it so if i have an expert on who says a bunch of stuff would you be informed well you would have new stuff coming into your head but i had no way to know that is right so is that a good thing to do it's a bad thing to do it's a bad thing to do have i read michael shellenberger's new book on climate change yes i have i have read it and it's excellent could you interview rachel maddow to identify the exact moment insanity begins when you watch rachel maddow does she look uh what's the right word saying i don't know if you have this uh impression now i'm not making a medical diagnosis of rachel maddow or anybody else this is just an impression because i'm sure that the people on the left have some kind of an analogous impression of people on the right and it probably looks like when they look at them they look like they're lying or stupid or something because they can't understand why their opinions would be different but when i look at rachel maddow she looks to be again i'm not stating this as to me some kind of fact because i don't know what's in her head but she looks to be hypnotized meaning she looks to be like someone who's dealing with a hallucination or a series of them as opposed to somebody who's grounded in the real world it's just an impression that does that mean i'm right no you should not take that as any kind of credible anything i'm just telling you my impression but i'm wondering do you have the same impression when you see her when you see her talking do you say to yourself well there's a different opinion it's different from my own maybe different priorities she has different set of facts she's looking at does it look like just someone with a different opinion because it really doesn't it doesn't does it it looks like there's a phenomenon happening and it's not one that's good like there's something going on emotionally or psychologically that's not quite right and let me say again if you were to take you know take a an iq test and you were competing against rachel maddow good luck because she's going to clean your clock on an iq test if you're if you're trying to test your knowledge of the world historical or otherwise against rachel maddow good luck she's going to kick your ass because she knows a lot and her iq is really high so really smart really talented uh really knowledgeable and still and still i can't get past the fact that my subjective impression is that there's something else going on there just an impression um and i don't think she's alone in that by the way and and i think i could probably pick out some people on the right who strike me the same way but nobody jumps to mind and blumps response somebody says does alex jones look crazy uh that's a complicated question because alex jones presents himself as a sort of a character and the character he plays is a sort of a complete character no i don't know how close his character is to what he would be if you talk to him in person maybe it's exactly the same i don't maybe just you know attenuate it a little bit for tv but uh alex jones is trying to be alex jones so that feels like a different situation from somebody who's trying to be a more objective tv personality i don't know that you could say alex jones is anything except exactly himself which is all he pretends to be um somebody says is she smart yeah rachel maddow is super smart don't take that away from her all right that's all i got for now i'll talk to you tomorrow

[Music]

hey everybody

come on in gather around it's time for

coffee with scott adams but you knew

that

that's why you're here for the best part

of the day the part that makes

everything better yeah now

if you're new to this it doesn't take

much all it takes is a copper bug or a

glass of tank or chalice or stein a

canteen jugger flask

a vessel of any kind fill it with your

favorite liquid

i like coffee and join me now

for the dopamine hit of the day the

unparalleled pleasure the thing that

makes everything better including the

coronavirus the economy racism

protests you name it it's all better

with one sip

go

my white blood cell count is climbing

i can feel it well the biggest news in

the world

might be the rain in china

because it's raining so hard that the

so-called three gorges dam

which uh is pretty big dam it's damn big

might actually break

which is a really big deal

a super big deal so this would be a

disaster uh on a level that would be

hard to

even calculate it looks like it might

happen

and one of the risks is that our the

factories that make pharmaceuticals for

this country

are in the flood zone so there's a

non-zero chance that the pharmaceutical

industry will get wiped out

this week so we got that to look forward

to

um but let's hope that doesn't happen i

would guess that the chinese are working

very hard to relocate anything that can

be relocated

so maybe they'll prepare in time

let's see portland

it's the 50th night of protests with

fires and big visual things

check out cnn.com to find

all the stories and the pictures the

fires the protesters

nothing if you look at the right hand

column on cnn.com those are the stories

they don't want you to see

so it's over there is just one line of

text

portland protesters

no picture so it's pretty clear that

that at least cnn doesn't want you to

see those pictures

but i don't think that even fox news is

playing it up

so i think there's some kind of

agreement not to show these protests

and i would love to know the real story

behind that

all right uh i

announced today that i'm going to start

blocking anybody who argues

that the science has proven face masks

won't help against the coronavirus

okay so don't say you weren't warned you

could you could have your opinion

and you can tell other people but here's

here's my reasoning

um i'm not a scientist

and i can't tell you definitively

whether masks

work or make things worse but i can tell

you

that if you're also not a scientist and

you go on and say definitively

the sciences proof and mass don't work i

don't want you in my world now

okay because that just hasn't happened

this is not true

if it's true that you've never seen the

studies including

yesterday in the wall street journal

showing that

face masks make a gigantic improvement

if you've never seen those studies then

why not i mean i've seen both the ones

that say they work and the one they

don't

and i've seen lots of them lots of

studies that say they don't work

lots of studies to say they do if you

haven't seen both

you shouldn't have an opinion so i'm

only blocking people

who are not aware of half of the world

i'm not i'm not blocking you because of

your opinion

i'm blocking you because it's been long

enough

right you know in the beginning it makes

sense that you haven't been exposed to

all the information

but now there's no excuse at this point

if you are not aware that major

publications

are reporting that face masks even the

the casual kind do make a big difference

even if they're wrong all right this is

important

even if they're wrong if you don't if

you're not aware of it

that's a problem all right so i just

and i'm so bored by it uh

i guess i'm bored that people think that

if they send me yet one more study

from the past to say it doesn't work

that that will be the one study that

that changes my mind and and makes me be

irrational it just doesn't work that way

all right so that was just my personal

frustration probably had nothing to do

with you

so here's a question i've been asking

just because the

the answers are funny to me it goes like

this

after three and a half

plus years of trump three and a half

years i guess is right

after three and a half years of trump

we don't have to wonder what he'll do

wrong

because you've got three and a half

years to look at it so

i like asking people can you tell me

what is the worst thing he's done

wrong in your opinion and here's why

it's so funny

number one the answers are all over the

place

what if i taught you um

that you should assume is true if

there's one question

and people are all on the same side

saying oh trump is bad trump is bad

so in that sense they're very unified

unified trump is bad now give me your

top reason

or top three or four and you'll see

their top three or four reasons

are first of all different which is

weird

because they're all on the same side

wouldn't they all have the for the same

top reason or maybe the top three would

be sort of similar but in a different

order

but wouldn't people have the same

reasons

and here's what's funny the top reason

at the moment

is of course going to be his coronavirus

response

but let me ask you this didn't people

have exactly the same idea

about getting rid of trump before the

coronavirus even happened

their their opinions of why trump should

leave

are identical now to what they were

all they've done is changed the reasons

whenever you see this situation where

somebody keeps

their point of view but the reason for

it keeps changing

it's not a real reason all right if they

added new reasons then you'd have

something it's like all my old reasons

are true

and i've added a few more but my top

number one reason that hasn't changed

it's always the same

but i have added a few more things that

would sound reasonable

but if you're complaining that your

number one thing is is coronavirus

response even if it wasn't good

you have to ask yourself wait a minute

have they just added a new reason

to something that was just they'd

already decided and now they're just

adding reasons

you know the oh my new my new top reason

is this

happens to be in the news this week but

i

i started collecting some of the answers

because they're

they're funny in a certain way

they're funny in a certain way in that

first of all it got more attention than

i thought it would

uh and this morning uh people who

weighed in on this question included

brian brian stelter selter stelter

you know from cnn so brian stelter

weighed in with

with the critics uh also uh

dave isikoff weighed in and matt

negrin who apparently has taken over on

the

msnbc and msnbc show

hardball so all three of these people

are sort of weighing in

on the side of the people saying hey yes

here are all the things that trump has

done wrong

all right so here's the list of things

that trump has done wrong

now remember this is a big decision it's

a big decision to get rid of a president

or to vote

for a new president so here are the

reasons

he downplayed the risk of the

coronavirus

to increase his odds of a china trade

deal

he downplayed the risk of the

coronavirus to

increase his odds of a china trade deal

so the first thing wrong with this

analysis

is that he puts it in some kind of a

personal sense

because i'm pretty sure that the

president negotiating with china

was sort of intended for the benefit of

the whole country

it's really not just something he did

for himself

and it's just funny to hear anybody

talking about that way no

the china trade deal wasn't about the

country

that was just about himself okay

all right let's let's take that a little

further

and he uses and this critic uses word

downplaying the risk

did the president downplay the risk

or did he balance the risk

was he balancing competing interests by

saying well

the economy is important a trade deal is

important

and coronavirus are important too but

it's not a case of one of them is the

only thing that matters

it's balanced so isn't the president's

job to balance the risks

but for this critic if you balance the

risk

you can call it downplaying the risk

and all he did was substitute a word for

my word

and turned a reasonable thing into an

unreasonable sounding thing

even though it's the same thing let me

state these two things with just

different words

my wording is the president balanced the

risks

of the economy the trade deals which are

part of the economy

and the health he balanced them

when i use the word balance that sounds

true

right because he wasn't saying one of

them is the only important thing

he never said the economy is the only

thing he never said the coronavirus is

the only thing

he balanced them now did he balance him

correctly

well that's not really the complaint the

complaint is he downplayed it

all this critic did was replace my word

balance

with downplayed but nothing nothing was

different

it was still the same thing you can't

you can't turn a good thing into a bad

thing by changing one of the words

that's not a thing but

if you can imagine that this person is a

professional writer

for the atlantic maybe you understand

what's going on

here's the number two thing on the list

of things that trump got wrong

on the coronavirus he mocked the virus

in february

that's right he was mean to the virus he

mocked it

he mocked the virus

what exactly did that cause

do you remember when you were feeling

good and then

ow ow i've got a headache what's causing

my headache

and then you find out it's because the

president mocked the virus

that probably didn't happen right or you

went out to start your car

oh god my car isn't starting did the

president

mock the virus again there's no

connecting tissue

between the the biggest complaints about

what what the president did

and anything in the real world which is

what makes it funny

complete disconnect from the real world

so that's the number two issue here's

number three

screwing up the european travel ban in

march and then there was

a detail given that uh there was a news

article saying that by giving a two-day

notice

about the travel ban in europe it caused

all the flights to load up

and people quickly traveled to get ahead

of the band

and then and of course some of them had

virus and brought it into the country

now i ask you this what was the way he

was supposed to do a travel ban

do you think the people who quickly got

on planes

in that two-day window do you think that

they were leaving the country that they

lived in

not knowing if they could get home or

was it a case that people were simply

going home

because they knew they were going to be

there for a while how exactly were you

supposed to prevent people from going

home

how exactly was that going to work and

moreover

in what world are flights not already

pretty much all booked

have when before the coronavirus how

often were you on a flight that wasn't

pretty much fully booked it was kind of

rare

right so how much difference did two

days make

when the only difference was going from

pretty much full

to actually full

and those people probably would have had

to be repatriated to their countries

anyway

so i don't know that you could make a

case

that that could have been done better or

differently i don't know what the better

would look like

if you don't say what would the

alternative look like

you haven't really criticized the very

minimum for a criticism is to say

you did x if you had done y

you know and somebody else did y you

could see that that was a better result

but we don't have anything like that we

just have people taking their best shot

at stuff

and maybe some of it was imperfect

here's another one he sidelined

the cdc in april what does that mean

what does it mean to sideline the cdc

was the cdc the ones who told us that

well i won't go through the list

but the cdc was not exactly bathed in

glory

during this and what does it mean to

sideline them i don't know what that

means

refusing to advocate for mass in may or

june

what difference would that have made

what difference would it make because

trump has never said masks

don't work and he has allowed his

experts

to tell you that they do work

so trump allows his experts to tell you

they work

and then he sort of leaves it to the

states

because that's the system of government

we have if he had done more than

what he did would he not be called a

dictator right now

because he's forcing the states to do

things and the states didn't want to do

it

i don't know if he had that option did

he have that option

um i would agree that he

could say more about masks

but he's not he's not stopping his

experts from telling you you should wear

them

have you ever seen that there's nothing

like that

he's letting the science talk and then

he's telling you what he's doing

could he do a better job of modeling

behavior i would say yes

but i don't know that you could

necessarily say you'd notice the

difference

in what people did

and then something about blocking

testing funding in july

i don't know what that was but it sounds

like fake news it sounds like

when you hear somebody blocked of

funding

and then you dig down it's usually

something more along the lines of

it was supposed to be in another bill or

this bill had some things in it that

didn't belong

or or you know we were going to do it a

different way or something like that

this is probably fake news i never even

heard of that one

but i don't think that we have a testing

i don't think we have a funding limit on

testing do we

i've never heard that before anyway uh

here's some other things that

that are complaints he turned america

from a shining hill of hope

to a laughingstock do you do you feel

that when you wake up

do you wake up in the morning you're

like

oh i just realized again

i'm not on a shining hill of hope

i did not wake up in a shiny hill of

hope my country is a laughingstock

what because justin trudeau was giggling

at that

that one meeting that time does justin

trudeau not take our phone calls anymore

if we call bulgaria and say bulgaria

we want to do a trade deal do they say

no you are not a shiny hill of hope

you are laughing stock now i will not do

a trade deal with you

does that happen because i don't think

any of this translates into anything

real and here's another one

uh oh so

somebody else i get was this matt negrin

who said

right no one remembers why he was

impeached somebody said that to me i

don't know who it was

so one of the things you'll notice is

that when you ask

what trump is doing wrong like what or

what has he done wrong

you'll get sarcasm instead of reasons

so here's a perfect example right no one

remembers why he was impeached

do you know what my first response to

that was

why did he get impeached something about

ukraine or something the phone call

and then i and i say to myself oh the

thing that was so

unimportant it barely barely held onto

my memory

and was completely political and was

ridiculous and didn't matter anyway

even if everything that had been claimed

about the president

were true what impact

none there's really none

that i can think of so anyway it's

hilarious to ask people

to name specifics oh then one of the

examples was 11

unemployment rate to which i thought

really

somebody is criticizing president trump

over the current

unemployment rate that's like

somebody who has never followed the news

or something

i don't even understand that so

everybody who says

sweden i might start but start blocking

people who

mentioned sweden because

sweden is just different and we don't

know why

exactly so sweden is just

different we don't know exactly why

so if you're making a point with sweden

you're not making a point

that is really a point all you're saying

is

there's a country what about estonia

i don't know what about estonia we don't

know why it worked why it didn't

what they exactly did we don't know

sweden is no longer an interesting

question

they're just too many things different

uh let me ask you this

how many how many countries that

regularly

supplement with fish oil which has

vitamin d

are having a bad outcome

sweden has heard immunity somebody says

no it doesn't

i doubt that's true i doubt it's true

that they have heard immunity

and i doubt they're even close could be

i won't say that there's zero chance but

it could be

so here's a viewpoint that i want to

share with you somebody shared with this

with me

sincerely and because it was sincere

i wanted to share with you and see if

you feel the same

and it goes like this that the wearing

of masks

while it might have a medical benefit or

it might not

so this is somebody who's you know at

least open to it being beneficial

but the larger point is that

wearing mass could lead to the breakdown

of society

and the collapse of the country

so the point of view if i can i hope i

can express it right

because it was worthy of mention so the

point of view is that if we're forced to

wear masks

we lose the thing that connects us as

human beings

and once you've lost that thing that

connects you as humans

because covering this much of the face

really disconnects you from people

that once you do that the social

cohesion of the country will be

diminished and there and the risk

of complete civil war becomes

bigger than it would have been now it

doesn't mean that it's guaranteed to be

a civil war because you wore mass that's

not the claim

the claim is that the odds of a civil

war

go up enough by wearing masks

that that's a mortal risk and it's

enough of a reason not to wear masks

what would you say would you would you

agree with that statement

that wearing masks loses our humanity

and our connection to each other

sufficiently so that it could cause

it would be one factor that might make

it more likely

for a revolution which would be gigantic

expense

i would say i don't buy into this at all

not even a little bit but i wanted to

see if anybody else

felt that it feels like the smallest

risk in the world

but i wanted to see if anybody had a a

feeling that oh

there's some people who are agreeing so

somebody's saying yes i agree

true empathy block others saying good

grief

uh no agree

agree so so some people have some

sympathy for that view

now i don't know that uh that is

something that could be tested

but just because something can be

expressed in words

as a risk doesn't mean you should

consider it a risk

so i'm typically on the view of well

you know there's no there's no such

thing as zero risk you should at least

put some odds on it

but that would not extend to something

that is so obviously

not a risk that maybe you don't need to

do the math

oh well there's enough of you who think

there's something to it

let me ask you this do you feel any

different

i know the people i care about tend to

be the people that i see without masks

anyway

the people i would care about would be

my family you know

people were close to me i just don't

have that feeling

i just don't think it's a thing but some

of you do so we'll leave it there that's

all we can say

charles barkley had a public statement

on video

that was a real

echoing what kareem abdul-jabbar said

which is uh

he was encouraging black people to not

be anti-semitic

because it works so much against your

self-interest

because obviously does

and and barclay says this directly

we can't be prejudiced if we're asking

white people to respect us

and he says i don't understand how you

beat hatred with more hatred

so i'm completely on board with charles

barkley but listening to him

and also to kareem abdul-jabbar

it it reminds me that the black

community

doesn't have a strong leader

it's really noticeable isn't it that the

black community

has lots of concerns that are legitimate

but they don't have sort of this one

leader you know and you'd think it would

be obama but he's kind of you know

retired if you will

but when i hear somebody like barclay or

uh

korean abdul jabbar talk out in such a

pretty productive way i mean i think

this is exactly the most productive

way that you could talk i asked myself

why can't we get more charles barkley he

feel

to me he feels like he's really good for

the country i'd like to see him have

more leadership role

there's a new new

controversy about roger stone so the

controversy is

this is the allegation and you can put

your own

odds of whether this is true and maybe

by now we know because i've

i turned off my computer a few minutes

ago but

the allegation is that he was doing a

interview with a

uh a black disc jockey whose name i

don't remember

and that allegedly roger stone

said when he thought that nobody was

listening

uh i don't want to argue with this negro

now that is allegedly what he said when

he thought nobody was hearing

on the phone but it was allegedly

clearly

heard and so when i heard that story i

said

wow i've got to hear this for myself

i've got to hear this for myself so

i clicked on the articles i'm looking

for the the link where i can listen to

it myself

and it's not there so i go okay okay

maybe there's some reason the new york

times doesn't have the link

so i go i google it i kinda gotta hear

this for myself because it just

that doesn't it sounds like the kind of

thing that maybe didn't happen you know

what i mean

so i gotta hear from myself so i go from

article to article to article

including something by the disc jockey

himself

with a tweet and i'm looking for the

link

have has anybody heard it has anybody

heard

the actual audio because i don't know if

we're gonna hear it

don't they record all radio shows

you think somebody recorded that right

so here is my question to you although

it is reported it

is very clearly said on that audio

just remember all the times things have

been clear on audio and video and just

weren't true

so you should have a really big

dose of skepticism coming into that

story

and i would i would encourage this if

you don't ever hear it with your own

ears it didn't happen

if you do hear it with your own ears and

other people who are not crazy you say

i'm listening to it too and i don't hear

it

it probably didn't happen

so i don't know will we ever hear that

video it if it

turns out to be a yanni and laurel thing

where if you're thinking that you can

hear it but if you're not thinking it

you can't hear it

probably didn't happen it was my guess

probably not all right but i wouldn't

say for sure

nothing for sure there was an amazing

campaign video that apparently was not

made by the campaign

in which a linkin park song was heard

and the and i tweeted it because it was

just one of the best

campaign ads even though the campaign

apparently didn't make it

because it showed the contrast so there

was lots of contrast between the

the sparkling bright capitalism that the

president

promotes versus

versus the uh you know the cities

falling apart under the democrats

it was a great contrast play but it got

yanked because that copyright problem

which is no surprise all right

um oh here's some more

things that on the list of things that

the president has already done wrong

all right treason pandering to putin

what was the treason exactly treason

who saw treason that sounds imaginary

pandering to putin what's the difference

between

being nice to dictators while you're

you know you're attacking them with

cyber cyber attacks and you're

you're banning their banning their what

what are they doing sanctioning them etc

anybody who says

that the president is pandering to putin

is sort of the lowest level of

understanding of your environment

it's sort of the lowest level because if

you don't understand

the saying nice things to the dictator

while you're negotiating with them

while you're trying to make something

work is just smarter

it's just smarter to be polite to them

and you show them a little extra

consideration while you're also being

tough with them

if you don't understand that that's the

best way to go

you're not you're not much of an

observer here are the other complaints

nepotism corruption and profiteering

what would be some examples

of things that hurt you because of any

of these imagined things

what was it that hurt you i can't think

of anything

nothing's hurt me uh

destruction of institutions of democracy

which ones what would be the

institutions of democracy that the

president destroyed

have you noticed that all these

complaints about the president are these

weird generic

hallucinations that don't even have any

connection

i think the institution was the news do

you think the president

destroyed the news business is he the

one that did that

because it looks like the news destroyed

itself

with their own business model i don't

see how you could

see it any other way anyway

uh hillary's selling our plutonium to

russia what's that called

that's called just doing business if you

believe

that that hillary sold our valuable

plutonium to russia

then you did not understand what

happened

so first of all the plutonium mines were

in the united states

if the united states needed

plutonium and the plutonium is in the

united states

in the mine would we care who owned it

no we wouldn't care who owned it

we just say oh okay you russians you

have to sell us all your plutonium now

you can't sell it to other countries the

fact that they changed ownership

didn't mean anything didn't make any

difference

because they're still in our country if

they didn't sell it to us we just say

all right

you can't have it anymore we'll just

take you back there was never any risk

and our allies canada and australia

they produce that stuff what was was

australia going to stop

selling us plutonium or whatever we need

was canada going to stop selling it to

us there was never a shortage

that was always a fake just a fake fox

news story

uh was it not pluto named uranium sorry

i don't know my plutonium is for my

uranium so erase everything i said about

plutonium and put in uranium

so thank you for that correction with

many exclamation marks uranium uranium

uranium

i hear you all right uh

who do you want to moderate the debates

i don't think it matters

i don't think the moderators make any

difference

uh she sold the plutonium for her

personal

interest well she may have had a

personal interest

but not that it matters

uh if china owns 35 of america no

problem

i don't know what you're talking about

uh she took huge bribes when you say

bribes you mean that

the clinton foundation got some money

possibly so but the problem is not the

selling of the uranium

the problem would be the taking of the

bribe wouldn't it if

if that's demonstrated to be true

um the point is she got

rich from the transaction uh

i believe that the clinton foundation

may have made some money that's

different

all right

uh russia ukrainian

just looking at your comments i don't

have much to say today

[Music]

all right don't know your ass from your

amium

that's that's pretty funny

uh imagine buying a psychology book

from a guy who got a ba in economics in

1979

as expert well if i ever called myself

an expert

i don't believe i have and have i ever

recommended any form of persuasion

that is not fairly routinely known by

science to be

persuasive i don't believe i have

so reporting on something and being an

expert are different

the the people who call me an expert on

persuasion

that's their opinion that's not mine i'm

just reporting what the

what the experts say works and what my

experience says works

that's all i've ever called it if i ever

call myself an expert on persuasion

you should criticize me about that

i wouldn't call myself that

please interview tony heller on heard

immunity

i don't think i will here's here's some

things

that i won't do so you should stop

asking

if you asked me to interview one expert

on a topic in which i've done some deep

diving and i have some information

i might do it so for example when i

talked about climate change

with michael shellenberger and

and also bjorn lomborg that was a topic

i've done my own

reading on enough that i knew i could

ask the right questions

but if i would have some other expert on

an expert on i don't know some other

thing

if i don't also know enough to ask the

right questions

then i would be doing a disservice to

you because having one expert blather

is worse than having no expert so let me

give you the order

of of understanding

your best situation would be two experts

who have opposing views

who have enough time to talk and maybe

there's a strong moderator that can keep

them on the right page

that would be the best way to get

information to experts

battling it out within a time limit

the next best in terms of understanding

your world

would be no experts so the second best

situation from having two experts on

different sides is no experts

that's your second best situation your

worst situation is one expert

because that one expert just like one

attorney

will convince you that they make sense

any expert can convince you of anything

if you're not an expert in that field

so if i were to bring on one expert i

would be giving you

disinformation because any time

one expert is presented and there's

nobody there to ask the right questions

that's misinformation now it doesn't

mean that it's always misinformation

but it does mean you should put the

lowest level of credibility on it

which effectively makes it no

information at all and since there's at

least a good chance that is misleading

or the expert

is wrong there's a good chance of

misleading people

with no chance whatsoever of giving

people credible information

so anytime you say can you put this

expert on to talk about let's say herd

immunity

what do i know about herd immunity

nothing some people say it's 10

to 20 percent some people say it's 60 to

70 percent

that's it so if i have an expert on who

says a bunch

of stuff would you be informed

well you would have new stuff coming

into your head

but i had no way to know that is right

so is that a good thing to do it's a bad

thing to do

it's a bad thing to do

have i read michael shellenberger's new

book on climate change yes i have

i have read it and it's excellent

could you interview rachel maddow to

identify the exact moment

insanity begins when you watch

rachel maddow does she look

uh what's the right word saying

i don't know if you have this uh

impression now i'm not making a medical

diagnosis

of rachel maddow or anybody else this is

just an

impression because i'm sure that the

people on the left

have some kind of an analogous

impression of people on the right

and it probably looks like when they

look at them they look like they're

lying or stupid or something

because they can't understand why their

opinions would be different

but when i look at rachel maddow

she looks to be

again i'm not stating this as to me some

kind of fact

because i don't know what's in her head

but she looks to be

hypnotized meaning she looks to be

like someone who's dealing with a

hallucination

or a series of them as opposed to

somebody who's grounded in the real

world

it's just an impression that does that

mean i'm right

no you should not take that as any kind

of credible anything i'm just telling

you my impression

but i'm wondering do you have the same

impression when you see her

when you see her talking do you say to

yourself

well there's a different opinion it's

different from my own

maybe different priorities she has

different set of facts she's looking at

does it look like just someone with a

different opinion because it really

doesn't

it doesn't does it it looks

like there's a phenomenon happening

and it's not one that's good

like there's something going on

emotionally or

psychologically that's not quite right

and let me say again if you were to

take you know take a an iq test

and you were competing against rachel

maddow

good luck because she's going to clean

your clock on an iq test

if you're if you're trying to test your

knowledge of the world

historical or otherwise against rachel

maddow

good luck she's going to kick your ass

because she knows

a lot and her iq

is really high so really smart

really talented uh really knowledgeable

and still and still i can't get past the

fact that my

subjective impression is that there's

something else going on there

just an impression um

and i don't think she's alone in that by

the way and and i think i could probably

pick out some people on the right

who strike me the same way

but nobody jumps to mind

and blumps response

somebody says does alex jones look crazy

uh

that's a complicated question because

alex jones presents himself as a sort of

a character

and the character he plays

is a sort of a complete character

no i don't know how close his character

is to what he would be if you talk to

him in person maybe it's exactly the

same i don't

maybe just you know attenuate it a

little bit for tv

but uh alex jones

is trying to be alex jones

so that feels like a different situation

from somebody who's trying to be

a more objective tv personality

i don't know that you could say alex

jones

is anything except exactly himself which

is all he pretends to be

um somebody says is she smart yeah

rachel maddow is super smart

don't take that away from her

all right that's all i got for now i'll

talk to you

tomorrow